Deat Matt Cutts and Google,

I used to love you. I would tell my friends about the “car Google bought”, the mortgage “Adsense was paying for”, and so on. Now you are trying to destroy what you helped create.

In an outright foolish blog post Matt Cutts said, “I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms.”

In other words, “We need data in order to be able to stop people buying links from anyone but us. Please screw other webmasters by being an un-paid rat, we’d appreciate it.”

Google, if you want my advice, stop fighting against webmasters, because if it weren’t for us, you wouldn’t have anything to offer searchers.

Webmasters don’t put content on the internet anymore because they want to. They write and spend money building sites so they can make money.

We don’t need a puppet giving us little tid bits of not actually useful help in “ranking better“.

But now you want us to stop making money by selling text links for page rank? Matt Cutts said, “Ash, there’s absolutely no problem with selling links for traffic (as opposed to PageRank).” How can I, as a webmaster, know what the intention of other webmasters is going to be? How can you, as a search engine, punish me for selling related text links? After all, I must approve links that are put on my pages. So even if they are paid, they are deemed relevant by me. It’s my site, and my content, leave it alone.

Oh, and on another note Cutts also said, “For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt.” Why should I punish people who are buying relevant links on my site by nofollowing them?  After all, didn’t you just say there is “absolutely no problem” with selling links for traffic?

They want a link, I think their site is worthy, they offer to give me money, it’s a win-win-win. It’s a win for me, I get paid. It’s a win for them, they get a relevant link. It’s a win for you, you find another relelvant site.

However, punishing paid links is a lose-lose-draw. I lose because people are scared to buy links. Advertisers lose because I won’t go to the trouble of giving them a link without getting paid. You won’t find the relevant site as easy, even though you’ll find it eventually.

I know with as many minor SERP updates, you can easily filter out 99% of spam. You aren’t going to catch that other 1% of spammers this way.

If you are going to alienate me and tell me that what I’m doing, and will continue to do, is against your rules, does that make me a “black hat”? And since you are saying that I’m on the wrong side of the line, what stops me from going all the way over and joining SEOBlackHat (No nofollow)?

If you still think this “Calling All Snitches” post is a good idea, keep it up.  You’ve just lost a follower and forced someone to the dark side.

Never again yours,

Brandon Hopkins