I’ve written in the past about the benefits of text link ads so the recent changes in PageRank are bound to have an adverse effect on my monthly bottom line. In case you hadn’t heard, Google is dropping the hammer on PageRank all across the web this week. There are a lot of theories about the methods behind the madness but the majority seem to center around sites being penalized for selling links and interlinking amongst themselves as a network.

This Shouldn’t Come As A Surprise

I think most people saw this coming once the public PageRank updates were being delayed month after month. It was obvious Google was making a sweeping change to the way their PageRank scores were being calculated. The sole purpose of this systematic change, in my humble opinion, was to crush the third party text link brokers like Text Link Ads who had setup successful businesses by using Google’s own system against them.

It’s important to remember that Google’s empire was built on the back of selling text links. For them to have a fundamental opposition to the act of selling links is ridiculous. The problem is that everyone saw Google making money in this sandbox they built and decided to build their own castles using Google’s sand. This parasitic economy, which I’m just as guilty of taking advantage of as anyone else, was obviously competition to Google’s business. So this week Google stomped on everyone’s castle.

So what now?

I’m taking a wait and see approach. If the drops in PageRank don’t equate to proportionate drops in traffic then we can all rest easy, talk about the good old days when we could make some extra money selling PageRank juice and get on with our lives. I think the lesson here is really about diversifying not only your income but who you really on to just do everyday business. Google is pretty great. I like a lot of their services. But it would be totally foolish for me or anyone else to rely on them as the backbone of any kind of business strategy when it’s so easy for them to totally change the rules of the game at any moment’s notice.