www.affiliateconfession.com

I wonder if Google is as green and carbon friendly as they would like you to think. With their latest move in censoring Water4Gas.com and ebooks and web sites promoting any such product that uses water to give your car better gas mileage, they look rather suspect. Believe it or not I received and email the other day from the powers that be at Adwords letting advertisers know that they will no longer be allowed to run these types of ads in their pay per click network.

What’s the reason given for this business hampering move on Google’s part? The email stated they won’t be allowing this kind of advertising because of customer feedback and “business considerations.” What!? Business considerations? Who is Google in bed with on this one? What about the business considerations of the people trying to make a living selling ebooks and information such as this now that they don’t have access to approximately 25% of the world’s online advertising market?

This is exactly why I have a problem, as do thousands of others, with the way Google operates. They have their tentacles into nearly everything that has anything to do with being “on the grid” and they can just arbitrarily decide they don’t like your product and immediately 25% of all online advertising is no longer available to you. And you have absolutely no recourse. I don’t know what percentage of their business an operation like Water4Gas.com gets from Google Adwords, but I assume it’s a lot since they are a product sold through Clickbank. Any way you look at it, Google’s decision will have a devastating impact on this business and others like it.

As with any product, there will be people who think something like this is an outright scam and others that benefit from it. Products like this one are legitimate and after talking with an engineer friend of mine who has actually built some of these systems, he assures me they do work. I can understand where people may have a problem with Water4Gas.com because what you are actually buying is an ebook showing you how to build one of these systems, not any physical parts as the landing page kind of makes it look. You have to get the parts and assemble the kit yourself, but it does work.

Regardless of what you think of water for gas type products, a decision such as this from the mothership Google should trouble the hell out of you. Now that Google is in the affiliate business with their acquisition of DoubleClick, what product, advertising strategy, ad network or affiliate network is next on their hit list?

In 30 seconds anyone can go to ClickBank.com and find several products that are ripoffs, but look them up by searching with their domain name and you will find plenty of ads on Google. Or look up anything related to making money in real estate, mlm’s, online, trading stocks, whatever, you name it and I’ll bet you can find someone running a scam and advertising it via Adwords. We all must have some discernment in the purchases we make. If you don’t know that by now I have some swampland in Florida I’d like to show you. Caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.

Google has way too much power. When are they going to protect us from themselves?

I learned a lesson in the last several days that I assume could have been much worse. Sometimes no matter what you hear or read about, you just have to try something for yourself. It’s probably a good idea to follow the advice you read about in some cases rather than being the Lone Ranger and doing it your way.

Case in point, I recently bought a text link on a very high profile blog, which will remain nameless, and thought I would get some traffic and maybe a little PR juice as well. Needless to say, I ignored the most recent advice I heard from Jeremy Palmer, I believe it was through the Black Ink Project, in an online session. Jeremy remarked that he thought he would boost some of his sites by buying text links and ended up getting them all penalized and losing some serious rankings.

Of course I thought, that’s Jeremy, Google knows about him because he’s a big shot, I’m just a medium order of fries, they don’t know about me. Wrong!

I don’t get a lot of traffic from Google here at Affiliate Confession, but it is enough that I don’t want to lose it, mainly because it is a source of ever changing new traffic. The 30 or 40 organic searchers that Google sends my way every day come from a huge variety of long tail keywords that are pretty diverse in the niches they come from. I jeopardized that traffic last week when I purchased the text link on May 28th and only 3 days later my traffic from Google dropped by 80% as you can see below:

Luckily I realized what was going on the second day after purchase and immediately converted that text link to an affiliate offer. It took a couple of days for the link to change, but when it did, the traffic returned to normal. I’m thinking I didn’t do any long term damage to this blog because I caught what was happening in time and changed it in just a couple of days. My strategy for buying text links now is to either use them only for affiliate offers or to experiment with links on lower profile sites sending traffic to sites that I can afford to do without. I’ll probably just stick with affiliate offers though.

Sometimes you just have to do something stupid before you realize how stupid it is. Don’t be stupid.

It’s been 4 days since the How Lame Is Technorati Experiment and conclusive results are in. Technorati is lame.

In making a purposeful effort to get traffic from a source that at one time actually did provide traffic, proved to be utterly unsuccessful. In the experiment I blogged a one liner about every one of the top 10 tags showing up on Technorati the day of the post and Affiliate Confession has received 15 total visitors in the 4 days since then. Not what I would call grand results. In fact, none of the tags used in the post were actually indexed on the results page for that tag.

What’s strange and is even more proof as to how lame Technorati is, is that a few days before I even tried the experiment, Technorati listed a single post on this blog completely out of the blue. I blog about the subject of that particular post quite often, yet only once has a post on that subject been indexed. And it gets even worse. A couple of spam blogs scraping my content are now being indexed for the same tags Technorati won’t list me for.

Not only is Technorati lame, it’s not even relevant any longer. Now there’s a target Google could go after and maybe adjust their PR 8 status accordingly.

I had a post already planned for today, and then I came across The Shrinking Window Of Opportunity by Gyutae Park over at his blog. It is a great article that’s really a wake-up call for Internet marketers to get busy because of the way the landscape of the net is changing. If you aren’t building your web empire yet, it could be too late real soon for the small, independent webmaster.

I’ve always believed that if you have an idea for a business on the web, you should have started it yesterday, because of the time it takes to get established and now this seems more important that ever with Google’s preference for older, well established web properties.

Even though we all know how evil Google is, the simple fact is that they control the game. While you may be able to get some traffic from various sources on the net, at this point if you don’t have traffic from Google, you probably aren’t doing all that well, and it’s only going to get worse. Gyutae points out that Google seems to be giving less relevance to or even completely discounting things like paid links, directories, widgets and more, resulting in the small business person on the web being driven out of business.

What Google supposedly wants is more relevance and in their eyes, large, established web sites will get more attention and will be pushing out the little guy and soon start to take over search results. So goes the day when everything on the web was to be on equal footing.

I don’t believe it is the end of the road for Internet and affiliate marketers and neither does Gyutae, but now is not the time to procrastinate with your ideas. If you are going to make your mark on the web, you have to start to establish yourself as an authority in your niche today. Rather than explain again how to go about that, go read Gyutae’s post about the dwindling opportunity for the independent webmaster.

As a little counterpoint though, I’m not so sure Google will always have the monopoly they do. Google’s track record as of late is to just make people mad. We aren’t reading about how wonderful Google has been to webmasters lately, we’re hearing about exactly the opposite, from lots of different sources. While they are trying to create a cleaner search index with more relevance, they could (some would argue they already have) become out of touch and elitist somewhat like the United States government.

Not that I would ever want to see such a thing, but companies who control commerce in such a way that it effects the economic stability of a large mass of people, attract the snooping eye of government intervention. With Google’s increasing record of putting people out of business, no telling what could happen if this were to manifest itself on a much larger scale. We would then have one out of touch bureaucracy giving orders to an out of touch company that controls a huge portion of commerce. Can you spell disaster?

The point of all this is to start building a relevant web empire today that will add value to the web for years to come. Don’t wait until the entry point for the small businessperson is beyond your reach.

The search engine gods, or at least the minor deities, that reside at Google have seen fit to throw a little page rank boost my way in the latest update. I first read about a page rank update being in progress yesterday on John Chow’s blog, but didn’t see anything happening my way until first thing this morning.

After starting this blog on November 1, 2007 and posting at least 1 entry every day since November 21st apparently the hard work has paid off. I can’t remember when I first got a page rank, but it was a measly 1 and stayed that way for several months. However, Google now has boosted Affiliate Confession to a PR 3.

Thanks goes out to everyone who reads and links to an interesting article here at this blog. I am immensely grateful for that. You were all part of helping to receive a better page rank here.

Of course the big question now is, does it even matter? If I get more organic search engine traffic from Google that’s the result that would make a difference. Whatever the result I will continue to blog consistently on programs, news, goofy stuff and ways to make money in affiliate marketing.

Thanks Google for a little more green in the bar up top there, now please send more traffic my way.