Where do I have to sign?

Kind regards
Rata

Good post Josh – I have left others to continue talking about this whole thing and reading them for info, but we can certainly use the time for other areas in which we are better at heheh!

@ Lucia, I’d imagine those adverts convert much better on the knitting blog as well. This type of blog isn’t the best for adsense. You’ll more than likely see them stripped from my blog soon. I still have a few things to test first though. Most of the people who talk about boycotting Google etc. still run adsense. It’s pretty comical lol

@ Maurice, very good point. If we don’t watch out we may see Google as a monopoly not only in search, but in many other aspects of technology. I don’t see anything wrong with your views on the matter at all. Those who claim they are going to “boycott” google totally, just because they didn’t get a visible PR that they liked though, are just a little naive in my eyes.

@ Chuck, that’s one point that many don’t understand, or don’t care to understand. Although some of their decisions aren’t in the best interest of marketers, in most cases they are done to better improve their own search engine. The more they can be gamed the less effective they will be for both Joe Schmoe Searcher and you and I as marketers.

Their actually pagerank actually is a private rating in-house. This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but I truly believe that the whole purpose behind the toolbar PR bar was/is to get marketers to install their toolbar so they can collect data from them.

I only wish Google could run a tighter ship. There are still far too many crap sites that rank well. I’d be happier if they’d employ people to hand-check sites for the top 50 returns for each primary keyword/keyphrase. They can certainly afford it.

I don’t give a rip about PR. It makes no difference to me. I’m not even sure it makes much difference to them. I’d rather it was a private rating in-house there. And I have enough respect for Google’s rules and its role in establishing some principled guidelines that, while I will continue to sell links from time to time, I will make (and have made) nofollow a part of that arrangement moving forward…but I’m not going back to rewrite previous advertising deals. It’s unfair to ask us to be retroactive when this is a relatively new request. It will take time to make those kinds of adjustments.

(Google brings me more SE traffic than any other, but recently MSN Live and Yahoo have been making more of a contribution). In short, I don’t hate Google, but I do want to see continued challenges to an increasingly monopolized presence.

I also make money on Adsense on the knitting blog. I’m not going to strip those off just because my toolbar rank dropped. The temperature is dropping: my search traffic is up.