Foreign Perspectives

Stories abound about the lives ruined by the latest slapdown by google.

I’ve just read of two people losing their jobs because of it. The drop in pagerank is a theoretical thing for google yet now two people are on the dole because of it and they didn’t violate google’s terms of service because, contrary to google may think, google’s terms of service don’t apply to the Internet as a whole.

But why bother at all? They seem to want the market in paid links to stop essentially because it doesn’t suit their algorithm to have paid links. In their ideal world the only links provided are those that are “natural” ie when someone links to a site that they’ve come across and think is great rather than a site that they’ve been paid to link to. In their ideal world, advertising just wouldn’t exist. Well, except for adsense from google, of course.