This is a discussion touching off a thread in the PPP forum.  The TLA community has been hit here as well.  Andy Beard mentions how long he has been tracking the attack, which I blogged about earlier with some of his shared and great stats on the changes in PR update.

Don’t worry, many top SEO observers have been making the same mistake and I find myself correcting them all over the net.

Having been hit in the first wave, as were a few other prominent posties, we have had to live through this just a little longer.  ~Andy Beard

Since then Matt C of Google  also tipped me off to a great article by Aaron Wall, who concludes his guest article on Google Blogoscoped with

Most of the SEO discussion is dominated by Google because they have the largest traffic stream. It will likely stay that way for years to come unless they do something that causes a backlash from webmasters, a lessening of user trust, or government regulation of some type.

The point is that its not just the small, new SEO types that think Google might suffer a backlash, but even the SEO types at the top of the food chain that think that Google could suffer from their recent jack booted tactics in monopoly protection.

We are not just talking about bloggers getting hit but lots of local news channels and other small to mid tier business sites are feeling the pain as well.

Couple points that are either missing or only lightly touched on in the thread so far.

To boycott successfully Bloggers and Webmasters and Family Need to

1. Get out of Blogger/Blogspot all together
2. Stop Using Google Pages and Google Docs etc.
3. Get Adsense code out of your sites   (Yahoo, MSN and others offer an alternative here)
4. Get Google Analytics Code out of your sites (SocialSpark will be free, Performancing is out there, there are others, but I’m so hooked on Google Analytics that I don’t have a good alternative on the fly).
5. Drop your Gmail crap
6. Feedburner is definitely a problem, (Feedblitz is an alternative for email subscriptions and you can always just let the old rss ride on a wordpress account without the feedburner tracking.  There are options here, but   )
7. Stop searching in Google
8. Stop Using Google Search embedded in other sites
9. Stop Clicking on Google Adsense Ads on other sites or in Google Search
10. Remove the Google Toolbar from your browser
1. For Firefox here is a nice tutorial at PeculiarPlace.com
11. Remove Google Desktop from your computer (Microsoft has a similar desktop search program ~ don’t know about Apple)
12. Use nofollow tags in unintended ways.
    1. Put nofollow on affiliate badges and other items in sidebars (not your internal links)
    2. Put nofollow on sites like wikipedia references and the new york times
    3. DO NOT put nofollow tags on sponsored links

That’s the White Hat Stuff . . .

Now if you consider the potential Gorilla stuff there is more that might happen to Google if a Backlash against Google happens.  

note I am not advocating this stuff, none of this is new, but this is the problem that Google has to deal with now that they are attacking people on the internet. 

This site Top10Tech/Web/ was one of the sites attacked by Google.  I suspect that a company covered on this website fraudulently turned us into the Google Gestapo Nark Line run by Matt Cutts.  I believe this because this same company has engage in other activities to discredit an expose that I wrote on top10tech/marketing/ another directory on this domain attacked by Google.

Google is Exposed to Black Hat Techniques in some of these areas.  If I have missed something, its because I do not engage in Black Hat techniques myself and I’m not terribly well versed in it.  I try and keep up as I work in the industry and sometimes advertise with Adwords and need to know how to structure my campaigns to avoid Google Clickfraud.

1. People that stop using Google Analytics and Adsense, and still have a Webmaster account have nothing to lose. . .
   1. They might start submitting sites that are doing nothing wrong
   2. Submitting big sites
   3. Fill the Google Nark line with noise and disinformation so that the nark line is no use to the Google Gestapo
2. Google is still very weak in the Click Fraud Department.  With 100,000 web masters, bloggers and businesses getting slapped down by Google, they could experience a lot of click fraud (That is a lot of upset former Google partners to contend with).  This is Google’s problem not the people that click on Google’s potentially fraudulent ads.   They are not doing anything wrong if they ‘ALWAYS’ click on stuff they are interested in, even if their interests are as wide as the wind.  Plus, all those click fraud weaknesses of Google start to potentially surface and be employed by the disenfranchised when they
   1. Don’t just click from their own computer,
   2. Borrow a coworkers computer,
   3. click from school,
   4. click from the library,
   5. click from a mobile device
   6. and when they don’t just click, click, click over and over again, but do it randomly
3. Drop their Google analytics code on other sites that accept java script (more disinformation)

 

To reiterate, I’m not advocating the black hat stuff.  I have not decided yet to engage in the boycott.  I have a feeling that Google is not going to be knocked down by a boycott, but I do think that innovation from other companies might be the thing that re-levels the playing field again.

Google is protecting a monopoly and they are not innovating any longer in any areas that take away from their monopoly.  That leaves the door wide open for other search engines to eat Google’s lunch.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 18th, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Google, Monetization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.