Jantics

I just finished co-hosting The Mo Show with Morgen.
Our topic was Page Rank.

For those of you who missed my rant, here it is, almost verbatim:

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I’ve done a post on Jantrails today, with links for all of you to check out, if this is a topic which interests you. I’ve linked to places where you can check your own PR, places that explain what PR is, and I’ve linked to places that help explain this problem with Google punishing certain blogs.

As most of you probably know, I have three blogs.
There’s my main blog, The Jannaverse, which is a PR-4. I do NOT do paid ads there, and my PR has not dropped. It’s stayed a 4.
Then I have Jantics and Jantrails, where I DO do some paid ads. Those were both PR-3 for awhile, and now they’ve both been dropped all the way down to zero. Google has done this to a LOT of other people as well. The PPP boards are full of people who have had their rank dropped drastically, simply because they were doing paid ads. I’ve heard of people who have had their rank dropped from 4 to zero, simply because they got “caught” doing paid ads.

I think I need to emphasize the reason some bloggers are so concerned about their PageRank dropping. I get the impression that people who don’t do paid ads don’t always understand why it’s such a big deal. They think we’re just over-reacting to losing some petty little popularity contest.
But that’s not really what it’s about.
Think of it as getting a promotion at work. You get promoted, you usually get a raise. Well, with better PR, we’re qualified to take better advertising opportunities, which increases our income. Better PR translates into more income, and lowered PR translates into a drop in income.
I do NOT keep my blogs just to make money; I blog because I love to blog. But in addition to the regular posts I do just for the fun of it, I also stick in some PPP now and then. And I try really hard to make those posts fun to read too. I try to put my sense of humor into everything I write.
For people like me, who have an extremely low income otherwise, the money from PPP is a HUGE help.

But, back to the subject of why PR is important….
Most blog ad companies still use page rank to separate blogs into hierarchies, to determine who’s qualified for the better-paying opportunities. Those with zero PR are at the very bottom of the heap.

So, if you’re doing paid ads, and your PR got dropped from three to zero, you’ve been cheated. You’ve lost out on the income you would have made, had you remained qualified to take PR-3 opps.

This is why it’s important to care about what’s been happening here.

That’s something I think some people don’t understand. I hear some reactions like “Well, don’t worry about it,” or “Just ignore it,” or “it’s not all that important”. If you got called into your boss’s office and were told that you were getting a significant decrease in pay, I think you’d agree that it IS important, rather than just shrugging it off and saying “oh well.”

PPP (which now calls itself IZEA) has started something new called “real rank”, which is their own version of ranking blogs. It’s still new, of course, and the numbers don’t mean much at this stage of the game until ALL their blogs have been ranked and the dust has settled. It seems to be based more on traffic than links. So blogs who don’t get many visitors will be the equivalent of a PR zero. Here’s why that’s a problem: If your readers like to use Google reader, or another type of RSS-feed-service, you’re screwed because those hits do NOT get counted. If you have a hundred readers a day, and every one of them uses an RSS-feed-service like Google reader, this system will record you as having zero hits. That’s why I refuse to use Google reader. With this new system, you’re only hurting bloggers by not visiting them individually.

Part of the problem, too, is that even though there are lots of perfectly good search engines out there, Google seems to be the top one FOR NOW. So they have a lot of power, and they don’t seem to be afraid to use it. I’ve heard a lot of people describe them as the “bullies” of the Internet. Part of what’s so infuriating is that they’re doing all this with impunity, and no one seems to have any authority to stop them. And the people who might have authority to regulate this kind of thing probably don’t understand enough about the issue to see why it’s a problem.
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That’s the rant I said on the air tonight.

I have a few additional thoughts which came to mind after the show aired.
I still get the distinct impression that people don’t quite understand the seriousness of what Google has done.
Google has NOT been behaving in an ethical manner.
Just because it’s done some things which are “nice” (free services, useful research, blah blah blah) does not give it free reign over the workings of the entire Internet. If I give you a candy bar, for example, that doesn’t give me a right to let the air out of your tires later that night.
And PPP (now known as IZEA) is absolutely NOT something to be ashamed of. One caller described it as something we should guard against getting “sucked into.”
Excuse me?
For me, PPP is like having a part-time job. It provides extra income that I absolutely NEED, and am VERY grateful for. This isn’t just some silly toy I play around with. This is income I NEED. I am below poverty level. I need all the help I can get. Having a “second job” is nothing to be ashamed of. Rather, it’s absolutely necessary for me at this point in my life.
If that second job was in the “real world” in a real building as someone’s employee, no one would have any trouble with it, and no one would accuse me of being “sucked into” anything.
Yet somehow people think differently when that job is with PPP. I find that remarkable, sad, and a bit aggravating.

As for whether we have the right to speak ill of Google on blogs that are provided by Blogspot (owned by Google), my answer is YES, absolutely we have the right to say anything and everything we damn well please. First amendment, people. Speak out. Don’t be afraid to get angry when you’ve been stomped on. And FIGHT when you get stomped on. Do NOT be passive.

Again, this is NOT just affecting people with Blogspot blogs. It’s affecting EVERY blog that does paid posts. Look at my URL up there, people. This is not a Blogspot blog. This is on its own domain, offered to me by a very dear friend. And Google penalized it just as much as it did Jantrails, which IS a Blogspot blog.
Jannaverse (also a Blogspot blog) did NOT get penalized. The difference, of course, is the lack of paid ads there.