On the Daily SearchCast with Danny yesterday, we got into the topic of the paid link debate. He was joking that if SEOs are really that upset that Google is coming out on paid links with the nofollow, then they should all block GoogleBot with their robots.txt file.
He and I joked that they would never do that. Google is just too valuable to their traffic and revenue to block the crawler that feeds them. But Danny believes that if every SEO in the world got together and blocked GoogleBot from indexing all their sites, then Google would hurt. Will that happen, absolutely not.
This morning, during my forum research, I spotted a timely thread on the exact topic over at DigitalPoint Forums. The thread says, "Lets Stop Google bots to crawl through robots.txt and teach it a lesson." He must of been listening to the show, no? In any event, there is a poll that asks, "Who is greater- Google or Webmasters?" The results are currently:
- Google (4) 25.00%
- Webmasters (8) 50.00%
- Can we stop Google by stopping its bots through robots.txt? (3) 18.75%
- No Google is too big (3) 18.75%
Ultimately, I agree, the Webmaster is more powerful as a collective. But it won't happen, and since it won't happen, Google is "greater" in this 'battle.'
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.
