Google making money is good; You and I making money is bad.

Google making money is altruistic; You and I making money is greedy.

Google’s search engine makes money off of all of our hard work creating billions of pages of content.

And yet if we try to make money off that content — outside of the AdSense program where we make money for Google — Google slaps us down.

This feels less like an internetwork and more like Stalinist Russia.

My themes contain a link back to my site, and that’s it. I have never paid a penny to promote them. However, other companies have used my generous free use policy (basically “do what you want with my designs”) and added various kinds of ads. But I can assure you that you will never see me promote a theme that someone else has added ads to.

Now, this was posted a long time ago and I have dropped this topic months ago. But if anyone have any doubts at all regarding my work, my themes or my view on online advertisements, just ask. I’d be happy to tell you how I work. Or just download my designs, that should give a good hint as well.

@ Craig, if Paid links are the only way for web sites with little content and next to no relevancy to search terms to get some rankings – than what would you suggest if you sell 25 000 products, that are editions of the same product – you suggest to write 25k descriptions? This is not for shops, at least not for those, who sell the same products which differ only little.

@ Alec
whose hand is in what cookie jar Correct.

@ DevilzOwn
Google doesn’t want anyone else to get paid for ANY kind of adverts unless it is through their very own Adsense – this is not new. Not at all. That is the path Google has chosen. And it’s a pitty Matt does not ever answers in this topic.

Mark said:
‘Much of the PageRank for wordpress.com/org is probably due to those links from various blogs. Since it is really advertising for WordPress they should be penalized or at least have the value of the links discounted right?. I sounds like Matt is suggesting that they should have “nofollow” attached to them.’

Well if google do this will be many angry users and will be few developers that will make free software .
Google need to know that his users make him to have so much money and if they don’t think on user interest they will folow Windows Live search path.

Google is too commercial at this moment

I am in the process of building a link directory. I have every plan on charging to place links on my premium directory. Why? Because it takes time and effort to visit and review each site that is submitted, and I will not place links to low quality sites or sites that I don’t think are appropriate for my visitors on my site. Am I charging for links? No. I am charging for a review process that cuts into my daily schedule. If a site owner decides to purchase a link from me, I’ll know that 99.9% of the time, their intent will be to gain better Google PR, or result page rank. But the reason that 99.9% of site owners have this intention has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with all of the hype that has been put into Google’s search results and Google’s seemingly worthless PR values.

If Google wants to offer better results to it’s users, then Google needs to figure that out on their own, and stop trying to strong arm the websites that make up 95% of what Google is by telling them how to process their links(ie the nofollow attribute) or how they’re allowed to create revenue.

About the nofollow comment I just made. I think that nofollow is a great tool, but it has it’s place. The reason that Google came up with it in the first place was to combat spam. Now site owners are being told to use it on sites that they link to if the link is sponsored. Here’s a crazy idea, if a site doesn’t approve of a particular site, for whatever reason, then maybe they should just not link to that site in the first place.

It looks like that if some guys pay Google to promote wordpress themes created by others including Andreas Viklund with his own links embedded in the footer or embedded Adsense ad codes, then every thing is okay!

I am getting really pissed with this latest furore. Look at it closely and it seems like Google doesn’t want anyone else to get paid for ANY kind of adverts unless it is through their very own Adsense.

Seems like rather than going after competitors like Yahoo and MSN (that can give Google some, if not too much, real competition) and fight for their ad spenders, Google wants to make small sites a soft target and take away their revenue stream if it is NOT Adsense! Want to save breath, eh Mr. Google?

Why don’t you ever really focus on the issue of warez sites displaying adsense ads or similar other shady sites and adsense farms? Even after people like me report such sites time and again, these sites stay up forever. Maybe ‘coz they get tons of traffic, loads of impressions and thousands of clicks and the advertisers are too dumb to note where the clicks are coming from or is it that these advertisers “request” for such traffic, eh Matt?

And you want everyone to look at “paid links” on their sites and let Google know that they are being paid for their hard work from someone. Since when has Google taken up this self proclaimed role of the “Web Inspector”? Care to throw some light on it, Matt?

Lastly, will my comment be even approved, Matt? Or will you kill it because I have digressed from the REAL issue?

Is Google going to penalize wordpress.com and wordpress.org because they embed this type of advertising in each installation of WordPress by adding their links into the blog roll.

Much of the PageRank for wordpress.com/org is probably due to those links from various blogs. Since it is really advertising for WordPress they should be penalized or at least have the value of the links discounted right?. I sounds like Matt is suggesting that they should have “nofollow” attached to them.

This seems a little odd to me. If WordPress made a product they should be able to benefit from links when people decide to use that product, both in the form of more attention from search engines and click through traffic.

So how is that different from someone paying for a theme and including a link?

No-one at WordPress is refuting the right of the theme designer to put a link back to their site in the theme. I commented above asking Matt (Cutts) his opinion on designer links, whether they should be nofollowed or if they are legitimate, but so far I (like Graeme above) am frustrated. Matt’s comments so far appear to relate to paid links only, paid as in $ not as in beer.

If a company (for this example, lets say a travel company called ‘Happy Travel’) has a blog about travel deals with a unique theme that has been custom designed for them by a talented young designer called ‘Tom Thumb’ who works for a web design company called ‘Cool Designs’. After a while the altruistic management at Happy Travel decide to release the theme to the public through the themeviewer and the codex. Who gets the link?

* Happy Travel?
* Cool Designs?
* Tom Thumb?
* All three?
* Nobody?

Answers on a postcard please…