In the world of the webmaster there are many ways to monetize a website. One of the easiest has been to sell paid links on site. The only problem is that the main metric used to set the price of paid links is Google Page Rank. Why is that a problem? Because Google does not want you to sell paid links and will penalize you for doing so.

It becomes a very fine line to walk. On the one hand you want to bring in an income from your efforts but on the other hand lies Google. A big lumbering giant with a club.

When the giant likes you he sends lots and lots of traffic to your site. When he does not he closes the gate and you suffer.

Yes, there are other search engines out there but none has the market dominance Google has. Being shut off by Google is akin to having every chain gas station shut you off. Yes there are some mom and pop ones still out there but they cost more and are few and far between.

A recent example of someone being hit with the Google Page Rank club is that of John Chow. His highly successful make money online site has recently gone from a Page Rank of 6 down to a Page Rank of 5. It may not seem like a big drop going from six to five but the world of Page Rank is not a linear scale. A Page Rank six site is seen as being 10 to 100 times better than a Page Rank 5 site.

Example of a Page Rank 5 site.

So, which site do you think deserves a higher Page Rank?

Aside from dropping Page Rank (to make a site seem less relevant to advertisers) Google also has the power to completely de-list a site from their servers. This happened to Text Link Ads. Even John Chow himself was partly de-listed in that people searching Google for his name would not see his site in the results! I can understand penalizing webmasters for doing bad things but doesn't de-listing also hurt Google in that it makes their search results less relevant?

In the end we have the dance. You want a high Page Rank so you can charge more for advertising but if you sell advertising Google will slap you down to a lower Page Rank, which lowers your ability to monetize your site.

Spy

Part of the problem lies in the fact that Google is not a search company, they are an advertising company. They want you to use their AdWords and AdSense programs. When they see people "abusing" their Page Rank system and profiting off of it with no benefit to Google they get mad and slap down the offending webmaster.

Until the other search engines step up and dethrone the advertising juggernaut that currently controls the land of search we will be forced to live in a land of search that is not based on merit but on obedience.