Why any proposed google boycott is a complete wank.

Posted by stuart as , , ,

Ever since the four horsemen of the apocalypse rode into town and started eating babies the google paid link pagerank slapping incident, I’ve been hearing whispers in the shadows about a proposed webmaster boycott of Google.

I thought I’d channel my vast intellectual resources (I even stopped drinking single malt scotch for the day) into having a look at whether this was, (as I thought) a complete wank or not.

Now in my “real” job, one of my clients provides me with about 80% of my work. Whilst this is nice and all, I’m a little uneasy about having so many eggs in one basket. This client can be a little difficult to deal with at times, sometimes payments are late, sometimes I have a little trouble getting him to understand the limitations of HTML and CSS, but hell, he gives me 80% of my work.

Will I boycott him for being a bit late with his payments sometimes?

Shit no.

This is the thing that people need to understand about the way Google is now treating paid links. You are now being given a stark choice:

1. Continue to do paid posts/sell text links and pay the pagerank toll, or;
2. Stop doing the above and keep your pagerank.

It really is that simple.

You can continue to do business with Google, or you can choose not to. The choice is yours.

While it may be a prudent business decision to not rely on Google for a large portion of your income, I’ll be buggered if I’m going to boycott the traffic and income they give me.