Angry Spammy Webmasters Versus Google

WARNING: This is long. But funny. (My writing isn’t funny, it’s the quotes. You can save yourself some time by just reading the quoted sections and skipping all of my stuff. I’m not important.)

Google (specifically, Matt Cutts and someone I’ve never heard of) recently posted something discussing selling links that pass PageRank and why that’s a bad thing that they’re against. And, big surprise, they managed to stir up the hilarious anger of people who feel that Google owes them the undeniable Constitutional right to sell whatever links they want.

Let’s take a look at some of the funniness that you can find in the comments on that post, shall we? I believe we shall.

What you fail to understand is that there are just no opportunities for small Webmasters to get attention.

Not all Webmasters can even THINK of competing with large organization who spend MILLIONS as if it was water.

You have an obligation to help the small Webmaster if you are going to insist that they not use paid links.

What other option are you giving them. Are they to just die and wither away.

Yes, Google’s goal in life should be to make sure that all small webmasters (we’re talking midgets here, right?) are given assistance so that they too can become big webmasters. And then when every single webmaster in the world is a big webmaster, Google can finally rest, satisfied with a job well done.

Let’s not bring up the fact that large companies who are spending millions will be able to buy far more links than you can buy if Google condones link-buying. No, that’s all an illusion, probably full of smoke and mirrors, orchestrated by the lolcats who control the Internet.

I’m another entirely unhappy webmaster. I write a blog and up until the recently, I had a PR of 2. Not an extremely high number but I was proud of it nonetheless. Come to find out I’m now a ZERO. I didn’t do ANYTHING! I write occasionally for PayPerPost…. I don’t know why exactly I was penalized or what I did, but I am not happy. In fact, I’m furious. I even blogged about it.

I used to be a fan of Google, I used to LOVE Google. But now I can see that you’re all just as bad and stingy and greedy and money-hungry as the assholes who are gouging us at the pumps. They raise our gas prices, you guys bitch and moan over a few measly dollars. Grow a pair, Google. Maybe it’s time you realize that not all of us are wealthy billionaire CEOs, not all of us know how to make millions off of AdSense, and some of us really rely on that PR for a few extra bucks and I mean that literally… $5.00 here and there. It may not be much to you, but it means the world to one of my children when they get a happy meal with it.

I’d almost accuse this of being a parody, what with the price of gas complaint and the Happy Meal thing. Yes, Google, you’re preventing these poor children from eating McDonald’s! How dare you! Especially to someone who “didn’t do ANYTHING” except write the occasional post with a paid link, which happens to be exactly what Google just said can affect your PageRank.

I have one very big question. Why do I have to be penalized for violating some terms of service that I never asked you to give me in the first place? Why are blogs that deal with paid posts getting spanked like little kids when, in fact, google is acting like little children because they are not getting the whole money pie?

Yeah! Take that! Nyah! How dare you impose any kind of standards and quality control on your index! It’s my site, so I should be able to be all over Google because I never asked for you to improve your site! (Although I am hungry for some money pie now. I imagine that it’s like a sweet pecan pie, only with the delicious addition of pennies.)

Hey, that last poster came back for a few more comments, let’s keep going:

I do not trust Google at all. According to what I am reading, my blog is in violation of a TOS from a company I did not invite into my life at all.

I cannot tell you how much I dislike your company telling me what I can and cannot have on my blog.

My blogs are sitting at PR ZERO because of an arrogant company that says I violate their precious TOS.

I ask you, what right does Google have telling me what is or is not on MY blog??? I DO NOT WORK FOR GOOGLE. THEY HAVE NO RIGHT TO TELL ME anything I am or am not violating.

Someone is apparently confused about who’s telling who what. “So, like, Google is saying that they’ll give me a low PageRank and therefore rank me lower because I’m writing spammy posts to make money? So I can choose to remove those links or make them not pass PageRank, or I can leave them on my blog and live with it? I think I would choose to live with it, since I’m not a big fan of Google at the moment. Wait, no, that’s not right, that’s almost rational. What I meant to say was YOU’RE CONTROLLING MY LIFE AND I DON’T WORK FOR YOU SO I CAN WRITE WHATEVER I WANT!!”

You know, I was trying to exaggerate this perspective there, but I really can’t exaggerate things any more than the original poster did. Google’s not telling what you can or cannot post on the Internet (although the guy writing this had a Blogger profile, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he accepted Google’s TOS in the first place to get a Blogger account.) Google’s saying you can post what you want, and they have the right to do whatever they want with their index. It’s not that difficult of a concept, really. I promise.

What are you people? The net police? No, I am not friendly to Google. I am simply a disabled person getting pocket change from social security for income and trying to make a tiny bit more. Your jerk company is trashing my income just like they are trashing the single mother’s incomes.

You people SHOULD be ashamed of yourselves. I will be so glad when your doofus ranking system is no longer an issue in the companies I work for.

Hmm, a Doofus Ranking System. I guess that’s like Am I Hot Or Not, where people just post pictures of doofuses they’ve seen and other people rank them? If I set up that site and become insanely rich, do I owe royalties to this pissed-off webmaster ranting away on Google’s blog? I hope not. Doofus Ranking System for the win!

Even more discussion on a similar post on Matt Cutt’s blog:

I hope somebody will sue you and google for this because you are ruing people business.
I hate google and it’s page rank. AND IF I WANT TO SELL LINKS I SELL THEM with or without nofollow s^^t tag, google is not making A RULE WITH ME or with us , GOOGLE DONT OWN US, google should rember that WE helped them to be what is he now.

That’s one clever guy, he saw right through Google’s position on the matter and realized that Google doesn’t own him and he would be able to keep on selling links. Too bad link buyers aren’t going to be too interested in buying links on a PR0 site that has had all its precious link juice stripped away. I wonder if all of the precious essences discussed in Dr. Strangelove were really about linkjuice? Stanley Kubrick was really ahead of his time.

What other choice are you giving someone after YEARS of not being noticed and playing by the rules?! Should they just remain invisible for the rest of their online lives? Would YOU not finally want to take some action to get traffic? Can you honestly say that if you were in their shoes, YOU would be content to never get anything from your commercial Website?

Oh no, I started a commercial web site in what must have been an overcrowded market and now everyone is going to bigger, already established, more trusted sites and not my brand new site that nobody knows about! I have to be able to game the system and buy links so that it’ll look like my site is worth something even if it’s not!

What you fail to understand is that there are just no opportunities for small Webmasters to get attention.

It sounds like a poor person saying that he had no choice but to rob the liquor store, since nobody was just giving him beer for free. Odd that so many small webmasters (are we still talking about midgets?) manage to build sites and get attention without having to pay for links.

Eliminating paid text link advertising as option, isn’t going to drive prices down, when Google is the only place you’re “allowed” to buy advertising do you think the prices are going to go down and become more affordable?

Or maybe some people just don’t understand what’s going on. Google sells advertising that doesn’t get spidered or pass any PageRank. Google says that if you sell links on your website, they shouldn’t pass any PageRank either, or Google will consider your site less trusted. It’s kind of funny that anyone could interpret it as “no advertising for you! I am Google, the Ad Nazi!”

“Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results.”

If that were indeed true you would NOT:

1) Be practing Web Apartheid, where you divide the Web into the HAVEs (pages with PageRank) and HAVE NOTs (pages without PageRank) and favoring the HAVEs over the HAVE NOTs in your search results.

Wow, now that’s the kind of stuff you like to see on the Interwebs. Let’s see, Google’s big innovation when it started was PageRank, and how sites with many incoming links tended to be better, more trusted sites than pages without incoming links. So sites with many incoming links should be listed higher in the search results. But no, this is bad, this is like racial inequality. How dare you, Google! All sites should be treated equally! Whenever someone searches for a word on Google, it should spit out every single web page that includes that word, in random order. That’s the only way to give your users the best search experience.

As long as Google continues to willfully and intentionally bury the most relevant, unique Supplemental Results behind less relevant Main Web Index results, your goal is by no means “to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results”. Rather, your goal is clearly to prove that PageRank can be made to work despite the fact that it never has.

Of course! The most relevant and unique search results are on web pages that nobody else thinks are interesting and therefore doesn’t link to. This is the same Web Apartheid poster as earlier, so I’m wondering if his “unique” sites are all things like chemtrail conspiracy theories or something like that.

And PageRank has never worked? I guess that’s how Google started as a tiny project that nobody had heard of and somehow managed to topple the leading search engines, simply because its results were so much better than anyone else’s? Oops, I mean, no better at all, and Google only succeeded through the random chaos of the universe. And chemtrails. I bet Google is brainwashing us — from the sky — to use Google and only Google. All praise Google.