Bye Bye Google, Bye Bye Advertisements

Yep, this here blog no longer exists in Google searches.

It seems like any blog that has banner advertising or affiliate advertising on their site gets automatically labeled by Google as being in violation of their indexing policy and is excluded from searches if such links don't use the "nofollow" guidelines.

I noticed this the other day when I went searching for a fellow authors blog and it didn't appear in my Google search. "That's odd," I thought to myself as this blogger has a very unique name, although his blog name is somewhat pedestrian. So I started searching for some other poker blogs, and NONE of them appear in the Google searches when I search for the name of the blog or the name of the blogger.

A bit of research into Google's new policy turned up that instead of checking all the blogs to see if they actually had original content and weren't just a bunch of affiliate advertisements, they just dropped the hammer on all of them. There is a method of getting Google to reconsider dropping your site from their index, but the process takes MONTHS. By then all poker blog advertising should have dried up completely.

I did take some small satisfaction in that a couple of the sites that once called me a "blogger whore" because I had a few sponsors (for example "Wired Pairs" which now sports 13 such advertisements) were also dropped.

It should be noted that NONE of these sites actually violate the terms of Google's requirements. If you provide original and unique content, you're in the clear. But it will take months for your site to be cleared, if it happens at all.

It will be interesting to see which bloggers quit now that the money train has come to a screeching halt.

Edit: Those that use the service "Text Link Ads" seem to have been targeted as Google feels that site and sites like it attempt to manipulate page ranks. I didn't have a problem with Google reducing page ranks, advertisers eventually figured out that page rank was just a phony baloney number that Google came up with and didn't really mean anything. Searches meant something. Now you literally CANNOT find a poker blog by searching the name of the site or the name of the blogger. Since that is specifically why a "search engine" is used, they have perverted their own reason for existing in order to punish us for abusing their phony baloney system.