Does Google Control Your Blog?

i think you have excellent points there. google should be working for us and not the other way round. do you care what place your name appears on the phone book? did you change your name to “AAA AAA” to appear first? i am kind of pissed of at the policies. i check my PR out BUT i have no SEO plugin enabled and i am not doing anything special. i am happy when people land to my site from search engines but i am not after it. what i am after is happier readers and readers that coming from a search engine will stay as readers. (sorry for derailing :)). all in all you are absolutely right!

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yah their domination is kind of alarming these days… their later stunts with the pr droppings i think will cause the bloggosphere to bring some kind of punishment :)

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I was a PR5 at blogengage and when I went to do follow I dropped to a 3 and stayed there ever since.

All my blogs and website are do follow unless it’s something I need to change then it might not be.

I do many things that Google doesn’t like and I have felt the wrath.

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When I started out, I thought better PR was top priority, but being a ‘n00b’ I never really altered the way my blog was set up. All I thought was, if I get good pagerank, I’ll get more people visiting as they’ll all want to comment! Later I realised that this wasn’t exactly true, and haven’t really thought about it much since then. If Im honest, I hadn’t even thought about keyword stuffing either, lol! I do try to make good post titles now, but thats more to get people to visit my blog from comments I leave on other websites :)

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Sire,
It’s an interesting read. Like you I will write my post and then make changes to put the keywords. That way my thoughts won’t be dictated by what keywords I should write. But I like to think that only if you put in some relevant keywords would you get organic search engine traffic. But I don’t really go overboard with my keywords. I agree with you finding the keywords can be pretty boring.

Peter

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I had a PR3 blog long before I went to do-follow, and I still have a PR3 blog (just had to check, since I don’t track that stuff, normally).

I don’t write my posts or do anything on my blog that is intended for Google or any other search engine. I kind of take the attitude that I don’t want to become dependent on Google. I would rather depend on readers, so I do whatever I do with THEM in mind. This is why I recently added the ability to subscribe to tag feeds, so they get only the topics that interest them when they subscribe to a feed.

Sure, I have adsense on a few of my blogs, but that’s only for the people Google sends me, as regular readers are blind to those. Most of my sites carry different advertising that appeals more to readers and not info seekers.

I believe the idea that Google is God and you have to do whatever it takes to make Google happy is a bad one. What happens if there comes a day where Google ceases to exist? Where will you be? Back at the beginning again, trying to get traffic from another search engine?

I am kind of old school and believe the best way to get traffic is by word of mouth…the way it was before Google and other search engines came along. Site owners that were social got the traffic, sites that were good were spread by word of mouth. Think about the first time you heard about Google. It was probably from another living, breathing human.

The new thing is “social marketing”, but the new thing is just the old school way of attracting readers by word of mouth. There is little different in the way it is done.

Google is beginning to socialize their search, which will reward those that have never changed their ways from the old school way of doing things. If you have changed your methods of traffic building since 1999, if you have been chasing after search engine traffic and PR, building inbound links for PR rather than human clicks, you may be in for a big surprise when those that didn’t, beat you for the top spots and drive you off the front page. (not that those people even need the Google attention they will get)

Google has always suggested you build your site and do your marketing for people and not search engines. Take that suggestion to heart. In the coming years, you’ll be glad you did.

Pay attention to your subscriber counts, repeat visitor counts, where they are coming from other than search engines. Follow the comments back to the owner’s sites and see what they are interested in. Commenting on their blogs will make them more likely to return to yours. Become friends with your readers and go “hang out” with them, wherever that is. Pay attention to trackbacks that are sending you traffic. Pay attention to what readers are clicking on your site. Pick your advertising with your readers in mind. Get away from caring about search engine traffic & Adsense and build a loyal following that will bring their friends, who will bring their friends, and so on.

(btw: Sire, I think your CommentLuv might be broken. Most recent post it offers is from July and has been off my front page for a long time.)

On the paid reviews, we really need to call them what they are, paid links to get PageRank, to game Google’s search algorithms. That’s why they took such drastic action on it. They do have the need to protect their results, at least up to a point.

What really made it a questionable move in my mind was that they also have near monopoly control over online advertising as well. It kind of reminded me of the way other monopolies like Standard Oil, AT&T and, yes, Microsoft behaved before the Justice Department came down on them.

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i think Google not completely Control my blog. because we can get traffic from another search engine

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I think I do the same thing you do by writing the post and then picking out the keywords. I should probably care more about it… it just seems to get in the way sometime. I think that sometimes what could be a really good post is trashed because the author is writing more for Google than for his readers.

But search engine ranking is important too so I will agree with Gerald in saying it is a science and you have ot find the right formula for you.

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I do admit I do a little keyword focus, but only as it relates to what I want to write. But I don’t write something just to get the keywords in, and I don’t put keywords in that do not relate to the post. However, if I’m talking about dancing and get to throw in a picture from Dancing with the Stars for a bit of Google credit, I think it’s forgivable.

~ Kristi

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Totally agree with the facts of this informative post. Google surely tries to influence our blogging in many ways with all their rules. As they are the Big G we can’t even ignore them. But sometimes all these rules and policies takes away the real fun of blogging.

But we should also keep in mind that whatever google does they try to implement something that is best for all. Like publishers, advertisers and general net users. And that’s what makes them GIANT.

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With the ways things are going now, it would seem like it. They really make us do what they want for their gain mostly. But not much we can do since we are like ants to Google and Google being the kid with the magnifying glasses.
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