Google Text Links: Tell them to stuff it!

If you read and believe the brouhaha beginning to rise out of the blogging world you’ll no doubt be considering if selling text links on your blog is worth the cost. If on the other hand you’ve not heard anything about it there are a few things you should be aware of.

Google penalizes publishers who sell text link ads

According to Search Engine Land they do so by lowering their page rank which of course is nothing short of a “Holy Grail” for many bloggers and website owners. In some cases they might even completely drop a site for selling text link.

Google isn’t the only game in town

A few weeks ago I wrote about doing away with Google altogether and I’ve been sitting on the idea lately, but more and more I am considering it. If Google was the only company in town that could supply their services then clearly I wouldn’t be considering this, but in all honesty something like 2% of my traffic comes via Google. Ad sense earns me less than 0.45 a day on average. I can use any number of free stat packages to replace analytics is need be.

Point being that there’s no reason to be held hostage by Google dictating anything to you when there are tons of viable options avaiable to you out there. Just pick one, spend some time learning about it like you did with Google and get to work at it.

Google is the Microsoft of the new millennium

Remember when it was cool to hate Bill Gates because he was a) so stinking rich and b) because he was Bill Gates? I do, and I can’t help but wonder where the scorn and hate for Google is these days. Microsoft might embed stupid things in your Operating System, but Google attempts to exercise more and more control of you internet usage experience. Notice I said “more control”? Not that they try to make it better, but that they want to control more and more.

Oh well, I suppose in the not to distant future we’ll start to hate Google as much as we have Microsoft.

The question is simply this. If Google does indeed penalizing text link monetization will you jump ship and clean them off your site, or will you tell Google to stuff it?