It looks like Google is all but declaring open war on the Blogosphere, attacking alternative sources of monetization that don’t line up with their idea of how the Internet landscape should run. The latest victim is paid postings. PPP CEO Ted Murphy has announced that the big G has started reducing the PR of blogs in their network to 0 from whatever they had previously. Penalties against other review post services can’t be far behind.
Google has been warning about the coming storm for a long time, but they are playing a dangerous game. Policing the Internet is an extremely ambitious and possibly impossible undertaking, but they seem determined to do their best to enforce their view of how website monetization should work on everyone.
The problem I see Google encountering in the long run is that ultimately the Internet is based on good content, not Google. John Chow’s blog is a prime example of this, he had been penalized heavily by Google long before the PR reductions hit, but people had interest in what he had to say and the Google slap he got didn’t hurt him at all. In fact, I bet it even increased his readership, because everyone was talking about it and building awareness of him. John believes Google is irrelevant, and one Blogger doesn’t really change anything despite how big they are, but if more and more people adopt that philosophy, Google may run into a problem.
I understand Google has a really delicate balance to maintain when looking out for the well-being of their advertisers, but more and more they are setting themselves up as the totalitarian dictatorship over the rebelling webmasters… and if history has taught us one thing, it’s that no empire lasts forever.
Good Profits.
