There are definitely people making a LOT more money with the posts than they do with adsense. I barely make pennies a day from it myself. The idea of making much more through paid posts seemed pretty neat but ultimately there were so many crap opportunities to write about that I really had no interest in. On top of that most of the advertisers stressed having positive reviews. If I can’t review something honestly, I don’t like the idea of reviewing it at all. Funny thing is all they really care about is getting linked to from high ranking pages, so why does it really matter if something is positive or not? You got your link.

In January SocialSpark.com officially launches and nofollow links will be a requirement. I still may poke my head in there and check it out once it gets going. I’d feel better about linking to advertisers through a system like that which won’t pass pagerank. The extra money to be made from it is certainly tempting since I’m trying to fund and make an independent film.

In regards to the Yahoo links and PR6. I’ve noticed that as well. I checked one of those prediction things a couple times and they predict PR6 as well. Of course I don’t trust those things all that much, however they did ultimately predict a PR4 for this domain and my others during the last update and were right.

Going after big buys like Shoemoney? Imagine that. It’s easier to pick on the little guys ;)

Thanks for the super comment, Dave!

Mike’s last blog post..I am only somewhat legend

I never did the PPP stuff on any of my blogs, but hey, my friends who did made a heck of a lot more money per month than with Adsense.

I still see you have 430 pages indexed in G! and you’re still topping SERPS (using the site:thingsbymike.com query in Google) for some of your article titles like

“A meme you can sink your teeth into”
“Google doesn’t completely hate me”

If you check your Yahoo backlinks using

linkdomain:thingsbymike.com -site:thingsbymike.com

You are showing 23,400 backlinks. That’s a right PR6 (as if PR really matters anymore). IMHO, Regardless, you have a good attitude, a great blog and I personally think the setback is only momentary. Of course, as wbmasters/bloggers, setbacks are the bread and butter of our business because as Nitzche said “That which does not kill us only makes us stronger”

Maybe this last G! update was like the Black Flag album title “Process of Weeding Out” and it will get rid of a lot of the unnecessary bloggers who were only here to take advantage of getting paid to post.

sidenote -> WTF didnt they grab John Chow, Shoemoney and ProBlogger ? and why is TLA still a PR7, PPP still PR6 – seems to me that the effective way to deal with this G! issue would be to “strike at the heart of the enemy” as Sun Tzu professed, alas, poor Google (and Matt Cutts), they are too busy reading “Stock Market for Dummies” tryng to figure out how to unload their stock options than to understand the real situation, either that or they knew they could get away with slapping individual (non-corporate backed) bloggers and the are too timid to “cut off the head of the snake”.

Still a great blog you got here and you’ve got one more loyal reader. That’s all that matters. Keep your head held high and stick to your guns. As the old saying goes “A defeatist is the first one who will admit defeat”.

Enough of my analogies and quotes. It’s 4am and my insomnia is starting to wane…

Peace Out,
Dave

@Bush: You should sue, dammit ;)

Hey Mike, what does – “violation of their TOS” mean, refering to Google?

No worries Mike, that is just Google rubbing their boot in your face one last time to make sure you STAY DOWN… see you wrote a post of Google hope and Google signs up for Google Alerts for “Google” and know when people mention they are starting to do better in Google and make yet another adjustment.

Kinda like in the movies when a gangster kills a guy with one shot… but then just because the guy is an ass, he goes ahead and unloads the rest of the clip on the dude even though he is already dead.

That’s how Google can be sometimes. :)

Joking… Google don’t ban me now, Ok?

@Jenny: Your name is about as common as mine, but ya never know..hehe.

@Malin: I bet if ya put your name in your site description though, it might help a bit :)

@Baron: That’s not bad at all, buddy! Hmmm, I wonder what ya could to rank even higher with brown? ;P

@Garry: Sweet! It looks like I’ve been bumped to the top spot of the second page as of tonight, but hey that’s still not too shabby ;P

@Julia: It’s a start! ;P