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.

I’m coming late to this meme which peaked yesterday. Basically, it’s another example of the cultural cringe and sense of inferiority still found in folk who make — or try to make — their livings online.

Jeremy Wright takes the prize as the best respondent with his highly-informative Ensight post on how much the unionization of a blog network would cost. #

On digital networks in particular, the problem arose when someone called them an “industry” — a certain J. Wright of Toronto in fact. But given the quality of his post, we’ll forgive him for that.

If blog networks really are an industry then clearly they must comply with industrial standards embedded in law. But not by any stretch of the imagination can they be put alongside General Motors, Rolls Royce or Microsoft. They are a sector at best — a branch of the Content Producers Guild, which is a bunch of disparate individuals in most cases, not public joint-stock companies.

Jeremy’s post, though, covered all the exits. As I’ve written here many times, there just isn’t enough money in online, original content creation to comply with every jurisdiction where you may have bloggers. At peak, Syntagma had writers in nine different countries. I have difficulty keeping up with our own laws, let alone the world’s legislative extravagances. Around 4000 new regulations for business were handed down from Cloud Nine (Parliament and Brussels) last year alone. Most just pile rigidities on top of complexity.

However, there are still some ragged-trousered half-bakes around who consider the Web as a substitute for the old Soviet Union. At Performancing, no less, someone’s even writing about “collectives”. Stick that red flag in the washing machine, you may need it before long.

The internet is about individuality, not collectivization. We have enough of that drab science in the real world, thank you very much.

I’m all for open source and charity. But they should never be forced down people’s throats or the best part of humanity will be choked off at birth.

Sundays are usually “put your hands up time” where I come from. In other words, a time to fess up to your faults. #

So here goes. I have an addiction. A serious addiction. It causes me no end of problems and sweaty-palmed angst. I am addicted to …

Techmeme! #

Like many a tech-oriented internet user, I find Gabe Rivera’s almost-perfect creation irresistible. There are times when it seems to be the centre of the universe, with huge galaxies and bright stars spinning off in vast numbers from this fiery firmament of knowledge and innovation. Heck, Syntagma is quite often in there too.

Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit to get your attention. Because there are also times — increasingly so — when a blanket of gloom settles over me as I trundle through the familiar stories on shiny new applications and hardware which deliver to the user the tiniest smidgeon of improvement over their current expensively-procured setup. And the orgasmic excitement over the tweeniest fall from grace, or the most overblown prediction, has to be experienced to be believed.

I was glad, therefore, to wake up this Sunday morning to a cool blast of common sense by Dave Winer. Spinning off a New York Times article about Silicon Valley, he pens the following :

“The truth is that the people of Silicon Valley toil to find security in money, never getting there, while avoiding the pleasures of life, including the mythological creativity, spinning on a treadmill, doing nothing but striving to make money, but it’s never enough. … You can’t find security through money, because security is impossible. We die. Deal with it.”

The reason that hit home to me is that it’s what I’ve been doing all this year. Pulling back from the mesmeric allure of the “blog network industry” dream which promises that the creation of mediocre content online can produce an eight-figure fortune in a couple of years or so.

I’ve written about my disillusionment on that score many times here, and also on the alternative of simply running a relaxed, quality content business for fun and a decent, regular income. In turn, this creates time to operate in the real world as a hedge play and a grounding exercise.

Either way, Silicon Valley is for obsessives who continue to believe the Faustian deal with venture capital is the path to enduring happiness.

To paraphrase that old IRA man, Gerry Adams : Mephistopheles hasn’t gone away, you know.

Syntagma was recently 78,000 on Alexa — not a bad score given the number of sites out there.

Then, inexplicably, it started to rise. Up to 180,000.

Since I’ve switched to a Windows Vista machine with no Alexa toolbar it’s gone up to 325,282. Can this be my own doing for not supporting the number every time I go to the site?

No, Alexa is rubbish. Our traffic has risen enormously in the very months it’s gone from 78,000 to 325,000.

Why do we bother quoting these useless statistics?