Google To Punish…
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Hope you had a great weekend. I spent most of Sunday sitting next to the rooftop pool at my girlfriends apartment. Sure it was overcast and cold all day but we had the whole place to ourselves and I managed to get through most of a pretty good book about Scotland’s Braveheart era king Robert the Bruce.
Today I want to talk a little Google housecleaning with you…
Last Friday the Googlemonster announced a new policy that may have some sweeping consequences for you.
Basically Google is now entering the copyright police game and will now penalize any site that has too many valid copyright complaints against it. And by penalize, I mean plummet your site’s rankings in the serps.
They’re calling it a “new signal in their ranking” and it’s already been put into place. The announcement was made by Amit Singhal who is a Senior Vice President of engineering at the Googlemonster.
First off, the copyright complaint has to be valid. Otherwise any of your competitors could swamp Google with complaints to get your site taken down. The mechanism Google uses to verify what’s valid or not will, of course, remain a complete and utter mystery.
Amit says that there will be a counter-notice tool so if someone unfairly flags your site as a copyright violation, you can get your ranking reinstated.
Of course, the counter-notice tool won’t work. Google is notorious for horrible horrible support and how many of you have filled out a reconsideration request after having a site deindexed, only to be completely ignored? I know I have…Does anyone think this tool will be any different?
This is clearly another sign of the decline and fall of the mighty Googlemonster. It’s one more stupid policy that will further screw up and distort the rankings and lead to user and webmaster disillusionment.
Good job.
I’ve never used stolen copyrighted material on any of my websites. I much prefer to spin my own content. But I know that many of my readers do use stolen content from places like article directories and things like that. So this could hurt you guys.
And of course, we’re all at risk of having our competitors file bogus copyright claims just to steal our rankings. So you’re going to want to keep an eye on this.
Of course, this is totally ironic since Google is really nothing more than a massive copyright infringing beast itself…what is their search engine but a massive thief of intellectual property. I know I’ve never given Google permission to use my site content in the serps, but they do.
Hypocracy…from Google? Perish the thought.
Oh well, whatcha gonna do except…
Keep on building!
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
