There are multiple reasons why I have supported PayPerPost and similar programs so strongly, and yet at the same time have never reviewed a link buying / selling service.

I have mentioned link buying and selling in passing, and also a couple of WordPress plugins, but those plugins generally allow you to sell links which have a nofollow.

My emphasis both in editorial about services and in the few reviews I have myself written is to encourage the writing of quality content with editorial links. Compensation in whatever form should be based upon the time involved, expertise, and possibly the size and influence of the audience, and not based upon any SEO benefit to a site or service being reviewed.

Encouraging The Selling of PageRank?

It is my belief that I don’t advocate the selling of PageRank, especially considering how I also discourage excessive blogrolls and sitewide links. If you have links coming in for your every utterance, I suppose internal linking structure is less important to you than acknowledging sites you respect (who might also reciprocate), or possibly those you sell links to (if you do) but in general for niche marketing blogs I tend to avoid leaks in the sidebar.

Comments on Sphinn and even here in the comments recently suggest there is some kind of disconnect between how I regard paid review services, and possibly how they are regarded, used and abused by the SEO community at large, and possibly Google reacting to that attitude taken by SEOs and not that taken by the review services, or the reviewers themselves. I think it is important to point out that PayPerPost was created by a marketing company, not by an SEO or link selling company.

Rather than single out individuals for the comments they have made, I would rather answer a specific question asked here on my blog by Lisa Stewart

Hi Andy- thanks for the excellent and well thought out post and arguments FOR services like PayPerPost.

To play Gevil’s Advocate- If a site (like PPP) is offering a fee to post and the fee is based entirely on Page Rank (and sometimes Alexa traffic) then why can’t it be interpreted as paying for page rank?
A post coming from PPP on a PR3 site may cost advertiser 10.00 and the SAME post on PR5 is 50.00.

Why wouldn’t Google seeing this as gaming PR?

Now I should point out that at this time Google is interpreting this as gaming PageRank. I personally feel this is the wrong interpretation, but then my own interpretation could be extremely biased. I have been penalized by Google, even though I believe I don’t sell PageRank.

Advertiser Or Client Intent

Every potential client who has requested a review and I have considered for a review, when told that specific link text is not a possibility, and that any link I give would be for editorial purposes, has responded favourably.

It seems people are not necessarily ordering reviews for SEO purposes at all, though I do give SEO friendly links to things I highlight as part of the editorial process.

Many corporate advertisers have a different need to fulfil, that of creating a buzz about a new product and feel that blogs are an interesting avenue to explore. They will most likely get different feedback than they would from traditional reviews sites, because a reviewer whilst being a consumer, would also spend more time doing it.
In the attention age we live in, gaining feedback from consumers whilst increasingly vital, is also becoming increasingly more difficult – sure consumers might make a passing comment, but constructive feedback is less likely, unless they feel aggrieved.

Google, Microsoft, and even most startups have rank upon rank of staff members and shareholders to “get the message out” about a new product or service, but in many ways those too are paid reviews that don’t mention competing products or services.
Other large companies don’t have such an extensive and influential online presence amongst their staff and investors, thus they look to other alternatives.

• Internal PR – the largest firms retain their own public relations specialists, often with shared ties to advertising personel – this isn’t a cheap undertaking.
• PR Firms – expensive but have access to key influencers
• Press releases – wider distribution costs money, though they are less effective for companies that aren’t monitored continually, and information is less likely to trickle down to niche markets – I have seen a number of popular websites hosting paid press releases
• Focus groups – Google themselves pay $75 per hour for people to test their services, and are probably paying the person monitoring them even more – from this they gain private feedback, but I wonder how many people also write about the experience.
• Product sample giveaways – quite frequently these do not have to be given back, so a blog owner can keep them, or give them away to readers.
• Special events – I have attended special events by major Fortune 500 corporations launching products where many of the exhibitors (including me) had flight, room and board funded, along with display space, and the same was probably true of the press.
• Paid reviews and buzz marketing

For some reason there is a disconnect between paying a blogger $10 to $200 for a post, and paying a staff member $100 per hour to chase a group of bloggers to write something for free, feed them with drinks, sponsor their events etc.

Social media optimization might be looked on as successful if a $5000 budget garnered 50 to 100 links, but paid reviews can garner many more links for a similar budget, and could also be used in conjunction with a social media campaign.

Paid blogging is a way of grabbing the attention of a blogger to consider looking at a product or service and sharing their experiences about it in public.

There are obviously some companies that use it specifically for SEO purposes, and some bloggers who are willing to write something purely for SEO purposes. Then again have you never heard of “SEO press releases” and “Article Marketing” where the content is provided 100% with links just to copy and paste.

I don’t think Hewlett Packard, Ford, or major movie studios really care that much about whether links count for search engines, but they probably do care if links are clicked. If you use nofollow, to a percentage of readers who see the link, the fact that you use nofollow suggests that you don’t trust the service you are writing about, the intent of nofollow.
The same is true for any redirects which suggest affiliate links and commercial tracking.

It is quite possible that 30% of my readers, and possibly more than 50% of my regular readers can see when I have used a nofollow on a link, because I encourage them to use the Search Status plugin for Firefox.

When Google and Microsoft employees start linking to their employers using nofollow, that is when I will start using nofollow on paid reviews and linking to consulting clients.

Leading People Astray

It has been suggested that my coverage of PayPerPost, Paid Reviews, and PageRank is in some way leading people astray, and thus the “Pied Piper” connotation.

My firm belief is that my readership is extremely mature and intelligent, and quite capable of making their own informed decisions.

Many do sell advertising in various ways without the nofollow attribute value, and would choose to use that advertising or not without my intervention, as they chose to use it in the first place without my input.

When half your family income comes from a few links in the sidebar on a few blogs, it is a very difficult decision to remove them just before Christmas, especially if you have long-term contracts.

If I was to denounce PayPerPost, it would have very little effect on the decision process each would make as an individual.

Alternative Metrics For Authority

There is a pay scale in many aspects of every day life, the time of different people has a different perceived value.

Advertisers, companies doing market research, and those looking for a little consulting need some way to determine a suitable pay scale.

• Traffic metrics

  Alexa and Compete are not very relative to niches, and not enough people install Quantcast code on their site to get a real measure.

• Technorati

  easily gamed with WordPress themes and widgets – eventually Technorati do kick sites out of the Top100 but the APis will still send high ratings. Competitions and “review my blog” have also been looked on as a good way of boosting Technorati rankings, and then we shouldn’t forget memes and link chains.
  Technorati really need to move away from counting anything in a sidebar, including blogroll links.

• Feedburner Subscribers

  You would hope that this would be accurate, but due to the problems with default feed packages, and cross promotions of alternative reading platforms, the real number of subscribers could be anything from 30% to 90% of the number shown… and of course that doesn’t mean that people even open their feed reader.

• Comments

  How much can your blog actually stimulate discussion on other blogs, and in your own comments. This is a measure of influence.

• Clicks From Feeds

  Lots of people subscribe to content but don’t read it, or take action by clicking through to an article or referenced site. Feedburner do offer some tracking, but it is hard to use this as an external metric, and to get good results you have to use their tracking URLs which then reduce the numbers of links counted by other metrics such as Technorati. People make linking mistakes.

• Social News & Bookmarking

  Most sites provide some kind of API access, thus allowing you to judge the quality of a page based upon social factors and popularity. These are also gamed to a certain extent. Stumbleupon need to provide an API. Eventually something like the Social Media for Firefox extension might be looked on as more useful than other metrics.

• Meme Trackers

  Meme trackers try to track what is a hot story right now, such as Techmeme and Megite. The nearest thing they provide to an overall measure of influence are compilations of statistics such as the Techmeme Leaderboard. It is a very small subset of sites.

• Custom Metrics

  Scripts such as Blogstorm can give an indication of popularity, but require server side access, and for a blog owner to care about being listed.

• PageRank

  Proving to be too easily gamed (WordPress themes and funny redirects), and the visual representation provided in the Google toolbar is now being adjusted with manual PageRank penalties with arguably commercial considerations. It hasn’t been very meaningful for search results for some time, and now it is no longer a metric of social influence by anyone that understand these things. Unfortunately Google mislead their Google Toolbar users.



• Argus Is Coming

  I am excited about the potential of whatever Izea (PayPerPost) come up with for their Argus project which promised to provide a comprehensive metrics service for both bloggers and advertisers.

  I haven’t seen it, am not on the alpha test, and might not get early access to it because I am not going to be at Postiecon or Blog World Expo.

Examples Of PageRank Used For Ranking

The Google Directory
The Adage Power 150
The Top 25 Blogs About Blogging
The Top 100 Make Money Onine Blogs

The of course there is the PayPerPost Direct – it is an advertiser marketplace and PageRank is used as one of the indicators of authority or influence, but you can’t search the database based upon that field, and it is just one metric offered and soon to be removed.

It is quite possible Google just took that database of sites for its penalty list, without realising that whilst PageRank is used as an indication of authority, bloggers are free to set their own criteria in private discussion with someone requiring some kind of review service. Bloggers are quite able to specify that they will nofollow the links, or use redirects. they are also able (as I do) to insist that all links are editorial..

I know bloggers on that list who have never written a review for PayPerPost.

Techcrunch Crunchies

In closing, Techcrunch along with a number of other technology blogs will soon launch what appears to be an award ceremony for technology startups.
If there happens to be a monetization or blogging category, I know who I am going to nominate, and encourage people to vote for.
In something as serious as an award called “The Crunchies”, I am quite happy to try to influence any results.

Update

I just want to highlight why I don’t support paid links and this is the kind of review I really wish Sebastian had been paid for.

If Sebastian was giving that type of advice in private, it would probably cost someone $1000 or more… seriously, Sebastian knows his stuff, just as he demonstrated with the Blogcatalog redirect problems in the past.

I think one of the problems was that Technorati created some great features that no one was really using extensively for managing OPML in interesting ways, and then with various methods of exchanging Technorati favorites, and my suggestion to import opml into Technorati favorites, the system might have become slightly overwhelmed.

If a legitimate blogger like Robert Scoble can read 100s or even 1000s of blogs, then importing 1000 blogs as favorites into Technorati shouldn’t be looked on as a bad thing, which is why I suggested doing that in the first place rather than wasting a huge amount of time running around between blogs requesting to exchange Technorati Favorites.

Over the last couple of days the Technorati Favorites and WTF were taken offline for maintenance and now there is a new message displayed.

My Favorites
We know you have a lot of favorites, we apologize that we aren’t able to show them.

There is a known bug where the favorites feature is disabled for accounts with a large number of favorites. We are currently working on this and hope to have this resolved within the next few weeks. In the meantime, you should still be able to view your tagged favorites. Please note that your favorites are not lost. They just cannot be displayed. Thus, when the fix is in place, you should be able to access your favorites again. Thanks for your patience!

It should be remembered that Technorati purchased PersonalBee back in April, and nothing currently has been done with integration.

There is no mention of what changes might be taking place, but hopefully Technorati will continue to expand the way that OPML data can be used to customize your browsing experience.

I still use the meme based upon my Technorati favorites on Megite which covers stories from over 800 blogs most of which would never appear on Techmeme.

Unfortuantely with Technorati favorites in the current state, I am not in a position to include more people in it, though as soon as they fix their Technorati favorites, I will be adding people just by reciprocating Technorati favorites.

There was previously a bit of a blogstorm over this, I am sure when the Technorati favorites system is fixed there will be another one.

OPML is meant to be used, and not just by geeks.

Basic Optimization

1. Offer full feeds – I am not going to argue about how this is good for subscribers. That argument has been debated almost to death. However if you want reputable sites to pick up your content, you need to give them an easy way to do it. Obviously they are not looking for excerpts. Meme Trackers that work on feeds rather than scraping content from your site will also attribute relevance better if you provide more content.
2. Image Alignment – lots of themes provide CSS for image alignment. It is useless as soon as your content is being read elsewhere. It doesn’t take much code to align an image left or right and wrap text around it wherever your content is being read.

<div style="float:right;"> Image Code </div>

3. Scraping Friendly Theme – You might not realise this, but many meme trackers scrape your content. It is very important to have your article content appear before navigation and various “about this site” text. There are quite a few top marketing blogs where the snippet listed on sites like Megite for their articles is always their “about me”, rather than relevant content
4. Images – Try to include images with every post, but also ensure that the most interesting image appears first on the page. You might need to make an additional thumbnail for the start of your post of an image that appears full size later on.
5. Headings – Please refer to the post I made recently regarding Headings in Feeds
6. Related Content – link through to related content on your sites – not only will you get a backlink to your original article, but also a deep link to something else. Don’t go overboard, and make sure it is highly relevant. You can probably get away with more than you might be able to with article distribution, where self serving links in the body of an article is heavily frowned upon.
7. Unique Format – Here is something I spotted on Megite recently that made me smile, the “Search Engine Twins“.

Obviously there is some prior history there, but both sites were listing relatively the same content, in the same format. I am not sure how they are going to solve that one in the long-term, but I hope their formatting develops in different directions in the future to add some diversity.

Advanced Optimization

Today I spend a number of hours experimenting with CSS and hacking my Disclosure Policy Plugin to do what I wanted to achieve. A couple of weeks ago I was approached by someone who was interested in syndicating my posts, and they requested a picture and a byline. I looked on their site, and wasn’t overly impressed with the way bylines were handled by default. I decided that if my content is going to be syndicated, it needed to have a clear link back to the original article, and maybe a link to my root domain as well, all presented the way I want it.

My plugin didn’t have an option to include the post title and URL, so today I hacked it in.

These changes are around line 70 in disclosure_keywords.php

$dpp_post_title = get_the_title($id);
$dpp_post_url = get_permalink();
$str = $content;
$content1 = $str."<br><br>";
 eval('$content2 = "' . $keywords_div_start . '";');

The first 2 lines above set 2 variables to contain the post name and URL
The 5th line evaluates the first block of text you set in the options, looking for php variables and processing them.

Handling quotation marks with this is a nightmare but here is what I found to work.

In all the CSS used in the options, I used single quotes
For the quotes around the variables to evaluate, I used double quotes.
For the actual disclosure lines that are defined, I use double quotes

Thus the code in the options “Insert Start Div Tags:” looks a bit like this (though it still needs tweaking)

<div style='margin: 0 0 0 0; padding: 0.3em 0.3em 0.3em 0.3em;'><div style='border: 1px solid rgb(184, 184, 184); margin-bottom: 0em; margin-top: 0em; padding-bottom:0.3em; width: 450px; float: left;'><div style='margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 0.3em; margin-top: 0.3em; margin-right: 0.5em;width: 75px; float: left; line-height:1em;'><img style='width: 75px; height: 100px;' alt='Andy Beard' src="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/andy75x100-a1.png"></div><div style='margin-bottom: 0em; margin-left: 0.5em; margin-top: 0.3em; margin-right: 0.3em; float: right; line-height:1em;'><a href='http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/' rel='nofollow'><img alt='CC-GNU GPL' border='0' src="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/cc-GPL-a.png" /></a></div><h3 style='margin: 0em 0 0em 0;'><a href='http://andybeard.eu/'>Andy Beard - Niche Marketing</a></h3><p style='line-height:1em; margin: 0em 0 -0.2em 0;'>
Blog search engine perfomance, WordPress and general niche and affiliate marketing tips</p><p>Original Article:<br /><strong><a href=".$dpp_post_url.">$dpp_post_title </a></strong></p><div style='width: 100%; float: left; line-height:0.7em; margin: 0em 0 0.2em 0.5em;'><h3 style='margin: 0em 0 0em 0;'>Disclosure</h3>

Note: all the quotes seem to be messing up even with a code plugin, so don’t just copy/paste the above, it won’t work. Also note I am not a CSS expert and just play around with things until they look ok. I tested first of all on a test blog running Kubrick, and then copied the code over here.

In the second box you just have 3 closing Divs

For individual disclosure declarations, I am using something like:-

<p style="margin: 0em 1em 0em 0em;"><small>Whilst the content I create, however it is distributed is commercial, relevance is always considered before any potential financial gain. <a href="http://andybeard.eu/disclosure-policy" rel="nofollow">Disclosure Policy</a> <a href="http://andybeard.eu/contact/" rel="nofollow">Contact</a></small></p>

I actually need to make that a bit more structured, so I can just wrap any entry with paragraph tags, although that entry will always be “small print”.

The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating

The only way to really see the effect is to see how it looks in an RSS reader or on various Meme Trackers.

Meme Trackers

Here is what a post should look like on Megite

You will also notice they also use your favicon, so well worth spending a few minutes generating one.

RSS Reader

No screenshots – try signing up by email and RSS to take a look. I think I need to make my box slightly narrower, because then the Feedburner Feed Flare using will all align nicely down the right hand side of the author box. Currently on a 1024×768 Google Reader view, only some of them are on the right hand side.

Landing Page

The changes have definitely made my Feedburner landing page for subscribers look more professional and personal.

ToDo List

I still need to format my tags the way I want to, both on page and in feeds. The same goes for related posts, which in syndication will most likely be cut off.
Some default CSS of my theme also seems to over-ride my inline CSS with margins and paddings, so I need to take a careful look to see how that can be corrected.

Standards compatible? Well I didn’t use any tables, or fixed fonts –

Conclusions

It is worth spending some time working on how you want your content displayed in the future, as once your working environment is setup, it can save you a lot of time, and improve the results you achieve. Are you in this for the long haul?

What would be better than Robert Scoble’s OPML file?

The Best Search Technology

Google Custom Search Engine gives great search results, and quite often gives better results than the main index.

Alister Cameron has just launched his new Scoble Search

It does give more current results on Technology news than Google might provide from the main search, though it doesn’t cover as many sources.

Robert Scoble Megite Meme

Megite have had a meme for Robert Scoble for some time, based upon the same OPML file.

It provides a great alternative to Robert’s Shared Feed from Google Reader. You don’t get Robert’s top picks, but the top picks based upon the people Robert reads. It is maybe slightly broader content, but it is automatic, and works at times that Robert is taking some time off to read his email.

Custom Google Toolbar Button

Of course it is a total coincidence that I happen to have a Google Toolbar button that points directly to Alisters custom search, and includes the Scobleizer Meme on Megite.

Robert Scoble – Custom Search | Megite Meme | Toolbar Button

But then my readers might not believe in coincidence ;)

This one focuses on Google Toolbar buttons

The first button is ideal for anyone interested in SEO

It is a mashup of

Lee’s list of SEO | SEM blogs and websites

Alister Cameron’s S.E.O. | S.E.M Search Engine

Megite’s SEO | SEM Meme

Enjoy the SEO | SEM Google Toolbar Button

It looks like Megite have joined MyBlogLog

Actually Megite would be a great purchase for someone very soon, probably more so than Digg in many ways.

Ok I should really qualify that statement… I am listed under “A” on the TopRank Online Marketing list of SEO related blogs.

What I also know is that while compiling the list, Lee really does spend some time reading the blogs listed. I have noticed him on my MyBlogLog recent visitors list, but also within their tracking.

I actually knew I was going to be included on the list this time round yesterday, without Lee telling me.

The exciting news?

A new SEO Meme on Megite

Honestly for the last few days I have been thinking how useless Techmeme is for my reading. I have only passing interest in 2000 stories about CES when they only partially affect my income (niche ideas).
My solution was on Monday I was going to pop to Elance and find someone to create me a script to make my own niche memes, or spend some time finding an existing one. Megite seems to be the perfect answer, and I have a few ideas for other niches.

Lee also mentioned a number of SEO Google Co-Op CSE search engines that have been created based upon his opml file. I hope they update frequently and get used frequently.