In Defence of Google

Poor old Mr. G. Of late, so many rotten eggs have been hurled upon him that anyone standing 2 kilometres away would have got a whiff of the stench that he brought upon himself. I even pelted a few myself, but I have calmed down a wee bit and was able to clear my mind to think rationally over this matter.

Was it Einstein or was it Newton who said, “For every action, there will be an equal and opposite reaction”? That is the basic law of physics. If you put a ball into a glass of water filled to the brim, the mass of water displaced by the ball will be in equivalent to the ball. Similarly, if you take away the livelihood of xxxx number of bloggers, you will get xxxx numbers of bad publicity. Well okay, livelihood may be an exaggerated word, but you know what I mean.

Let’s be fair and look at things at Googles perspective for once. What is happening now is different from what happened some years ago when Microsoft insisted that Media Player must be bundled into their operating system. The main criteria today is because of Google taking away the Ranks that they had given in the first place. If Google had let everyone kept their ranks but devised another way to deter them from doing what is harmful to their company, the lash-back would have been less severe.

From a blogger’s point of view, Page Rank is only useful in one legitimate way. Search Traffic. The higher your blog is ranked, the more chances your blog has of appearing in the top pages of the Search Results, so a blogger with good SEO skills will be able to manipulate his blog to the maximum if he has a good ranking of 4 and above and get tons of Search Traffic which is vital for the survival of many sites and blogs especially those involved in marketing and affiliate sales and to a certain extent, niche blogs which runs Adsense.

Taking away their ranks will mean no more Search Traffic. Even if the blogs are still indexed, their page will be buried so deep the search results that they will never see the light of the day. Other than this legitimate reason for wanting a high rank, the page rank is just an ego boosting number to show off to your blogger friends.

To determine the rank, Google have an algorithm that decides how high a Page Rank should be accorded to blogs and sites and it is an open secret that this algorithm is based on how many backlinks a certain blog gets. The higher the sites that the backlinks comes from, the more juice it has in giving your blog a higher rank. It’s like you have many powerful friends, so Google decides that you too, must be quite powerful yourself in you knowing so many powerful friends. It may be weak, but it works.

However, the algorithm do not have the logical sense of knowing that in this world, friendship can be bought with money. It also does not have the logic to differentiate a link that has been paid for and a link that has been given out of true friendship. Since the selling of links has become so rampant, Google have to make a “sweeping” decision that affected almost every blog in the whole world, as every blog has outgoing links. It might have been an arrogant act, but it would be impossible to check each and every blog manually.

Notice that Google did not wipe out your ranks totally in the first wave. Most got a demotion. There was a gestation period after that, and I felt the first wave was a warning from Google that it’s time to get rid of the paid links for those who has them. For those who doesn’t, they too will have time to appeal against the decision.

Notice again that when the second wave came, some blogs got back their ranks, some went down even further. That was the second siren. Many who refused to let go their links were hit harder this time. Then there was another silence. Again during that time many took the necessary remedial steps. Some gave in after seeing what a demotion could do and cleaned up their acts totally, but many also decided to stay put.

Then the final blow came. All those who decided not to give in during the first 2 waves, all those who figured that it was not their responsibility to let Google know of their innocence and all those who has made up their minds not to let Google rule their lives, has everything taken back. So, do you still think it is fair that Google gets walloped the way they have been now? At least now they can tell the people using their search engines that results in the first few pages will be more relevant.

I have written so many articles about the big G and this will be the last I am writing about this Page Rank Issue unless something else comes up.

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