Google’s Hypocrisy
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I’ve seen traffic on message boards about PR drops from bloggers that write reviews and sell text link ads. I got hit with one last spring on my poker blog, along with nearly every poker blogger I read, so I know the pain.
Andy Beard was recently hit with a pagerank penalty as he described in his post, Dancing With The Gevil - Defamed By Google?. His post led me to comment about top bloggers that sell google-legit (I believe, but they may be illegitimate) ads, then provide a contextual link in a monthly ‘thank-you’ post. I won’t name names at this point unless I see those names take an aggressive pro-Google stance, but there are well-respected, highly-trafficked bloggers that do this. If, as an advertisers, I understand that my sidebar ad also gets me one of these thank-you links, isn’t this the same thing as requesting a review link?
So, now Google starts down the slippery slope of using humans and trying to read minds and determine the motivation behind links (not a particularly scalable method for attacking the issue). In Andy’s case, he makes a legitimate argument that his reviews are more of a consultancy than advertising. I have to agree, I’ve read several of them, and some of the subject matter goes right over my head (not difficult to do, I suppose! 
). Andy does not sell sidebar links at all. If one were to rank Andy and I on a continuum of google-legitimacy, my practices might be in the second quartile while Andy’s practices would be in the top quartile.
As I’ve said before in unrelated posts, just because you have the right to do something doesn’t make it right. Google has the right to assign pagerank as it pleases. But, when it cannot do so consistently, we have the right to slap the "hypocrisy" label on their practices. Until Google develops an algorithm that understands the motivation behind a link, it will have to rely on human reviewers and not their core competency, a scalable automated ranking system, and will never achieve consistency on the issue of paid links.
I will leave the incredibly hypocritical practice of Google selling Adsense links to text-link sellers while penalizing text-link sellers to the domain of "too-f’in-obvious".
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[…] practice continues to one cornerstone of my contention that Google is hypocritical and inconsistent in its application of this rule. It seems like the people spared a zerorank for […]