Waving a red rag at Google

I think it’s fair to say that this week has been “Wave a red rag at Google” week.

First, Rand Fishkin was profiled in Newsweek. The article effectively pointed out that even small “mom & pop” sites can do great on Google through link popularity.

Rand is a nice guy, and he’s got good publicity from it - but a move like that could be rank stupid when your client sites are made so high profile.

Let’s look at the undertones of the article:

A company with over $100 billion market capital valuation can be easily controlled by third-party small businesses

I don’t think that’s a message that Google wants advertising - or the Google investors to read.

It’s an invitation for more punitive updates next year, as Google try to reduce the ability of people like Rand to influence their search rankings.

If that wasn’t enough, Jeremy Zawodny - a very high-profile Yahoo! employee - is now selling text links on his blog.

Google have already stated something to the effect that these links will not parse value for Google - but the advertisers are still treating it as a link bombing exercise.

Meanwhile, webmasters at Threadwatch have been lauding the use of text links, and declaring that they will not be coyed by Google into following Google’s methods.

I personally think that Google is wrong to seek to devalue text links - if the links are relevant for the keywords in their anchor text, then are they really going to harm Google’s results?

If you remove the power of paid links from Google, is the quality of the Google results really improved? I personally don’t see that argument being justified.

But Google has other plans - I’ve already written about Clickstream on the articles section here. This is Google’s future for limiting the value of text link manipulation.

For the time being, webmasters are indignant that they should be expected to follow Google’s controls of the internet. But once you get past the high-bravado, the reality is that Google leads, and we - as SEO’s - must follow, or die.

This week people such as Rand Fishkin and Jeremy Zawodny highlighted issues of Google’s short-comings. In my opinion, they will only succeed in pushing Google faster towards devaluing those link factors many of us have relied on to help our clients.

Google has been very aggressive in devaluing SEO manipulation in 2005. Weeks like this promise 2006 will be more aggressive.