Google has not only put out the word to website owners to stop selling or buying links direct or through other services but has moved again to increase it’s stranglehold on Internet advertising. What Google wants to call “paid links” is essentially advertising competition and Google wants to penalize any website owners that sell links to other sites. When will their transparent efforts at monopolizing Internet website advertising bring them to Federal Courts?

Under some “google-logic” when a web site owner sells a text link direct, or through a service, to another web site this is a bad thing deserving of punishment. Never mind that a website owner just sold a link as an advertisement; Google penalizes you. Why? Because its system of page ranking is based on links to other sites and it’s failure to properly program discrimination of a paid link from a content link means that the popularity and rank of a site may be passed to the advertising site.

What’s wrong with your advertiser getting some reputation for having an adlink on your website? Are advertisers not always looking at sites that enhance their market? Don’t advertisers like to choose what kind of site they are on? Don’t web site owners like to choose what sites advertise on theirs? Of course they do! On the face there is nothing wrong. You probably have text links from Google, Yahoo or any of the myriad of other services available. It seems that Google wants to corner the market on context linking and has no other way than to penalize anyone who sells a link through someone other than Google. This is passing the lines of absurdity and monopolistic practice.

This site and many others use many services to find proper advertising links to support a website. When a good website sells its space it usually tries to find suitable partners that will be happy with the results. This site sells links to Internet related services and companies regularly. We use a combination of advertising services and we sell direct links. As we discriminate to make sure that the links are relevant to the sites we put them on we have happy linkage.

Google claims this is about advertising relevance. Selling links with no relevance to your sites content being at issue here. When we had Adsense there were many times and places their textual ads had no relevance to the website. Political sites with locksmith adverts? Music sites with mortgage adverts? Come on Google, your results often suck with computer driven algorithms instead of manual selections.

All of this relates to the fact that the programmers at Google cannot fix their errors. Every time they find a bug they think that webmasters and web owners should jump through hoops and shed other revenue streams so that Google may keep its monstrous growth without fixing their programs and putting more pressure on websites to stop gathering other revenue streams for fear of losing adsense!

We use a service right now called Linkworth. This service lets you pick the offers from advertisers wishing to place a text link on your site. Keeping them relevant is easy and for good sites important. We are making more money than we made on Adsense selling our contextual advertising using the Linkworth direct approach. Each month there is growth in these earnings as more websites appreciate advertising their links on sites with relevance to their offerings.

About the “Google penalty” let’s get real. Google is a fraud and they screw with sites regardless of what is going on. Case in point is MovieTV.us. which is an Independent Film and video sharing site. Search for MovieTV.us on google.com then on live.com and see what the difference is. MovieTV.us uses no service other than its own and Yahoo! It is impossible to find a return on the site without site:movietv.us. When a search for a company name does not produce that company first you are not really a search engine at all.

Google has been for most of its giant corporate life been a monopolistic advertising driven link farm dictating the content and format to its member websites and prohibiting or punishing financially those who go outside their box. This is a monopoly whose resources are now stifiling growth through the homogenization of content and format..