Hello again, my social networking friend!

Like a cowboy that never killed any indians, received no key’s to the city, or made it’s way into the hearts of profit searching webmasters, Google Referrals is finally riding off into the sunset.  Of course, since Google Referrals never worked for anything, their depart isn’t as dramatic as a cowboy riding off into the sunset.  In fact, I’ve used Google Referrals and despite getting quite a few clicks, that never turned into a cent of profit.  First they had a little red line of text at the top of the adsense control panel, and then they sent out an email to it’s users.

For those of you who don’t know what Google Referrals are, they’re somewhat similar to Clickbank, Click Junction, or Amazon.  You’re supposed to get paid whenever signs up for a product that you refer them to, through google.  Unfortunately for google, that wasn’t working out as they’d planned, and they decided to just shut it down.  Atleast they’re giving us notice, so we have plenty of time to remove the adsense referrals from our sites.

Note: Referrals will be retired during the last week of August 2008.

Luckily I only have 1 unsuccessful page that contains a referral button.  Battle of the Browsers never really saw the light of day anyways though.

Earlier today i went on digg and clicked on upcoming to use the recommendation engine for the first time.  I was surprised to see that the top 4 results for upcoming with the “most diggs”.  I do happen to digg most of the articles that get to the front page, and MakiMaki does happen to get quite a few articles to the front… so this makes a bit of sense.  Not to mention, his webmaster blog DoshDosh is one of my favorite sites for learning about social media and blogging, but how did digg know this?

Just an interesting bit of data on digg’s new recommendation engine captured in a screenshot.

In a perfect world, only the websites people like would be at the top of the search engine results. In a perfect world, webmasters would focus only on building up their content so that people wanted to read it. In a perfect world, Search Engine Optimization Does. Not. Exist. Google is trying harder and harder to stop webmasters from gaming their websites to the top of the search engines. I’m assuming that they’ll never be able to completely end webmaster’s ability to purchase success.

A friend brought this to my attention when he told me that most webmaster’s were spammers. Buying, selling, and trading links are all against google’s wishes. Though Google is not the law of the internet, they’re plenty powerful to make it seem so. As far as I’m concerned, Google is right to deem the actions of certain webmasters’ wrong, or right.

Think about it, if the websites with the best content were at the top of all your search results, you and everyone else would get the information they really wanted. Unfortunately for your search for greater knowledge, depending on a webmaster’s ability to get people to link to him, he’s able to put any site he wants at the top of the search results. To me, it’s spam when you put a link on your site just because you were paid to.

Don’t get me wrong though, I have no problem profiting from people advertising on my website. Google does it with their contextual advertising company, Text-Link-Ads does it, Kontera does it, John Chow Does it, and so do many other websites. I feel so redundant right now I think I should end this post, but I’m ending it knowing you’ll see SEO in a new light. If you see the flaws of your old disgusting SEO habits, then repent, and try social networking. Since only the good stuff really gets popular, it’s not as spammy as Search Engine Optimization.