If you have ever used the adsense publisher platform for making some extra cash like me, then you most likely have heard of horror stories about people getting banned right at the moment when they were due to be paid. I have seen this myself and know personally two people that lost their accounts right when the earnings were ramping up.
Here is one story that seems to shed some light on the dark side of Google:
I have seen clicks evaporate, stats for my adsense back office not jive with my multiple reporting methods. It was suspicious at best and I always wondered if I was being skimmed. I still earn daily with adsense but it has been a rocky ride. Makes a person wonder about all those stories and complaints in the Google forums. A lot of people game the system, but there are folks who do make some good cash with it like I have. If you take time to read the story it may alleviate your worst fears, or at least confirm that you were not crazy or just a conspiracy theorist.
I also have a post from another person that is fairly long but well worth reading.
Josh Bachynski wrote this very long article about a meeting he had with Matt Cutts…
It has been confirmed by Matt himself that this meeting did take place. I relate Matt with the white house press secretary, both being able to stand up in front of the world and tell fibs as a front man for a very large corporate interest or government. To me,they seem to have only self interest in mind when they spew the cover stories to protect their own.
Google has purposefully set out to hurt individuals while reaping the harvest for their own bottom line. Collateral damage is just part of the scenery it seems, you got hurt while they destroy the spammers. Do they really care your life’s work in a blog got dropped down the index 40 pages? I think not, they really only care about targeting the competition. More money for them and to hell with you. And they wonder why Black Hat SEO still works and people are tired of trying the white hat crap.
Go Social They Said
If you remember Google Friend Select and had built this up over time then you know what I am talking about. They had this going and people used it, then they dropped the program without a replacement. I still wonder why we even bother sometimes trying to do what they ask. It is only one SEO signal but I had real people not fake following my blog, not any more from that program at least.
You can see why so many people over the past couple years have inundated the forum with complaints while the Google fanboys and rats laugh and ridicule. They have rats in all parts of life, but it seems in the second linked story you can see a reference of people ratting to Matt about a certain website and crying like little babies to get a cookie from Matt and be seen in good favor.
That is my soapbox for today, you can see that these stories just solidified my suspicions about a once well liked funny named search engine called Google. Most folks have a very negative view on this search engine now, and they deserve all the vitriol as they created it.