I’ve loved Google and all its products from the very beginning. I think they’re far superior in Search than any other search engines. When they introduced gmail, I was among the first to use it as a secondary email though I still keep Yahoo!Mail as my primary just because I’ve used it forever and it’s a hassle to shift things.
They developed Picasa- a photo organizing and editing tool and I use it all the time for quick editing of my photos. I have been using their toolbar even before Mozilla Firefox partnered with them as the browser’s default search engine! I use Google adsense for all my blogs and sites. I prefer Google checkout when shopping! I love Google Earth and I use YouTube all the time! All my internet surfing and computing involves Google in one way or another. I’m practically a walking ad for them as I always recommend Google products to my non-geek family and friends.
The recent events with Blogger however, makes me rethink if Google actually deserves all my adulation and support! First, Google placed the “rel=nofollow” tag in our templates as default so every comment we get goes nowhere and just dies in our posts- meaning, the links left on the comments page would not be crawled by search engines for page ranking- rendering that comment practically useless to the person commenting! Second, it penalized sites who are doing pay per post and those selling text links in terms of their page rank. I don’t do both so I’m not really affected by it. My website is also only 2 months old for me to even vie for a page rank!
AND NOW THIS: Google deviously and cunningly incorporated a new stupid rule they have for commenting on posts using the Blogger platform. They’re making commenting almost exclusive to just Blogger readers. Other platform users like Wordpress and LiveJournal would have to contend to leaving their name either as anonymous or nickname that doesn’t mean anything because there is no way of entering a URL link. Basically, non-blogger users comment wouldn’t amount to anything with this kind of setup. This is discouraging for non-Blogger users obviously and makes receiving comments even harder to come by. And when we Blogger users don’t do anything about it, then we probably end up with no more comments at all.
So Sneaky Google just went ahead on their own and started this thing if I’m not mistaken two days ago! Most bloggers haven’t noticed this yet to react! Google didn’t announce it. What were they thinking? That we users wouldn’t care and if we did, just accept it?! I don’t really see the logic in this! If someone outside of Blogger leaves me a comment, I wouldn’t even know how to contact her back or how to get to her website because she has couldn’t leave her URL.
The good news is there IS ALWAYS a workaround just like the “rel=nofollow”! To Find out how, read the full story here…
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