I was talking to a friend today and he mentioned that he finished yesterday with .05 cents in adsense earnings. “What the hell am I supposed to do with five cents?” he asked me, joking that he can’t even buy a piece of candy with that.

Indeed you can probably find five cents just rummaging through old bags or boxes in your closet or the pocket of some pants you haven’t worn in a while. To most of us five cents is almost equivalent to zero cents. If we’re down to five cents in our wallet our wallet is essentially empty.

But once upon a time 5 cents could almost buy you the world. In an article published in 1987 and available via the New York Times website, Mildred Wohlford shared the following list of things you could buy with five cents back in the 20s and 30s:

For 5 cents one could buy a trip on the New York City subway (which is now straining to keep its fare at $1), a ride on the Manhattan-to-Staten Island ferry, a loaf of bread, a Hershey bar with nuts, a box of Cracker Jack that included a prize of a lead soldier or a penny doll with moveable arms. In old-fashioned groceries and delicatessens there were often revolving, wood cases containing a large assortment of penny candies, including licorice whips. My mother said the tasty whips were made from sweetened floor sweepings. She forbade my buying them, but I did once in a while and never was sick.

That revolving case was wonderful. It held lifelike, small sugar bananas and little tin frying pans, each containing a candy fried-egg or gum drops, among other delights. See article

It’s amazing the things that people can come up with, but what’s more amazing is that they actually find people who buy the BS they’re selling. If you believe the claims being made by these folks then by all means Click Here! to buy yourself a nice big load of the crap they’re selling. Otherwise, go with the mindset that if it sounds like a ridiculous joke that insults the intelligence, it probably is.

>> Internet Multimillionaire is deliberately out to show up Google, Yahoo, MSN and every other big search engine by giving away this monster of a secret! (But he doesn’t even care!)…

“Internet Marketer Gets $87 Million in Google Pay-Per-Click Ads FREE! … And makes Over $314 Million as a Result! … And Now He’s Going to Give You ThisSame Secret for Next to Nothing!”

The joke part is the implication that you can successfully scam your way to over $87 million dollars in free pay-per-click advertising at the expense of the biggest names in pay per click advertising and turn those millions of dollars worth of free advertising into millions of dollars in profit.

In the first place, these people are blatantly encouraging you to commit a crime, telling you they’ve committed this crime themselves and don’t even care. In other words, they brag about their criminal activity and dishonesty. Even if you were the type to callously commit crimes in the name of money, why would you believe these people are telling the truth about the success they’ve achieved as criminals and your likelihood of being able to succeed duplicating their crime?

Google is God, and God has been punishing buyers and sellers of text link ads lately. We have been chastised ourselves. God dropped our page rank because we’ve sold text link ads on our website. At least we’re supposing that’s the reason. We can’t think of any other reason for our page rank to have dropped. But why would God penalize little old us?

We sell the ads so we can pay our bills. But God doesn’t seem to understand that, which makes no sense because God understands everything. God sees all. God knows all; therefore God knows that our intention with selling text link ads on our website is to help us manage to pay the bills to keep the website running; to help us manage to pay our rent, our utilities. God knows we don’t make enough money as it is and we’re in crisis every month. So why would God penalize us for trying to make a living?

Some interesting reads on Google and text link ads

Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google

No More Text Link Ads and Paid Links?

SellingText Links Ads And Google Penalization: What You Need To Know

Google is currently in the process of updating page rank and depending on whether they go up, go down or maintain the same page rank as before the update, millions of webmasters will be affected in one way or another by Google over the next few days. We, for example, started the morning with a modest page rank of 4 which we’ve held for a good while now, and at some point during the day we noticed that our page rank had been dropped to 3. Our site is pretty small and relatively obscure, so you’d think we wouldn’t be much affected by the drop in page rank. But even a small, obscure website like ours suffers a loss when a Google update results in a lowered page rank, because Google is considered to be the begin and the end, the alpha and the omega of the Internet.

In an October 2002 piece by Stefanie Olsen for CNET news.com, Danny Sullivan of searchenginewatch.com is quoted as saying, “So many people are dependent on Google’s free editorial traffic that it’s like food out of their mouths to lose ranking.”

The majority of the little traffic we receive daily comes from Google, and if indeed a drop in page rank results in lower placement in search results, then we will be seeing a reduction in the little traffic we’ve been managing to get.

Unfortunately, a website like ours depends on selling advertising in order to generate income; but advertisers have no interest in advertising on properties with a low page rank. A low page rank tells an advertiser that, in the eyes of Google, a website is pretty useless. Admittedly there are other statistics that advertisers consider in addition to your Google page rank. Alexa ranking for example is used by most advertising programs and a site can have no page rank but a good Alexa ranking and still be considered worth spending money on for advertising. But more often than not, a site with a low Google page rank will also have a low Alexa rank unless that site has other means for getting traffic.

Granted Google doesn’t just arbitrarily drop your site’s ranking. At least you want to believe. But Google is hardly considerate when it comes to the plights of website owners who are unable to get well-ranked websites to link to them, and with Google putting so much emphasis and importance on link popularity, it often doesn’t matter whether or not you have quality content. Your worth comes down to a measurement of who your friends are so to speak. If you don’t have a few “rich” friends, as in friends with a page rank of 5 and higher, you’re worth nothing as far as Google is concerned.

With page rank being one of the primary decision makers for advertisers, Alexa rank also playing an important role, website owners who can’t charm their way onto the blog rolls of sites held in high esteem by Google, are forced to try to buy friends, and Google doesn’t like it when you try to buy friends. Google makes every effort to find and punish those who resort to desperate tactics to try to get their page rank higher. They argue that if your site is worth anything it will somehow find its way into the in crowd without you having to resort to tricks; but if you’re at the bottom of their pile and you don’t have money to afford to pay for advertising your website, it can be difficult to get visitors to your site to begin with. With Google being the God of search engines, if people aren’t finding you in Google, people aren’t finding you unless you can afford to advertise. It’s almost a no-win situation for website owners who don’t have funds, and don’t have extensive knowledge of how to optimize their website so that, even if they fall short on the link popularity, they can still get good search engine ranking.

Not that it’s Google’s responsibility to help you get your web site’s page rank up or to help you keep it up; but Google certainly does little to make it easier for the little guy, and without Google’s seal of approval a website with no page rank or low page and no other means for reaching it’s target audience, has little chance of getting anywhere.