NOFOLLOW GOOGLE!

Google has been “enhancing” it’s PageRank algorithms every few months are so and constantly affecting the pagerank of various websites. It is dictacting the terms of advertising on other websites by penalizing sites that sell links. The reason for penalizing is two fold

* People displaying irrelevant links on their websites
* Passing on pagerank juice to other websites

First reason, IHMO, is really stupid. I still remember, the days, when whatever stupid word I put in, I end up with atleast one ad, mostly pointing to eBay. So, it’s ok for Google to display most irrelevant and also irritatingly repeated ad that’s keyword templatized, but it’s not ok for webmasters to make money by displaying some what irrelevant ads? The reality is, relevancy is not a boolean variable.

As to the second problem, it’s a problem of Google, however much they try to convince webmasters that it is the websites’ problem.

Say there is plenty of electricity and cheap. Then no one cares about how much they are using. But as the electricity becomes scarce, then it’s going to become expensive and people start caring about their usage. Now, those who install solar panels and are able to produce a little more electricity than what they need, can put the surplus into the grid and can even get paid! Now, if the electricity becomes more and more expensive, then more people would try to install the solar panels and produce power and make money.

Linking is no different. When there was no PageRank, people never cared about how and what they linked from their web pages. But then, suddenly “being linked” became expensive and everyone wants to make money out of it. So, say a website got a PageRank of 6 and doesn’t care to be more than 5, then obviously it can try to sell the extra juice for a fee. This is no different from the above analogy of consumers putting the extra solar electricity into the grid for a fee. How would you feel if the utility companies try to lobby for not paying for your surplus electricity and mandate you to give it back into their grid for free because their livelihood depends on being able to sell electricity? The right technical solution is for these utility companies to invest more on their technologies to make them more efficient and competitive. Not whine and try to pass rules and regulations.

Google has a bigger problem. As time passes, atleast the most popular websites are going to only get more and more inbound links. That brings their pagerank to a perfect 10. That means, they are going to show up more and more on top of the search results. That means, their incentive to pay for Adwords ads decreases (I have seen some stupid companies which rank No 1 in the search results for a given keyword also advertising on the topmost position and I have no clue why they do that!). When that happens, it’s going to eat into Google’s profit.

I remember seeing a while back a few websites having moved from a PageRank of 9 to 10, but later on they moved back to 9. Google seems to be the only site at present having a pagerank of 10. Since PageRank is relative, as long as Google keeps maintaining the highest number of high PR inbound links, it can normalize and reduce the pagerank of all other websites to less than 10.

So, if you believe Google has become that 800lb Gorilla and the Monopoly of this decade/century, how can you prevent Google from dictating your website design, your advertising strategy and your business strategy?

The answer lies in Google’s rule of NOFOLLOW. If everyone on the web goes back and converts their Google reference links with a rel=’nofollow’ attribute, what happens to Google’s pagerank? You get the picture! As of this writing, searching for link:google.com gives a total of about 4,870,000 results. Let’s monitor how this increases/decreases over time.