I have to say, Dave’s take on Google’s recent actions was quite interesting…
The only thing I can really say about it this is: what about it really surprises anyone? Name one country or big corporation who hasn’t gotten a taste of real power and not changed because of it.
That being said, I’m not totally convinced that everyone has their facts straight. Given the way search engines operate, it is entirely possible that this “attack” is really just Google’s way of heavily de-emphasizing blogs and links from blogs.
A little over a year ago, blogs were considered the defacto SEO tool for both blog and ping style indexing tactics and link building - but now that blogs are so mainstream, perhaps Google simply decided a change was needed, and in this case the change was noticed by an extremely vocal segment of the online population… bloggers.
Another theory would be that services like Payperpost are essentially a variant of link brokers, so if Google is specifically targeting people earning money through this sort of monetization, is it really evil or just an extension of cracking down on link sellers?
Regardless of who is right or wrong, in the long term I do believe Google is positioning itself to be our online “police” - but the fact of the matter is, we all want them to do it. Their attempts to filter the information may suck for those of us who depend on their traffic, but for the common person who is just looking for information, all this effort is perfectly justified. Now if we start seeing people having trouble because they use YPN instead of Adsense, then we’ll know they’ve gone too far - but until then, I think we can cut them some slack.
