Google Penalizes Pay Per Post Writers
You might know it’s official. Danny Sullivan has confirmed that selling paid links can hurt your page rank or Google ranking.
This post from Digital Inspiration talks about the Stanford University website, which was once a PR 9, dropping to a PR7 because they sold text ads. It’s since dropped to PR5.
But here’s the shocker. The prominent writers at Pay Per Post have been hit… hard. Most of them have dropped 2 PR points. Ouch.
Prominent blogger Andy Beard, also hit with a huge page rank penalty, says; “If you mention PageRank as an indication of how “pretty” you are to advertisers, you are going to be treated like a prostitute.” Read Andy’s post here…
I understand Andy’s position. There’s a lot of folks out there offering ”high PR links for sale.” I’ve been offered a stupidly high price for a link on some of my high PR pages by people that buy and sell links for page rank purposes. (I declined the offer)
A blogger who reviews sites with full disclosure is not the same. Not even close.
This is an inherant problem with robots and algorithms. I do understand Google not wanting people to sell page rank. Selling page rank has no good result. All that would happen is that searchers at Google wouldn’t find anything AT Google except the people that can afford to buy most page rank.
But they need to make their algorithms and robots smarter. Because a blogger working hard to earn ranking and working hard to feed their family from the revenue earned at their blog or site is not the same as someone with a questionable quality site that bought page rank from a link broker.
For now, the only solution seems to be using the “no follow” tag in paid ads. But it’s a flawed solution at best.
Not much different than flagging all email as spam if it uses the word “buy” just because spammers use that word.
November 17th, 2007 at 11:35 am
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November 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
If somebody would have told advertisers that PR doesn’t mean anything when it comes to amount of visitors a website get, let alone if they will be interested in the advertiser’s product in the first place, nobody would have needed to blame Google for keeping their search engine quite up to standard.
November 18th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Agreed, Linky! Too much obsession on “size” of things… including size of the green bar.
December 4th, 2007 at 2:38 am
Uh…hmmm. So I did bad by taking opportunities, and suffer the consequences.
What do we do if we don’t know how to make money online, other than prostituting ourselves, SEO kitten?
December 4th, 2007 at 2:50 am
Aww, John. I don’t think pay per post is prostituting yourself. lol. Just Google does.
What I’d suggest is that you go set up an account at commission junction (cj.com) then poke around through the bazillions of merchants and see if you can find some with good payouts. Put some of those in your sidebar and even blog about them.
There’s a dental plan that’s paying a whack of cash per referred sale. with all the home business people that don’t have dental, you can do the same thing. Blog about the thing you’re promoting and use your commission link. Google doesn’t penalize those.
It’s a stupid, fine line difference, but at PPP, a lot of people see it as getting paid to link to a site. At CJ, you’re not. You’re a commissioned sales person and selling online isn’t a problem for google.
Plus, you can put that stupid no follow tag in your CJ links, and Google won’t mind them at all.
December 4th, 2007 at 2:53 am
to add more (when don’t I) at PPP it’s a case of the baby getting thrown out with the bathwater. A lot of PPP posters really did just say ‘rah rah’ - take the money and link to a site. AND, by posting everyone’s pagerank, PPP kind of caused the problem because it made it look like they’re selling links for page rank.
So all bloggers with PPP got whacked. Kind of like being punished for the company you keep. lol
With CJ, that’s not a problem. And use the no follow thing in your CJ links. The buyers don’t care about your page rank or Google Juice. They just want to pay if you refer a sale.