Google Gets To Decide Who You Sell Advertising To

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You have to hand it to Google: in a few short years they’ve managed to turn themselves into the most powerful company in the world. Now they wield that power with an iron fist, telling everyone else in business “how things are gonna be.” They’ve always been touchy about the subject of “paid links”, but now they’re stepping up their hostility.

Matt Cutts has invented a “link spam” reporting mechanism that is designed to deal with these issues. So much for the idea of algorhythmically dealing with spam.

Matt does claim its only to collect data to dogfood some algorithmic approaches; but I don’t buy it. If he wanted to do that, he’d just scrape text-link-ads.com and a few other high profile link brokers. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for detecting paid links algorithmically.

But tell me, Google; are you going to penalize topix.com, Answers.com, Scientific America, Forbes? They all sell paid links (some of them, rather pricey!). Or are you just going to start frustrating the little guy while providing immunity to the worst offenders?

As usual, it is the “little guy” who will be hurt. It’s not likely Google will wage war on companies the size of Forbes in order to enforce a little-known tenet like this new one. In fact, is this policy even official? The way Google issues new “policies” through “mattcutts.com” is quite remarkable. Wouldn’t it seem more official to release the news from the “Google.com” website. Maybe it’s not official at all.

My main problem with this whole thing is that’s ineffective. It’s not done using an algo, so you’ll have to rely on a network of snitch bitches, who are not turning in other companies for an ethical reason, but rather because they have a business reason to do so. There will be no altruistic “linkspam reports”, IMHO.

What do you think of this latest issue? Why is Google differentiating so much between “temporary text links” like their Adwords ads and “permanent text links”. People sold “text link advertising” long before Google was even a twinkle in the eye of Page or Brin. Have they gone overboard because of their inability to stop link spam?

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