I am getting really tired of having to fight the mega giant Google to be able to make a little extra money online.  Twice I have made progress in making a bit of money, only to have Google step in and slap it down.  Mind you, I have not done anything at all illegal, black hat, or even “iffy”.  At least, not that I know of.  You see, Google makes it nearly impossible to figure out what it likes, and what it doesn’t like.  If they suddenly don’t like you, then they will take away all of your search traffic.

I have been building a website that uses the Ebay Partner Network, and compiles searches from Ebay and makes it so that shoppers can find particular items very quickly and easily.  For several months, I was getting a ton of search traffic, and was converting very well, as the search traffic was finding what it was looking for.  Isn’t that exactly what Google claims to be about?  Customers finding what they want?  But, I was making money by converting this search traffic, so Google didn’t like it.  Evidently, they are the only ones that are allowed to make money on the internet.  Now, I am not getting a single hit from Google on my site, which makes it evident that they have now blocked my site.

As I mentioned, this is the second time that this happened.  I used my personal blogs to write some sponsored posts (clearly identified as such) for some extra income.  I only posted a handful of these types of posts among a ton of normal, personal posts.  But, those few posts angered the great Google, and they took away all of my Google rank.  I had one blog built up to a rank of 4 over a relatively short period of time, only to wake up one morning to find my blog dropped to a zero.  Again, think about this:  Google rank (I thought) was based on the traffic you get, the quality links that you have back to your site, and whether you provide what searchers are looking for.  None of those criteria have changed.  The only difference is that I made a little money from sponsored posts.

I am not sure how Google got so powerful in the internet market, but it appears that they have gained too much power for those of us that are small in the market.  I know there are probably some who are trying to cheat others, but most of us are just trying to make enough to make it, supplementing our income with a few bucks here and there.  That doesn’t hurt Google in any way.  They are simply becoming the dictator of all things internet.  I am sure there is no solution to the problem, but at least it helps to vent…