This is a hugely controversial subject at the minute and one i’m very passionate about. I thought i’d go into more detail than i have done in the past and explain exactly how i feel and why once and for all… grab a cup of tea and get comfy in your chair as this will be a long one

Paid Links/Sponsored Posts, in my eyes, are a bit like our Irish education system or any education system (private -v- public).

You have the Google SERPS in their purest form or ‘public schools’, the majority of sites fall into this bracket – all honest, decent, sites with a good work rate and loads of content.

You then have the Private Schools or paid ‘do:follow’ links. These guys have the cash the rest don’t, and in some people’s eyes ‘buy their way to the top’.

So it’s a tiered system. The rich get richer in terms of traffic/pagerank etc.. and the poor get poorer in that they’re knocked down the SERPS by the rich guys.

My heart says that’s wrong. All should be equal. I know that, you know that.

But history tells us equality/communism is a dream, it’s never been a reality and never will be. Why? Because people are competitive. They like money, they like to have more than the guy next to them. I’m talking in a general sense here, obviously you’ve got exceptions…

So although buying success (online or offline) is morally wrong, it’s only natural. If you have money, you’re going to spend it. More than likely invest it to try and earn more.

If everyone just ‘got by’ and bought no more than they needed, we’d all have huge savings in our banks There would be a surplus of wealth, not a deficit. That would mean we’d be missing opportunities, not developing and growing/expanding as a race and that would be an even bigger sin.

Getting back to paid links, this is what advertisers are doing…. they’re injecting their cash into business to make more cash. There’s nothing evil in that, we all do it on some level. Tell me you’ve never bought a lotto ticket or never thought about buying something and selling it on for a profit or flogging some of your old junk on ebay (unwanted gifts etc). It’s greed and making more money, or the thought of it that fuels the majority of us on some level at some stage in our lives.

The problem occurs when new laws and regulations are brought in and God intervenes or someone does on behalf of him and morally right decisions are made. God made man and but is also the cause for destroying him (religion is the cause of most wars). If god did not exist and we had one religion as a world, we could possibly be better off, that’s my own twisted theory but that’s for an other day

Google are now acting as ‘God’ as they have created their own world that is turning rotten before their eyes. Although they may think they are doing good by intervening, it could all go horribly wrong if they take things too far. If God came down and wiped out business/capitalisation/globalization on earth, what would be the consequences? I shudder to think. It would be a backwards step.

We’ve developed rapidly and for the better as a globe and a lot of it is down to capitalisation which motivates people to create ideas, think and in turn get money/credibility out of it. Look how far we’ve come in the past 100 years.

Imagine if Google had ruled Rome or England or any order for that… i’d imagine we’d end up with a communist-like world where the wealthy can only invest and earn through Google itself and get rewards in the form of Google shares for coming up with good ideas or inventions.

Perhaps i’ve gone too far with this, and I may have lost most of you guys somewhere in this post, but i know what i’m saying and it makes sense to me. I accept 100% that paid links/sponsored posts/do:follow etc are in some cases wrong or not good, but imo, they are an integral part of not just the internet, but symbolize real life in general…. buying success or paying someone to get you success is part and parcel of business and it’s why we are where we are today.

I’m interested as to what you guys think on this… i’ve exhausted the subject at this stage