We have fielded a lot of emails in the past three days about the still developing situation between internet giant Google and text-link buying agents, like TextLinkAds.com.

To recap, Google has conducted a manual search of mainly networked sites to penalize commercial publishers who sell links via the agencies, or who have hand-rolled ads without rel=”nofollow” in the code. The code stops Google’s robot from following the link to its source, thus avoiding clocking up a backlink for the buying site.

The more ranked backlinks a site has, the higher its PageRank. Google has been progressively lowering the rankings of sites on which perceived mal-dispositions are found.

For example, Syntagma — which we expected to rank 6 by now — has dropped to 3 in the latest round of carnage. Our site Fifty-Something Women — which has around 20 text links of various sorts — has fallen from 5 to 2. This gives the artificial impression that the site has low traffic and puts off some ad buyers who respect Google’s approval.

Google claims the ads are skewing the results of its search engine, replacing relevancy and authority with the ability to purchase links, i.e. buy authority and relevancy rather than earn them through merit.

There is some force in that argument, although the contrarian view is that Google itself is now skewing its own results by retreating from its pure search criteria.

Also, many observers believe Google is attempting to crush the businesses of the astonishingly successful agencies that sell the links. Its own text-based system Adsense, has undoubtedly taken a knock from TLAs in recent months, especially on low-to-medium trafficked sites, which do poorly on the Google system.

Whatever the facts in this case, Google has created the monster from which it is now suffering.

Background
A mere 15 years ago, at Silicon Valley’s Stanford University, founder Larry Page saw literary citations as a software opportunity for the web. Nowadays, it’s hard to see beyond the system he produced, first BackRub, a way of measuring backlinks to articles and sites, and then PageRank, the most addictive element in web oneupmanship. Has that system really served us well?

To generate Googlejuice you have to cite and cite regularly and relevantly. The blogosphere, in particular, is a madhouse of clickability. The genius of Google is that it didn’t just transfer the bane of academic publishing, the citation system, onto the web, but that it discovered how it could profit enormously from the process.
/Background

Is it now pulling the rug from under other companies who are using its innovative scheme to build businesses on the web?

The link, or citation, system is behind the present controversy in the search business. The wonder is that Google tolerated the SEO — or Google gaming — system for so long. The sudden rush to penalize publishers has a rather thuggish feel about it, particularly as the broken bit in this chain lies within the software of the companies that broker the ads.

Jason Calacanis, formerly chief of Weblogs, Inc, which sold to AOL for a reported $30m, has put up a good piece in which he explains how he created the interlinking system between blogs and also hosted the first text link ads.

Where are we now?
We are now at the point where we have to decide. Do we take the ads down, or leave them up and suffer the consequences, the extent of which is not yet clear?

At Syntagma, we have sites which are 90 percent plus dependent on text links. We are therefore going to sit this out and observe what happens. We will keep faith with our advertisers. Business as usual.

However, we strongly urge the brokerage companies of text links to do deals with Google on this matter. Not only is their business model in grave danger of being blown out of the water, but it may be that small tweaks in their software will be enough to allow Google room to compromise.

After all, there are a lot of enraged publishers out there, who feel they have been badly let down by the giant of the internet. Uncle Google has suddenly turned into the wicked stepfather.