Google Making Another Move for Fairness

Almost a decade ago, when baby Google was born, it wasn’t the company of dreams it is today. It had a reduced number of employees, the pay was far from impressing and the headquarters… well… let’s just say they were galaxies away from today but, by popular choice and a very good ad-distribution platform, they managed to become the leading company on the Internet. Doesn’t that sound like every Hollywood
gangster movie that you’ve ever seen? Young and poor – rich and famous, with a cash flow that would make King Solomon blush with envy.

The only difference between the Mountain View-based giant and the prodigal gangsters of the ‘30s, when the prohibition made it all so very easy to get rich, or to those of the 60’s and the 70’s, when drugs did the trick, is exactly the ad platform I mentioned earlier. Everything else is the same, the people working side by side, the deliveries, the people knocking at its doors for a shot at greatness.

Following a trend that started with the removal of page ranks from PayPerPost bloggers and the reducing of the clickable area for ads, Google decided yesterday that it was time for some more order to be made. It removed the text link advertising methods that didn’t carry the "nofollow" attribute as a "machine-readable disclosure." The point was to disallow the advertising for such PageRank-selling schemes via Google, according to Matt Cutts.

Yesterday's search results for PR8

Philipp Lenssen of blogoscoped.com noted that "while many to most paid links marketplaces are now disappearing from ads in Google search results and sites using AdSense, there is nothing in Google’s guidelines that would disallow one to build a "nofollowed" paid links service, as this ban is only for what Google considers 'PageRank-passing' ads."

Be that as it may, the change of implementation is in accordance to Google’s existing AdWords and Webmaster guidelines, so it was well within its rights to do so in an attempt to clear its "ranks".

While the Sunday wipe was most effective, there are still a few sites out there that have not been found, but thanks to the feedback and interest of the public, they too will most likely be missing their page ranks by the end of the week.