A few readers have noticed the black banner with the white flag running at the top of the blog and emailed me asking why I am surrendering to Google. At first, I thought it was a joke but I’ve received several emails asking the same question. The answer is I did not surrender. The white flag is from long term advertiser, Search Engine guide, and they’re the ones who are surrendering after receiving a PR bitch slap from Google for linking to their advertisers without a nofollow tag.
Editor In Chief, Jennifer Laycock was determined to stand her ground on what she felt was mass intimidation by the giant search engine. However, the founder of Search Engine Guide, Robert “The Chicken” Clough, concluded that you can’t win in a war against Google and tried to draft up a letter of surrender. The first draft went like this:
Regardless of my opinion on the situation, it’s Google’s index and we have to abide by their rules if we want remain in their index. I want us to remain in their index.”
Therefore, effective immediately, we will be nofollowing all advertising on Search Engine Guide and our sister sites. We surrender
Jennifer did not like the letter one bit and recommended Clough reword it to the following:
Oh mighty Google overlords, take my ads, take my firstborn, take anything you wish. By the way, give me a minute to bend over and here’s some lube to make it easier on you.
This is why I love Jennifer so much. 
Make sure you read the full surrender post. It’s too good to pass up.
It seems that Search Engine Guide isn’t the only one surrendering to the mighty Google overlords. Yaro Starak, who wrote that PageRank doesn’t matter after he was slapped with a PageRank penalty, did a sudden flip-flop and said that PageRank matter for him. I’m sure many other blogs have tossed up the white flag at Google. However, I am not one of them, but I have no problems with any blogs that does bend over and pass Google the lube.
For me, surrendering to Google would cost way too much money. Sure, it will be nice to be ranked properly in their index but the traffic they would send wouldn’t come close to making up for the money lost. This is a business decision that each site will have to make on their own.