Is it online suicide to show Google the door?
A blogger called Vlad is so angry at Google for reducing his PageRank that he is effectively telling Google to leave his blog alone and get lost. Groundbreaking stuff or online suicide?
It’s amazing these days how bloggers bend over backwards to keep Google happy because let’s be honest, if you want to create a successful blog, you need Google on your side. The big G accounts for a huge majority of daily web searches and so not allowing Google anywhere near your website would be considered by many to be tantamount to slashing your wrists. So it’s hardly surprising that when we write something or configure a site, we often think how Google will look upon it. Will the bots like this link and will they approve of the way I have configured this HTML? But the decision by Google to re-evaluate websites PageRanks has got bloggers and webmasters considering something previously thought unthinkable - amping down the Google love and going it alone.
You’re probably wondering how you can stop an anonymous GoogleBot from touching your site. Well, you can start by removing your website details from Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. You could also insert “nofollow” links but that would also stop other search engines from indexing the pages too.
Probably at the end of the day, it is impossible to fully exclude a website from Google. If you write quality content, people are going to link to you and Googlebots will follow those links. So the move by Vlad to show Google the door is symbolic at best. But I think it reflects a growing sentiment that perhaps Google is getting a little too cocky for its own good and that the search engine giant is starting to exert an inordinate and unhealthy amount of power online.
Thank you very much for the spotlight.
There also another side to the story. Google, or at least the “search engine” part of it would have no content at all without webmasters.
Yes it was true that I was upset about recent Page Rank reduction. However I also free more than maybe other bloggers to experiment with things- even though sometime they may look a little drastic.
Of course I would discourage to follow my example if your earnings depend on SERPS or AdSense.
I do believe that any website that uses RSS technology can very easily survive without search engines these days.
Pfft. How about ‘no effect’?
Honestly, it makes no sense to go all emo about pagerank, much less going all emo about it then blocking the same engine that’s giving you the pagerank (no matter how low it’s gone).
Logic is not at work here.
The problem here is simple: If you depend on a single source, even if it’s Google, you are doomed.