There’s a bit of an uproar this weekend about Google and the use of ‘nofollow’. I’m seeing a lot of posts about it.

It seems that Google not only wants paid links in sponsored posts to be ‘nofollowed’, but they want any links in sponsored posts to have the ‘nofollow’ attribute. After all, the post wouldn’t exist without the pay, right? So they want any other links to be treated that way.

nofollow links

Not many webmasters are pleased with this.

The impact can be seen all around. Techcrunch put a nofollow on their links thanking their sponsors. Andy Beard is talking about it. So is Ted Murphy at Izea… well, he’s very much in the middle of it in a lot of ways. There’s a post about it on Graywolf’s blog.

And now here. Just can’t forget here. :)

I have to agree with a lot of the comments I’ve seen on this topic. Google needs to figure out a better way to determine the quality of a link. Any link from poor quality content shouldn’t count. But if a review is well-written and informative, should it really matter if the review is paid or not? A good quality review is something that benefits visitors whether or not the writer was paid.

And what about people who write about something as their job? They’re getting paid for it too, just not in a way that can be easily seen by Google or other search engines.

I’ve done paid posting. Heck, this blog here even lost its PR over it. I don’t care.

I only do a paid post if I like the topic anyhow. That’s why I do relatively little of it. I’m far more concerned with providing good content than with earning a few meager bucks for a paid review. But apparently Google thinks I should suffer for that.

Google is deeply offending many webmasters with their current policies. And as much as they claim webmasters are not their customers, they are a part of Google’s business model, one they’re trying to enforce some standards on.

Sometimes that’s a good thing. Other times Google, dear, you go overboard.

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