ReveNews
PayPerPost is Now Blackhat
If you’ve followed the Ted Murphy / PayPerPost soap opera over the past few months, you’re aware that Google is not a fan of selling pagerank for dollars (or whatever currencies PayPerPost offers its publishers).
Now, the week following PayPerPost’s first conference, PostieCon in Las Vegas, Google seems to have dropped the hammer on its latest move to stamp out the nuisance that is PayPerPost (that is my own opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of all the bloggers here at ReveNews):
Ted Murphy wrote the following on PayPerPost’s Izea’s blog on Nov 15:
Last night Google decided to go after some of the bloggers in our network, reducing their PR from whatever they previously had to zero. Once again Google has proved that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance and everything to defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising.
It is no coincidence that Google has gone after some blogs that utilize PayPerPost and many of our competitors services. We offer a very attractive alternative to AdSense and are leading a charge to provide real monetization for everyday bloggers. Unlike the Google AdSense black box, we are palms up when it comes to revenue share and give bloggers the lions share of advertising dollars that they deserve.
According to Murphy, Google is slapping PayPerPost and its publishers because they are worried that PPP will break the AdSense hegemony. Closing out his post, Murphy offers this bit of (hopefully) hyperbole:
I find this outrageous. I encourage you to write to Google and your Congressmen.
TechCrunch is certainly not a fan of PayPerPost, but the write-up about this development didn’t come from Ted Murphy arch-nemesis Mike Arrington, but instead from Duncan Reily who shared these thoughts on what the Google slap means to PayPerPost’s future:
I’m all for exploring different ways for the little guy to make money,
even if personally the ethics and morality of PayPerPost has never sat
well with me. Yet if PayPerPost ever wanted friends, wild conspiracy
centered posts such as this one just say “mad” to me. This looks and
smells like a company that is not in a good way, a company that is
lashing out as its business model starts to fail around it. I’m
predicting Deadpool within 12 months; I can’t see a lot of bloggers
being happy with losing Pagerank so we should see an exodus of bloggers
out of PayPerPost (particularly ones with traffic) over the next few
months. This will leave PayPerPost with inventory deficiencies that
will result in diminished revenues making the PayPerPost business model
unsustainable going forward.
And the always thoughtful and well-written Andy Beard brings up the issue of allowing paid sponsorships or advertisements on a blog with dofollow links (links that pass “google juice” to the site being linked to as compared to “nofollow” links which do not), in this case TechCrunch:
So today Duncan trys to defend Techcrunch stating that the links are disclosed and they are not distorting the trust with advertorial content.
That means Techcrunch are selling pagerank
It doesn’t take any time to post a list of 8 links to advertisers.
Google’s issue is with PageRank passing links. It is nothing to do with
disclosure.Wouldn’t they like to see Google make a statement of exactly why
“thanking your sponsors” kind of advertising links are OK, and PPP
links are not?No, because if Google closely examined Techcrunch in the same light
as paid reviews, they would probably find that these “thanking the
advertisers” links are distorting their rankings more than paid reviews
from D list bloggers.
While Andy and I have always differed on the issue of PayPerPost (Andy still defends PPP and keeps the “Hire Me for $130″ PPP button in his blog’s sidebar despite having his pagerank dropped to 4 a couple of weeks back), he does make a needed point about blog advertising and the use of links which allow for the transferral of pagerank within the Google system.
Here’s what we can draw from this whole debacle:
1) Sponsorships on blog should be seen as just that: sponsorships. Expecting SEO value out of a blog that you are sponsoring as an advertiser does neither you nor the blog any good and ultimately (whether tomorrow or next year) will cause damage. Whether that means moving to nofollow links on a blog across the board is the right move is relative, but it might be something worthwhile to look into if you are looking to keep your stature in the Google index.
2) Blog owners need to seek out sponsorships based on their content and influence, which is the supposed basis for Google’s pagerank algorithm. However, blog owners need to realize that using content and influence as a metric for how much to seek from sponsors is not the same as actually selling that content and influence.
3) The need for performance and affiliate marketing in combination with sponsorships for blogs that seek monetization. This is something I preach often and use on my own personal niche blogs. Problogger does the same.
At the end of the day, this is all about trust… Google’s algorithm is seeking to find a way to mechanically measure and ensure trust from the content it indexes. PayPerPost and similar schemes are trying to leverage that trust to effectively game the system by selling false promises to small traffic bloggers looking while raking in cash from gullible advertisers. Blog owners (large and small) need to realize that this is not just about a TechCrunch vs PayPerPost fight to the end. This whole issue is all about your readership and the potential long term value that you are building or squandering as you stake your claim in the evolving cyberspace.
Times are certainly changing. What bugs me though is that Google equates selling links to less trust.
There is a very lively debate going at at http://www.AndyBeard.eu between Andy and Duncan Riley at TechCrunch over the recent PR reduction of PayPerPost participants. And I do mean “very lively” … Check it out……
Eric
Sam I don’t really look on what I write as advertising, I like there to be some real consultation value.
I am aware I put myself on the line by having the PPP Badge displayed, and I have even submitted my own content to Google via their form reporting paid links to give them an example of content that is possibly something they should allow.
That is extending the olive branch, I did that months ago, they never got back to me
LOL I told you they were black hat all along… they are the scum that clogs up the search engines and then try to make money from it
Can the buyers of posts opt for nofollow tags if they feel the spend is justified just by the exposure on the blogger’s site? If the blogger always does this will he or she be penalized?
It was only a matter of time before Google came out against PPP. I got ride of it early on. Paid posting will never go away just this business model!
What I have always wondered about PPP is whether their advertising clients are solely buying PR or do some actually buy for the possible advertising potential, whatever that may be?
That seems to be the take from PPP, but I find that highly unlikely. If you were buying advertising from blogs you certainly wouldn’t be paying the “D” list bloggers to advertise you product or service. Let’s just call this what it is, a SEO tactic, that has worked and probably will always have some degree of success if done in moderation and with thoughtful intent.
White hat to gray hat to black hat…it seems a natural progression for most SEO tactics and as inevitable as the tides because everything good on the Internet is eventually tainted by those looking to exploit it.
…stepping off soapbox now…
It isn’t the paid review that was the problem. It was the paid links that created the problem. Yes, anything good gets corrupted … that how life and human nature are… The Internet is just a bit player in the bigger picture know as life.