Google Continues to Piss People Off: Adsense Referral Changes
Google Continues to Piss People Off: Adsense Referral Changes
After Google slapping hundreds of thousands of bloggers for making money with a program other than Adsense “paid links and paid postings” by reducing their Google Page Rank to 0 (while leaving the big boys alone and either not reducing or only temporarily reducing popular blogs while screwing over the little guy); Google has now announced they will be greatly changing the Google Adsense Referral program. These changes hugely cut referral payouts if you live in North America, Latin America, or Japan. Oh and it gets better. If you live anywhere else in the world there will be no Adsense Referral program. Sorry International Countries, Google doesn’t want your business and doesn’t want you to promote their services.
ShoeMoney is pissed of as is ProBlogger two of the largest names in Professional Blogging. I would expect John Chow to weigh in soon as well.
I’d be careful Google. Piss off two many influential people and you will have to do some major damage control. Oh and while you are at it why not give me back my PR on this blog?
And Yes I am running Adsense on this Blog……
Here is a link to the Adsense Blog with a Nofollow on it I might add
I just find it ironic that Google is trying to expand into other countries such as China but is sending out such a negative vibe to those other countries at the same time.
How many times are people that know better going to keep repeating the same BS?
Once again, Google did not slap “hundreds of thousands of bloggers for making money with a program other than Adsense “paid links and paid postings” by reducing their Google Page Rank to 0″.
They merely started enforcing a rule that they had all along. There is ZERO evidence that having Adsense or not was a factor. Hell, you have Adsense ads and got smacked yourself!
PR is Google’s property, it’s their public opinion of the trustworthiness of your site. They’ve been saying for months (at least) that they don’t trust sites that sell links that pass PR. Just because we didn’t listen to them doesn’t mean they’re suddenly attacking people who monetize their blogs in ways other than Adsense.
Many monetization strategies were not effected by the PR smackdown, only paid links that pass PR were targeted.
Spreading this garbage just undermines anything else in your anti-Google stance.
There are maybe 30 people that don’t work for Google that agree with you. There are about 300,000 that agree with me. I am guessing that you didn’t have your Page Rank abitrarily reduced or you might feel differently.
I agree with Aahz also, and yes my site got ‘smacked’ even though it has never had a paid post on it because I ran textlinkads.com on it. You either misunderstand what google did, or you are spinning it into something it’s not because it suits your rant better.
Having said that thanks for this post, I will have to read up about the referral issue..being from the UK this is going to affect me
Starlet, no I understand what they did. They are protecting their business. That doesn’t mean it was right, or done correctly, or done fairly, or done uniformly, or that people shouldn’t be pissed off. Guess what happens when you piss off your customers? They go somewhere else.
Hi Admin,
I’m on your side!!!
Google may have been trying to protect its business; they may have had the ‘rule’ for a while; and so on.
But it doesn’t matter: Google has 62% of the search engine market – that alone means that they can’t act in a monopolistic fashion REGARDLESS of the reason for it.
Whatever the reason for their actions, the results resulted in the rug being pulled from under a number of competitors in the online advertising market. Perhaps these advertisers were using proprietary PR to make money, but hey! what kind of car do you to drive to work? Would you like it if the car company said you can only use your car for private or personal use not commercial?
Google will run in to much bigger anti-trust actions, just as M$ did, REGARDLESS of what its intentions were, if its behavior is perceived as being or potentially results in attacking competitors.
The single reason thing we should all note: commercial companies will always act to preserve and expand their business for their shareholders first, customers second, and employees third.
Kenneth