As Techcrunch now has 2 million readers, many of them corporate, you would think they would be a little more careful publishing statements that are false, misleading or could seriously damage not just a single company, but a whole growing business sector, even if they clearly hate it. Opinion is one thing – stating facts that are wrong is in a totally different territory Here is an excerpt for the recent fluff piece for Brian Solis on Techcrunch

Seems simple enough, except two things are going to prevent this from effectively promoting the sponsoring brand over time — 1) disclosures read like warning signs; 2) Google is downgrading any blog or site that actively publishes paid content.

Sarah Lacey’s recent piece was fluff as well

Google has no stated problem with paid or sponsored reviews – with Google it has always been about machine readable disclosure of paid links i.e. use some way to block the links from counting such as rel=”nofollow”, javascript, block with redirect + robots.txt etc

I stated that Brian’s article was a fluff piece, because it is very easy to research, but here are a few choice articles.

Matt Cutts Interviewed By Eric Enge

More on Matts own blog

Paid posts should not affect search engines

Two search tidbits

Official Google Statements

Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Why Fluff Piece?

You would expect Brian to have mentioned something relating to nofollow or PageRank passing links

Techcrunch Make No Mention of Nofollow or PageRank Within Their Article

Paid Links From Techcrunch

Techcrunch for as long as I can remember have sold PageRank passing links as part of their advertising packages.

It isn’t something that is mentioned within their advertising material, but being a Techcrunch sponsor of one kind or another has its benefits, and Techcrunch despite repeatedly being nudged about it whenever they mention paid reviews, has never addressed the problem.

This is search spam

Our friends at the LeWeb conference, in Paris on December 9th and 10th, are going to be giving away one ticket to the TechCrunch reader who leaves the best comment about why they want to go (and includes a contact e-mail address). We are also excited that LeWeb’s organizers are offering TechCrunch readers a <a href="http://www.lewebparis.com/techcrunch.html">20% discount </a> Thank You LeWeb

Without our sponsors TechCrunch would not be possible. Accordingly, we want to thank the following sponsors for their support.

<a href="http://www.clarion.com/us/en/top.html">Clarion</a> is a leading manufacturer of car audio and video systems, marine audio products, navigation systems, and other multimedia products.

<a href="http://www.rackSpace.com/">RackSpace</a> a provider of managed hosting solutions

<a href="http://www.mediatemple.net/">MediaTemple</a> TechCrunch’s exclusive hosting provider, and a worldwide leader in managed hosting solutions across all major platforms

<a href="http://www.ebuddy.com/">eBuddy</a> a web and mobile instant messaging client with over 18 million users.

<a href="http://www.ironscale.com/">IronScale</a> the world’s first fully automated dedicated managed hosting solution

<a href="http://www.perflect.com/">Perflect</a> the makers of PSD2HTML and other solutions to turn design documents into W3C compliant XHTML

<a href="http://www.seesmic.com/">Seesmic</a> the video micro-blogging service that powers video commenting on TechCrunch

<a href="http://www.conduit.com/">Conduit</a>, the makers of the <a href="http://techcrunch.conduit.com/">Crunchbar</a>, and other toolbars

<a href="http://www.ServePath.com/">ServePath</a> the maker of GoGrid, the world’s first multi-server control panel that allows you to deploy cloud server networks in minutes

<a href="http://www.mpronto.com/">MailPronto</a> a hosted e-mail solutions provider

TechCrunch also is happy to announce two new sponsorship opportunities. First, <a href="http://www.crunchgear.com">CrunchGear</a> is publishing a <a href="http://www.crunchgear.com/tag/300-2008/">Holiday Gear Guide</a>, which is the perfect way for your company to reach people as they research their purchases this holiday season. Second, we are now offering a full banner (468×60) on TechCrunch’s RSS feed, which has over 1.2 million subscribers. If you are interested in either of these opportunities, please e-mail <a href="mailto:dan@techcrunch.com">Dan Kimerling</a>

It makes Google look stupid

How many of these articles (Techcrunch Search) thanking sponsors use nofollowed links?

Just Advertorials?

Techcrunch coverage always concentrates on paid reviews being advertorials or purchasing opinion, thus I would like to highlight 2 of my own paid reviews which totally fly-in-the-face of that theory.

WordPress SEO Masterclass – whilst this post needs to be revamped, as many of the topics discussed have now been borrowed, or expressed inaccurately by others, it still stands as one of the most in-depth tutorials on WordPress SEO.
It has been linked to by SEO experts, syndicated, and stood the test of time for 2 years… yet it was a paid review, written as a form of consultation.

Volusion Review & Suggestions – The suggestion by Brian Solis is that paid reviews are somehow biased – in reality, paid reviews can be anything but biased, or even less biased, because a reviewer with any integrity will ensure that their review is thorough and accurate, because it will be heavily scrutinized.
In many ways that is to the detriment of the site asking to be reviewed, if their are any holes a detailed review might uncover.

Fluff reviews are in my experience are frequently caused by:-

1. Blogger receiving a press release
2. Blogger spending 30 minutes glancing at a site
3. Rewriting the press release with a few screenshots to make it look pretty
4. Offering a flimsy opinion that they can easily reverse if put on the spot

Time = money – to write detailed reviews that have real opinion and give valuable feedback from an expert, often there needs to be some level of payola.

p.s. Brain did you and Techcrunch really pay $750 for the Forrester report?
p.p.s. Does Techcrunch pay for Comscore? (I have always wondered why they predominantly quote Comscore in posts)
p.p.p.s The nofollowed home link on Techcrunch is funny

Despite the headline, this article hasn’t been primarily SEOed to rank for either Brian Solis or Techcrunch (e.g. the title is spelt wrong, first link priority, optimized meta title etc)

Update

One of the biggest problems Google faces in its battle against paid links and PageRank passing links in sponsored reviews, paid posts, or whatever methods people come up with to gain an advantage in search engine rankings is knowledge and public awareness.

The feedback I have received from Brian Solis certainly suggests he was unaware of the intricacies of the paid link situation, both the technical aspects, and the specific statements from Google.

Michael Arrington, Techcrunch editor also left a comment looking for clarification which I am including below as a reference point.

I am going to address each paragraph in turn as a separate section of this update.

just twittered this as i think it’s a debate worth having. I wish you were a little less emotional about it but your arguments are interesting.

If Google isn’t downgrading sites with paid content I didn’t know about it. Am looking into that now. IMO they should be.

On the links on TechCrunch, you make a pretty aggressive statement “Techcrunch for as long as I can remember have sold PageRank passing links as part of their advertising packages.” Please show me evidence of that.

Having a link in an ad to MediaTemple, or whoever, that links to MediaTemple, isn’t a search scam. It’s just linking to an advertiser. Now if the keyword was “hosting” or something like that I’d agree that it would be inappropriate. But its just a site name being linked to a site name. A search for Media Temple on Google that shows Media Temple’s site is a good thing, and I don’t think our ads are designed to create any deception there.

If i’m missing something please let me know. Would be happy to continue the conversation. I’m at editor at techcrunch, please email me if you follow up here so I can come back.

I really want to have a constructive conversation on this issue.

Emotional?

just twittered this as i think it’s a debate worth having. I wish you were a little less emotional about it but your arguments are interesting.

How emotional are people about the current financial crisis and losing their jobs, and ability to put food on the table?

Whilst I haven’t written any form of sponsored review for probably close to 18 months, that doesn’t mean I have abbandoned the option – I have a lot less time available to blog, and more refined goals partially enabled by the clearing up of a number of issues around the treatment of paid links, and more specifically affiliate links.

That being said, hundreds of thousands rely in part on the income they can make writing paid reviews. If inaccurate coverage of Google’s treatment of paid links is left without challenge, that could be harmful to their income.

If job losses in the Tech sector or auto industry are something people get emotional about, you can bet a reduction in income, either part or full time, is something people will get emotional about.

However in this post I am effectively just a mouthpiece for those whose voices would otherwise remain unheard.

Downgrading  Sites?

If Google isn’t downgrading sites with paid content I didn’t know about it. Am looking into that now. IMO they should be.

Google have “downgraded” sites for paid reviews purely due to PageRank passing links. Most believe the downgrading is purely cosmetic (reduction in the toolbar pagerank displayed).

I have data which strongly suggests that Google can target both whole sites and individual pages, preventing them passing on PageRank both internally and externally.

That in itself may not reduce site traffic significantly, but it can certainly unbalance efforts to control PageRank flow and indexing within a large site.

I have no data to suggest that companies buying paid reviews have seen massive downgrades in their rankings – it is hard to isolate the data if they are also undertaking other marketing efforts.

Google has mainly penalized those selling PageRank passing links in one way or another, though even 18 months after they had the first major clampdown (Oct 2007), they are still not amazingly good at detecting paid links – even with the human element of the penalty process I have seen claims of false positives, and I am sure the process is labour intensive.

Techcrunch Selling Links

On the links on TechCrunch, you make a pretty aggressive statement “Techcrunch for as long as I can remember have sold PageRank passing links as part of their advertising packages.” Please show me evidence of that.

Firstly that isn’t the statement I made, as there were words which followed.

Techcrunch for as long as I can remember have sold PageRank passing links as part of their advertising packages.

It isn’t something that is mentioned within their advertising material, but being a Techcrunch sponsor of one kind or another has its benefits, and Techcrunch despite repeatedly being nudged about it whenever they mention paid reviews, has never addressed the problem.

I need to clarify that statement as I am sure someone will try to pick holes in it.

In December 2007 for at least one post, Techcrunch did nofollow links when thanking sponsors. It was such a notable event that I blogged about it and I am pretty sure I was the first to blog about it.

It was also mentioned by Michael Gray, and both posts were linked to from the Search Engine Land 2007 Roundup on Paid Links

The Search Engine Land Roundup is a good birds-eye-view, and notable because it was written by ex-Googler Vanessa Fox – whilst she had been out of Google for a while, I am sure she still had a good measure of the “pulse”.

Whilst it is possible that Michael Arrington didn’t read any of the above, or the 10s, possibly 100s of blog comments that mentioned it on the Techcrunch blog, repeatedly, every time he attacked paid blogging services in one way or another, that is just plausable deniability.

To get some idea of how many advertisers think, you only need to read a few blog posts about buying links, and how to do it under the radar. The fact that it is under the radar doesn’t mean it isn’t buying links.

Linkfluence: How to Buy Links With Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk

How to: Buy Links Without Being Called a Spammer

8 Ways to Buy Links Without “Buying Links”

What percentage of a purchase decision, or just some purchase decisions revolves around the added benefit of links from “sponsor thanks” posts, increased chance of editorial mention (possibly just due to increased brand awareness) is impossible to quantify, but it would certainly be part of the thought process for some brands.

It would probably be exactly the same though process as people contemplating paid blog reviews with a look to gain not just increased awareness, maybe a little traffic, but also a bit of long lasting link juice.

No Anchor Text

Having a link in an ad to MediaTemple, or whoever, that links to MediaTemple, isn’t a search scam. It’s just linking to an advertiser. Now if the keyword was “hosting” or something like that I’d agree that it would be inappropriate. But its just a site name being linked to a site name. A search for Media Temple on Google that shows Media Temple’s site is a good thing, and I don’t think our ads are designed to create any deception there.

This has to be a little geeky, but the short answer – anchor text is just one of hundreds of factors

Even links without any anchor text at all have value

Here is a link to the old “Ranking Factors”  compiled 2 years ago and due for an update

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Some SEOs would state that the proximity of words to that URL would have an effect, that the keywords in the URL have an effect, and none would argue that that link passes PageRank, various authority traits, temporal traits etc.

The link has real value.

Here is a link that possibly doesn’t have value. It is an affiliate link to Stompernet’s excellent SEO Training Course which you can get for $1, in the hope that you also remain a subscriber to their Net Effect magazine which is full of great cutting edge training.

https://stompernet.infusionsoft.com/go/S2SL/SN347

It is obviously an affiliate link, it passes through a 3rd party tracking link, it does a 302 redirect rather than 301 (not always a factor) – most of the time I “nofollow” affiliate links when I remember, though Google have stated at conferences that they don’t have a requirement to do so.

Best Practice

• In content – Use tracking links such as those provided by OpenX – the links get blocked by robots.txt, but you should always still nofollow them, or you create hanging/dangling pages
• Sidebar Advertings - Use tracking links such as those provided by OpenX – the links get blocked by robots.txt, but you should always still nofollow them, or you create hanging/dangling pages – if you are using javascript, this isn’t an issue

• The advice is exactly the same for both scenarios
• Advertisiers get traffic stats
• You get valuable business intelligence from the click tracking which has value in itself, but also for content choices.
• No problems from Google, or criticism from the blogosphere

Read Write Web currently do a pretty good job of this after I nudged them about it, and refined the system when they started using OpenX links within the content, though a few links to content still slip through, which should possibly be nofollowed.

There are big problems still within the whole paid link debate

• Unequal treatment – some blogs seem to be above the “Google law”
• Grey areas – there still isn’t an official statement I can point to from Google about Affiliate links being ok, and there are “clean” affiliate links with the tracking on the back end. What counts as paid PageRank passing links is never exactly specified, they can’t cover every form of payola.

I am quite confident if PPP bloggers had included a banner in their sidebar for every website they wrote about, even for just 1 week, Google would have still slammed them.

It will be quite time consuming going through 100s of posts adding nofollows to historical advertisers who received a link – I did publish a WordPress plugin that could have handled it, along with complete disclosure and even more advertiser exposure, all fully automatic, but I abandoned the project over a year ago – no matter what the FTC say, nothing will be done to police best practice, and bloggers are not interested in best practice.
I spent $3000 hiring a programmer to create a plugin that no one wanted.

Bonus Tips

Techcrunch have been attacking Last.fm over data sharing, but in many ways bloggers are worse.

• Subscribe to comments doesn’t comply with Can Spam
• Data sharing with 3rd party services across borders, including email address and IP (comment spam plugins)
• How many bloggers have a privacy policy? It is actually a requirement for Google, but should also cover tracking, comment spam, advertisers etc.
• Content ownership of comments?

There are all kinds of things that in many ways are much bigger issues than whatever the FTC has to say on WOMM

Update 2 – False Information Spreads By Copying Techcrunch

This is just unreal, or the negative side of extremely bad information spread virally.

Businessweek just published an article on paid reviews, quite well researched, but they stole a sub-headline from Brian Solis’ Techcrunch piece.

“Google Downgrades Paid Blog Entries”

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/tc20090518_532031.htm

Yes that is a nofollowed link to a very bad article, I really should nofollow the Techcrunch links as well, but Michael did take the time to comment and learn, and hopefully will write some kind of followup.

I am trying to be a responsible blogger. Over the last few days I have actually spent a considerable amount of time trying to avoid writing this post.
Most of my reviews are generally positive – if a company approaches me for a review and I feel that I have major concerns regarding their service, most often that will be expressed in email and we part ways, hopefully for the company to rectify the problems.

When I do write something negative, most often it is about specific features which if rectified, will make the product offering significantly better, or on occasion it is to offer differing opinion on a hot topic that is being extensively debated, and I will link through to differing opinion.

This is an ugly tale I don’t know every aspect, I doubt anyone does, but I have clocked up hours of research in writing this article, and it represents the truth as far as I see it.

I haven’t taken the opportunity of contacting ePerks or iHype directly – this article is not about their services, but primarily the way they have poorly handled their contact with the bloggers which has a significant bearing on how their newest offering, iHype will be accepted by the blogging community.

ePerks

Vlad is a regular reader. He was hired to write a review of ePerks on his real estate blog through Sponsored Reviews and since then he has been in a long battle of cease and desist letters and legal threats.

Whilst his original post doesn’t appear to be online any more, and I didn’t read it in the first place because I am honestly not interested in real estate in the US (and my wife would gladly tell the world how little interest I have in Poland in anything to do with the house), from what I have read in a number of references, the article was generally positive.

After Vlad published the article, he received a number of comments that were generally negative about ePerks.

What does a smart honest blogger do in such a situation? In my opinion as he has already written a largely positive review, it is well within conventional practice to publish a followup article possibly expressing the views of one or more of the comments he received on his previous post, and encourage his audience for more feedback.

That is exactly what he did, asking with Eperks is a Gem or a Scam? which he posted on August 10th.

The title and his emphasis in the post suggest that his first review was largely positive, and that the negative views had been expressed by his readers.

What followed were well over 160 comments on the post – over the last 24hrs I have read the whole thread, some parts of it multiple times.

At some point the comments turned into a running battle between a number of anonymous commenters plus one person who claims to be an employee of Eperks.

There may have actually been previous comments on the thread that Vlad determined were in some way dubious as is hinted from his comment @ 2007-10-18 02:17:54 (Vlad doesn’t have permalinks for comments)

Steve are you reading the comments or you just here to spam as were other ePerks employees?

Look ,these agents feel they were mislead, it’s not like they are buying company’s shares on Wall Street. They have purchased the service and ePerks failed to deliver. How can you blame them for criticizing ePerks?

Just a few days previously the conversation had changed from people complaining, to contemplation of action, with the entry of Sergio Gala stating that he had complained to the BBB.

Around the 30th October “inguru” showed up, along with “Benjamin” an employee of Eperks. I don’t know whether Benjamin is in actual fact Ben Behrouzi the Founder / CEO of ePerks.com

In January 2008-01-22 02:07:03 another commenter, “john” joined the conversaion and started making claims of unfair portrayal, doing “research” on Vlad and making threats.

Inman, among other top real estate blogs covered Vlad’s legal problems in March

I am not going to take a position on whether Vlad should have written the followup post, left the comments open, or continued reporting. One of the biggest dangers in interpreting events at this stage is hindsight. Another danger is for the views of your community, in the way of comments to sway your own opinion.
In many ways it is a good thing, but to an outside observer not all the information is available, as we will see…

Attack Of The Shills

Vlad aluded to various ePerks employees commenting on his blog under various different names. How could he tell?

It was actually something quite simple, IP addresses, but unfortunately those are not make public, and making IP addresses available to the public could be looked on as a privacy issue. Avinash wrote about IP address privacy concerns 6 months ago – I didn’t respond at that time but I have a very good memory.

Vlad also recently added the following statement to the top of the gem or scam post.

But lets step away from Vlad’s blog post for a while, and take a look at what has been happening on other sites. After all, there have been accusations that Vlad is in somehow biased, as are anyone offering him a shoulder to lean on.

Whilst ePerks deal with Real Estate, they also deal with car sales (no car salesman jokes please)

There was a very interesting conversation over on Yesterday’s Trucks

Here is a long screen capture of the comment thread which does have a lot of legitimate commentary from people I have seen in other discussions about ePerks. I have highlighted the comments that are of real interest.

Ray S. 11-30-2007 16:52:17 76.206.0.161
Lisa 12-27-2007 16:55:36 76.206.0.161
MARY 12-14-2007 08:47:44 76.206.0.161
benjamin 07-03-2007 12:47:12 76.206.0.166
Charles 11-30-2007 16:37:10 76.206.0.161

That is the order they are displayed in the link I used, I haven’t quite worked out how to get a threaded view, though with close examination it appears that some of the comments are replying to each other.

This is shilling of the worst kind, and it should be the BBB, WOMMA and the FTC taking a looks at ePerks, not ePerks trying to exert legal pressure on a blogger who just provided the forum where events materialized.

But It Gets Worse

Apparently Mr. Behrouzi has stated to Vlad that the IP ranges are unconnected to ePerks though the evidence, not only on the trucks site suggests otherwise.

• The IP range has been connected to email correspondence from ePerks
• The IP range has been connected to comments on Vlad’s blog
• The IP range has been connected to the fake attack on Vlad’s reputation across the internet, on social bookmarking sites, Yahoo answers, and various Wikis.

Yes, even Jaffar Sadighi maligning Vlad’s character has been linked to this IP range

Anonymous

There have been lots of anonymous comments all over the internet but the worst of all are on a WordPress.com blog that seem to have been created as an attempt at reputation management.

The post was written by someone called Michael K.

http://eperks.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/eperks-success-experience-feedback-clients/

Just the URL and Title of the post suggests that it is aimed squarely at capturing traffic from people searching for feedback. Nothing wrong with this as a tactic, but it is important to take a look at all the comments.

This is the real estate industry – the people involved in ePerks are looking for more business. The post is overtly positive as are all the comments.
For me as a marketer it looks like an absolutely ideal place to mention which area codes I might have purchased for ePerks, along with a link to my blog or website, or even just a link to a profile on ePerks.

I have lots of people involved in Real Estate who read my blog – they are certainly not shy of including links when leaving comments, and on occasion some targeted anchor text.

To have a comment thread about ePerks, with 28 comments, and only 2 of them have left a link (one to a totally off topic site might even be just a spammer), is totally absurd.

If someone from WordPress.com happens to feel like checking, without compromising anonymity of the blog author that might take a court order), there is a high chance that a large number of those comments were left from the same IP range.

It would also be interesting to check whether there is shared ownership with this blog that was previously used to attack Vlad

http://vladzablotskyy.wordpress.com/

You see at one time the blog at eperks.wordpress.com was part of the “web of destruction” being used to attack Vlad’s reputation, and the single post contained the following reference.

Whats holding me up is that there is a blog on the internet that seems to hold a great deal of negative comments. In fact I’ve noticed that anyone who leaves a positive comment is either deleted or considered an ePerks.com employee. However I have this feeling that the owner of that blog is making those comments up or they are competitors trying to give ePerks a bad name.

The reason I think this is because the site (go-beyond-mls.com) has 4 or 5 blogs just about this company. Why would any average joe write so many articles on the company if they weren’t competitors? In fact I wrote a comment on the blog and was instantly titled an ePerks employee by the owner, Vlad. This upset me greatly so I have decided to start my own blog about it that will be completely organic. I have no hidden agenda’s nor am I profiting from the traffic generated to this website.

I do not want Vlad the owner of go-beyond-mls.com to post on this blog for I feel and am almost certain that he his somehow affiliated with one of ePerks competitors. I would like to warn all that read both this blog and his that they second take all the content on that site for I believe and am almost certain it may be artificial.

Note: the internet has a long memory, and I was the one who forwarded that quote to Vlad on April 2nd by email. I am sure if legal proceedings do take place, there will be a need to access email and historical records of every website ePerks has ever been mentioned.

As mentioned in the discussion on the Gem or Scam thread, IP addresses can be faked but whilst I am not a lawyer, I doubt Vlad would have to prove that the IP addresses are genuine.

Here is a little excerpt from the defamation FAQ on Chilling Effects

Question: What defences may be available to someone who is sued for defamation?

Answer: There are ordinarily 6 possible defences available to a defendant who is sued for libel (published defamatory communication.)
1. Truth. This is a complete defence, but may be difficult to prove.
2. Fair comment on a matter of public interest. This defence applies to “opinion” only, as compared to a statement of fact. The defendant usually needs to prove that the opinion is honestly held and the comments were not motivated by actual “malice.” ( Malice means knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth of falsity of the defamatory statement.)
3. Privilege. The privilege may be absolute or qualified. Privilege generally exists where the speaker or writer has a duty to communicate to a specific person or persons on a given occasion. In some cases the privilege is qualified and may be lost if the publication is unnecessarily wide or made with malice.
4. Consent. This is rarely available, as plaintiffs will not ordinarily agree to the publication of statements that they find offensive.
5. Innocent dissemination. In some cases a party who has no knowledge of the content of a defamatory statement may use this defence. For example, a mailman who delivers a sealed envelope containing a defamatory statement, is not legally liable for any damages that come about from the statement.
6. Plaintiff’s poor reputation. Defendant can mitigate (lessen) damages for a defamatory statement by proving that the plaintiff did not have a good reputation to begin with. Defendant ordinarily can prove plaintiff’s poor reputation by calling witnesses with knowledge of the plaintiff’s prior reputation relating to the defamatory content.

Lot of these defences might apply to Vlad’s case, but most interesting is consent

ePerks Paid Vlad To Write About Them

There a various banking records that ePerks through Sponsored Reviews paid him to talk about them.

Maybe the intention was only the initial brief mention, but bloggers have their own social contracts with their audience to think about, and new details emerge.
It could easily be looked at by a court that follow up posts were an extension of the first, especially as Vlad was fairly good with interlinking between posts.

This is one of the positive aspects of paid blogging, the chain of evidence created that whilst many people suggest that the payment might add bias to any potential review in favor of the person providing funds, it also might provide an additional layer of protection.

Effectively if you get slammed by a paid blogger, you asked for it whether it is the time of the initial review, or at a later date.

Vlad didn’t start the review process, ePerks engaged bloggers to write about them

It might take ePerks some time to realise this, but they have lost this battle… Q.E.D.

There has been a lot of analysis among real estate bloggers, but I feel Trace’s recent article on ePerks destroying their credibility is the most compelling, and worrying for anyone who has invested money in ePerks.

iHype

Time to about circle, it might seem that I am just waffling about ePerks, and that it has no real relationship with iHype other than the owners.

iHype is a paid blogging service, paying bloggers to write paid reviews.

Paid reviews and the companies that offer such services are a core topic of this blog though generally PayPerPost have had more to talk about than other companies.

With paid blogging services in the past, companies have had the option to request “positive tone” for reviews. That isn’t intended as controlling the “voice” of the blogger, forcing them to shill. What it does mean is that honest bloggers won’t accept writing about a company they don’t feel comfortable introducing to their audience.

Unfortunately for companies requesting this option, that isn’t the end of it.

Whilst you might in the past have been able to request only a positive tone, and it would be a little unethical to accept payment to just trash a company blogging is a conversation.

Requesting a blogger to review a company, paid or not is a little like rubbing Aladin’s lamp, uncorking a champagne bottle, or removing a thumb from a dyke holding back the floodwaters.

The truth wants to be free

A blogger can’t legitimately control the conversation (they can give it some direction, though that has repercussions) that happens around what they write. ePerks have certainly accused Vlad of trying to control the conversation through moderation of his comments, but where were the bloggers coming to the defense of ePerks? Surely the blogosphere would be buzzing with blog posts about how wonderful ePerks is from their 1000s of customers, rather than anonymous blogs created for the purpose of shilling ePerks.

Paid reviews companies receive a huge amount of criticism in the blogospere, and one of the things that impressed me the most about PayPerPost, and also competitors such as ReviewMe and Sponsored Reviews was the way that their representatives engaged the blogosphere, opened up conversation, addressed problems in the open, and eventually used that feedback to enhance or change their product offering.

Instead, the iHype founders at ePerks have been using legal threats to silence a blogger

I can’t shake the possibility that my opinion in this might be biased. Behind the scenes I have helped Vlad a little in removing some of the most disgusting attacks on his reputation on sites like Yahoo Answers.

I would have liked matters to be cleaned up in a friendly way before iHype launched, with the ePerks founders having seen the errors of their ways and what effect it might have on their future plans.

I have deliberately not linked to either ePerks.com or iHype.com, I haven’t used their logos, or screenshots of their service. I haven’t created an account with either service, or tested them in any way.

Why?

Because I don’t trust them, or the founders. They don’t deserve even that vague recognition that they are in some way a legitimate site. It is a personal opinion, I will sleep peacefully having made that decision.

As far as I am concerned, and this is personal opinion, iHype can go straight to the deadpool

Michael Arrington might have referred to Ted Murphy of PayPerPost as being “the most evil person in the room”, but ePerks and Ihype founder Ben Behrouzi certainly seems (in my personal and possibly biased opinion) to be one of the most evil people in the blogosphere.

Trace Richardson also has a followup article on iHype, with some other interesting facts.

I am not going to call this a perfect example of a reconsideration request, but I decided that it was better to be 100% honest about my thought process for both now and in the future, because whilst I am now blocking paid reviews with robots.txt, there are so many things still not specified within the webmaster guidelines that it is a potential minefield, especially for someone who has previously been the target of a manual penalty.

Here is exactly what I sent to the Google webmaster team.

I honestly still believe I didn’t break the spirit of the webmaster guidelines, the webmaster guidelines as most frequently described by Google employees on official duties in regards to paid links and reviews, and even the “letter of the law”.

I have a very high rejection rate on paid reviews, approaching 80% – that shows editorial discretion far beyond many if not all paid directories.
Content was always highly targeted to my audience

I retained editorial control of links – in all my blogging I give good search engine friendly links that are descriptive of the target – such practice is effectively law in the UK and Europe, though who is responsible for regulation isn’t certain.

Almost a year ago, when Google first made it possible to report a site for paid links, I reported myself with a request for clarification – at that time how my reviews were regarded by Google was not clearly specified, in many ways it still isn’t.

Adam Lasnik previously suggested multiple times that sites which were predominately high quality content were not your target for penalties – paid reviews content currently represents less than 3% of my original content – just 9 reviews

I strive to provide an example of paid review content that is benefiting readers in general, and has a reason to be indexed and counted as editorial content.
The compensation I receive is more a token gesture, like a box of chocolates to say thanks, as the time I spend on them means I would earn more flipping burgers in McDs – how could that class as paid links? It doesn’t even cover my time.

Penalties have not been handed out evenly, I know Googlers read blogs that have written paid reviews where the links were not blocked in any way, and have even commented on the specific reviews. Those sites remain unpunished.

Googlers continually promote Google services from their private blogs, and certainly gain financial compensation from increased stock prices. Just today Matt wrote the following post without a specific disclaimer that he is a Google employee.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/adding-new-features-to-google/
Surely such posts should have a nofollow to Google – it has purely promotional (though helpful) intent.

All that being said, I had no intention to break the Google guidelines, and if what is required for the Google Toolbar to truthfully depict the authority of my website is for my editorial links in paid reviews to be blocked from Google in some way, I am going to comply.

All permalinks to my paid reviews are now blocked using robots.txt – I have checked that this is the case within webmaster tools

Where excerpts of my articles appear on duplicate content pages, all links are nofollowed, such as on tags pages http://andybeard.eu/tag/volusion_review

Ultimately the Google search results will be poorer quality, because a good paid review is a better result than an article based upon a press release, or a SEO optimized press release itself. I would argue that the links are of higher value as well.

There are still going to be cases where what I write will be within the grey area not defined by your webmaster guidelines.

I earn money from Google through Adsense – should I nofollow every link to Google and Google services now?

I have paid advertisers, many are purchased by my regular readers or services I frequently write about in an editorial manner. Do I now need to nofollow every past current and future link to them because I have accepted a small amount of money for display advertising?

Do I need to nofollow affiliate links? I can’t see an automatic way that Google can tell the difference between an affiliate link, and a paid link that has a tracking parameter.
It is somewhat strange that Google has provided help for merchants in cleaning up search results with affiliate links using redirects, and thus gaining an SEO benefit from them. Affiliate links very frequently are not editorial endorsements.

My content gets syndicated often on authority sites such as Webpronews and Searchnewz, and many lesser sites – I trust that if they choose to publish my syndicated content as an editorial decision, that the fact that content was originally a paid review is no longer a problem.

Best regards

Andy Beard

Before filing it I checked that the changes I previously made had taken effect and the pages were actually blocked.

I also made changes to my disclosure policy to make sure that it was 100% clear to anyone from Google performing a manual inspection that all links in paid reviews from my domain will not affect search results.

This was important based on the discussion regarding Donna’s reconsideration request.

Something For The Naysayers

There were people who for some reason thought that blocking my paid reviews using robots.txt would for some reason be extremely harmful to my search traffic.
It is true that a document that can’t be indexed cannot rank for long-tail phrases within it, but pages blocked with robots.txt can still rank in Google.

That is just a snapshot of a SERP, it is certainly bouncing around a little and the position is changing daily.

That being said, that page was previously ranking 12th, and whilst it isn’t a high traffic term, it is quite competitive with lots of theme and plugin authors also attracting lots of links.
I haven’t done as much as I could do to promote the page because it is a paid review.

In addition I have flattened my internal linking structure over the last week – frequent detractors obviously wouldn’t look on that as a major search ranking factor.

I am lowering the red flag

Carry on reading to find out why this isn’t the same as raising a white flag, and is far from surrendering to Google on paid reviews.

Robots.txt

I have spent a long time deciding on a course of action, and have decided that blocking my content using Robots.txt is ultimately better for me, and better for people hiring my services.

It also happens to be worse for Google than currently, but that is the beauty of this strategy.

It might be harder to rank, pages blocked using robots.txt still gather PageRank, and can appear in the index, though they would be looked on as dangling pages.

Ultimately links can always be redirected to a followup review which refers to the first, and that followup isn’t a paid review.

It is a little naughty, some people will sometimes receive editorial links within reviews and receive a trackback, but I don’t know of any spam plugin that checks robots.txt , plus the links will still be valuable in other search engines.

Google’s Achilles Heel With Paid Reviews

The only domain for which a client is paying for a review from is this one. When my content appears on other sites, there is a totally different editorial process, and links can in no way be looked on as paid links.

Content syndication is extensive:-

1. Social Bookmarking

Sites such as BloggingZoom encourage more than just a single line of description and rewritten titles on submissions, and not only deliver traffic from their existing user base, but also search traffic.

2. Hub Pages

Many content sites allow you to use syndicated content in the form of article feeds, and content is even picked up by larger sites such as Topix.

3. Authorized Syndication

You can arrange or organise for your content to be selectively syndicated on authority sites such as Andy Beard on WebProNews and even my WordPress SEO reviews published on SearchNewz.

Whilst I haven’t made it clear recently, I publish all my content under GPL, in fact I am switching to the GFDL with an invarient clause requiring a live hyperlink back to the original without nofollow – I prefer GFDL over creative commons because of this flexibility (for me) to be highly specific.

In future I am going to be actively encouraging syndication

4. Unauthorized Syndication

This is technically the same, but as long as people scraping my content are linking back to me, preferably with a followed link, it is great. I am not even worried about some light spinning of the content, as long as they state that the content has been modified and is only based on my original.

5. Indexed Search Results & Aggregators

This is the likes of Technorati, and feed readers that are indexed – I have no intention of blocking reviews from RSS feeds.

6. Multimedia

I use a lot of pictures and screenshots for my reviews, but this is going to increase – in addition I will also be creating podcasts and screencasts which will be widely distributed in their own right.

Hooray for Universal search!

No Nofollow = Editorial Backlinks

By not using nofollow in my reviews, it is most likely that syndicated copies of my reviews will provide backlinks not just for me, but also for my clients. The backlinks are editorial in many cases, someone has chosen to syndicate my content.

Unfortunately Google use backlinks to attribute content to an original source, but it is a whole lot harder if they can’t index the original. It will be interesting which site syndicating my work will rank highly, or how many.

Linking to Syndicated Content

This is something I haven’t decided on yet, but just like I can link through to my various social profiles, I do have the option to link through to my content on other domains after it has been syndicated.

Worse for Google

My content will still be in the index, filtered through an extra layer of editorial control, but there is going to be a whole lot more of it.

Google have made it clear that they are only worried about the existence of links, and not the time it takes to create content, expertise, and whether links within reviews were specified or given in an editorial capacity.

I honestly don’t like junk reviews written purely for SEO purposes, but as Google seem determined to impose the letter of the law rather than the spirit, throwing the baby out with the bath water, whilst I will comply to the letter of the law, I can’t see a reason why I shouldn’t sidestep the charging bull.

Nofollow is not the answer to Google’s troubles

Update

There seems to be some misunderstandings, and I need to clear them up.

1. The blocking hasn’t happened yet – it is the next thing on the todo list
2. I intend to get more search traffic from Google taking this action, not less.

Update 2

Robots.txt has now been modified

The list is quite short, but now I have a strategy in place, I will be writing a lot more paid reviews

Whilst this might be looked on as insignificant, some of those pages rank quite well for very useful terms, and are probably worth 2000+ visitors per month.

Update 3

Whilst the changes in robots.txt were quite straight forward, before making any reinclusion or reconsideration request, I thought it important to check the robots.txt within the Google webmaster console.

First of all I waited for it to be refreshed by Googlebot, which seems to happen approximately once every 24 hours.

There is an option to just copy and paste that refreshed data by hand, but waiting for it to be fetched is conclusive.

Next I entered in the URLs which need to be blocked by the robots.txt file, and checked them.

In theory Googlebot will now be blocked from crawling the “offending” pages, and I will be able to ask for reconsideration.

Photo credits
Lowering the Flag (modified)
Matador (modified)

This was previously written about by Ted Murphy of Izea, and vehemently defended by Techcrunch, so it is surprising that they have made a significant change in their stance without also making a public statement about it.

I also wrote about this situation in a previous article on paid links and the PageRank update (round 5).

Here is their previous links to sponsors post from back in November 2007

Here is Techcrunch’s most recent post thanking their sponsors in December 2007

Precautionary Or Suggested By Google?

Techcrunch was frequently being highlighted as a site that might be abusing Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, but somehow immune from a penalty, and also had a reputation for being critical of paid links in content (though one of their advertisers is Text Link Ads, and I believe they have also had advertising from sister service ReviewMe)

I can think of 3 reasons Techcrunch have made this change:-

• They have made a unilateral decision that linking to sponsors without nofollow was in some way hypocritical and frowned upon by their readers
• Precautionary based upon analysis of the Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Suggested or advised by Google

The reason Techcrunch has made a change is extremely important, because hundreds, maybe 1000s of bloggers currently link through to their sponsors on a weekly or monthly basis, effectively copying the Techcrunch model, and most do not include nofollow on the links.

I think it is also important to point out that Techcrunch hasn’t made this change retroactively. To have a clean slate they should go through all previous content and add nofollow to all links to sponsors, possibly even in editorial content.

I honestly don’t think it is the first option – Techcrunch after all are still accepting advertising dollars from Text Link Ads who offer various in-post advertising, not just sidebar linking, and unlike Izea (PayPerPost), have given no indication of supporting nofollow on the advertising links they sell.

If Google did contact Techcrunch, shouldn’t they also make an official statement on the webmaster central blog giving advice to all bloggers that this practice is looked on as paid links, and could be subject to a penalty?

So far the best estimate for having a landline for internet access provided by the Polish national carrier is 10 months, so I am using a GSM solution which in my remote part of Poland seems to clock in slightly faster than what I would expect from UMTS so might be giving me a slow HSDPA signal.

I really wish I had been able to respond sooner, because I am actually quite disappointed in the way “facts” were portrayed, and because from what I can see no SEOs actually did any in depth research of what Matt was presenting.

I Did Some Homework

Two weeks ago, I think on the Sunday after Matt posted I read the post and the first 400 or so comments, plus all the stories related to it that appeared on Sphinn. I am going to try to cover a few different angles that I haven’t seen elsewhere, though that doesn’t mean these opinions haven’t been already been voiced by someone. There is only so much catching up you can do after 2 weeks out of the trenches.

Was This Really Cleared By Legal?

Maybe Google have run out of PHDs to hire in the legal department, but it seems there is a real grammatical clanger here.

Now I’m going to ask you to put on your regular user hat. If you’ve just learned that you or a family member have a tumor, would you prefer that radiosurgery overview article from the Mayo Clinic, or from a site which appears to be promoting a specific manufacturer of medical equipment via paid posts? My guess is that you’d prefer the Mayo Clinic.

The site in Matt’s screenshot isn’t the one that might appear in the search results as a result of the “paid” links. The site that would appear is the one being linked to. This one which has been around just as long as the paid reviews when checking on archive.org

The oldest version of the site even seems to have a link to investor information, though that is not in the archive, so it seems very strongly to suggest that the domain was intended for use by the manufacturers of the Gamma Knife in some way.

I notice Matt didn’t link through to the final site so people could do a fair evaluation. Matt was certainly suggesting Google’s line was that the site in some way was junk that didn’t deserve to be in the search results and that the other sites linked to had more reason to appear.

Another site that also seems to be by the manufacturer is this one on GammaKnife.org

It seems to me the manufacturer, Elekta, the registered trademark and patent holder were trying to do some understandable reputation management and SEO work, or someone was doing it on their behalf, because at least from my location if you search in Google for “Gamma Knife” Elekta’s corporate website doesn’t appear.

That is about the same as John Chow not ranking for John Chow.

Maybe they have some problems with their website design they might want to fix first, and maybe they should have done that before thinking about paid reviews, but to suggest any of their sites don’t deserve some kind of placement is misleading.

They are not “just one manufacturer” – they hold the trademark for what they wanted a satellite site to rank for.

Language

Lets face it, the people who generally need money enough to write reviews for $10 are not normally PHDs, though many people who write for PayPerPost are highly qualified, certainly more than I am.

Then again my wife just finished her Masters, and though in Europe it is not looked on as politically correct to brag about how well you pass a masters, she averages over 4.5/5 so walked away with an A or 5/5 overall grade.

Most people look on her being fluent in English, though she doesn’t write English as much as she should and thus makes stupid mistakes.

If she was under pressure to write 200 words in 15 minutes she would struggle without my help to write flawless English.

Payment

There is no way to prove whether the person writing the paid posts actually received payment. The posts might have been rejected for all kinds of reasons, such as the number of reviews that seem to be paid posted one after the other, and the general low quality.

Disclosure

I checked 2 of the posts depicted in Matt’s screenshots. The first had a very clear disclosure in the sidebar, and the 4th had a disclosure policy badge that links to a clear disclosure policy.

As far as humans are concerned I would class that as better disclosure than Matt personally uses for posts such as his recent recap of everything Google and how often do you see Matt openly criticize his employer.

There are lots of posts on Matt’s blog, if you were wearing a “regular user hat” and just appeared on a permalink page from a search result, where you wouldn’t realise that Matt is writing as an employee and shareholder.

In fact, if you stumbled across these entries on the web, you might not know whether someone got paid for writing these posts.

Matt has a disclaimer, but it is not in the content of every post (yes I am also guilty that my disclosure policy plugin is currently switched off due to a bug I haven’t had time to fix, but I have in post disclosure of some kind regardless for every paid post/review)

A Blacker Than Black Example Flawed, How About Grey?

I might be biased, but I think the gamma knife example whilst at first glance was a travesty, when you delve into it a little you realise that Google’s argument in that particular case was just as equally flawed.

What would happen if they tried to explain the links their own media buyers bought from the recent Leweb3 site, or various SEO conferences without nofollow.

Those are clearly advertising links, and if you take either the spirit or the letter of “Google’s Paid Links Law”, they are guilty. If Google doesn’t set a good clear example, how can they expect the rest of the internet to understand what exactly is or isn’t allowed?

I do agree in the case of the gamma knife that the posts were most likely ordered for SEO reasons, just like many press releases about mundane events get published, or junk articles get syndicated.

The saddest thing is that none of the trusted resources Matt listed actually link through to the manufacturer of Gamma Knife, Elekta other than Wikipedia… with a nofollow link.

This is my follow on from my post yesterday:- Dancing With The Gevil – Defamed By Google?

Fair enough, for those people who have been caught selling links primarily for boosting search engine results.

The funny thing is I have seen so many blogs today that are selling Text Links who have not received a penalty, yet lots of sites that write high quality paid reviews penalized.
I am referring to the PR6+ sites with 10 or more text links in the sidebar that are totally off topic.

As per my previous article, I don’t believe this should cover editorial links that are given during a review that is a form of consultancy. I have always made that clear that that is the purpose of my reviews.

It really does seem I am being penalized based upon the Payment processor and market-place I display most prominently, PayPerPost, though I have seen a few sites that display other Paid Post badges also hit heavily.
The most prominent PayPerPost writers seem to have been hit the hardest.

I Don’t Sell PageRank

Here is the description of the service I offer on my profile on Sponsored Reviews

Blog Search Engine Performance, WordPress, Niche Marketing, Affiliate Marketing Tips and Social Media with Original Opinion and Loads of Attitude

50% of revenue from reviews is donated towards WordPress plugin development adding additional exposure.

I look on reviews as a form of consultancy.

You are paying for my time, not just for link equity or buzz.

My reviews are typically 2000 – 3000 words and I strive to highlight both good features and flaws constructively and offer suggestions for improvements.

My readership is not mass market, but contains many thought leaders and influencers.

I talk about tools and strategies to help with creation of various types of niche websites, social media, social networks, blogging and WordPress. I can easily review a site not just based on content, but also from an SEO perspective.

If you actually follow the link, there is no mention of PageRank anywhere on the page. They do mention link popularity, but the number of links a site has is also a traffic indicator, possibly more accurate than Alexa.

Here is my profile on ReviewMe – you might notice it is quite similar

50% of revenue from reviews is donated towards WordPress plugin development adding additional exposure.

I look on reviews as a form of consultancy, you are paying for my time, not for link equity or buzz.
My reviews are typically 2000 – 3000 words and I strive to highlight both good features and flaws constructively and offer suggestions for improvements.

My readership is not mass market, but contains many thought leaders and influencers.

I talk about tools and strategies to help with creation of various types of niche websites, social media, social networks blogging and WordPress.

I can easily review a site not just based on content, but also from an SEO perspective.

Again, no mention of PageRank, just Alexa, Technorati (which is an indication of links) and RSS subscribers.

Lets take a look at PayPerPost Direct

To find me within the directory, you would have to filter on a price range of $100 – 200, no direct link to the profile

I am considered by many to be an expert on:-

* Blog Search Engine Performance
* Search Engine Optimization
* WordPress
* Niche Marketing
* Affiliate Marketing Tips
* Social Media
* Blogging Community

If you are looking for good, detailed, solid information and are not looking to be spoon fed, you are going to love what I write.

My primary blog is in many ways a community project with the content provoking stimulating discussions.

Average Tack: 5 / 5 Google Page Rank: 5 Alexa Score: 17797

I should really log in and get that PageRank updated, because it currently gives a value different to what is displayed on Google’s toolbar. I don’t think it actually is different in real terms as far as the ranking of my own content, although who knows, I might actually be a PR6 now that has been downgraded, and my readers seem to like my content.

I did use a more sales like appraoch with some HTML that I grabbed from my Blogcatalog profile – with PayPerPost Direct any initial contact is just that, an initial enquiry and they have a built in message system. The first message I send to any enquiry always ensures that they accept a neutral review, as in they have no editorial control, and to ensure they understand that any and all links will be editorial, with my own choice of anchor text. On more than one of the reviews I have even pulled out a keyword research tool to get a good idea of what to use in the post title, and to some extent topics to discuss and link text.

Tack is something that is important, it is based around advertiser feedback

I Reject Reviews – Lots Of Them

ReviewMe 33% (2/6) Accepted
Sponsored Reviews 80% (4/5) Accepted
PayPerPost 37.5% (3/8) Accepted

Total 47.3% (9/19) Accepted

That doesn’t cover all the offers I pass over within the various directories, or the people who have approached me directly. The direct offers I generally ignor totally or refuse politely, depending on product. There is one ebook I still have to take a look at to see if I am going to write a full review. That will be free even though a paid review was offered. Why? It has an affiliate program, if it is any good, I will earn more as an affiliate over the long term.

Editorial Control

Google representatives have stated many times that paid directories are OK, as long as they are not selling PageRank specifically, and there is some editorial control over the process.

I Don’t Sell Advertising

Any advertising you might find on this blog is affiliate marketing, and where I remember, that is blocked and nofollowed.

PageRank = INFLUENCE

It seems as I suggested in my previous article that Google have singled out anyone, or any collective group or company who gives a hint in their promotional material that they are selling links based upon PageRank.
Selling links based upon even a similar term, such as listing the number of links to your site does not seem to currently be a problem, and this might be a slow but manual process.

If you mention PageRank as an indication of how “pretty” you are to advertisers, you are going to be treated like a prostitute.

As I also mentioned in my previous article, PageRank can also be looked on as a measure of influence that can never be assessed just by looking at a pure number of established links, or a traffic rating from Alexa.

Whilst I would love for PayPerPost to move away from displaying PageRank, influence makes a huge difference, but even then they will need additional metrics for traffic, not Alexa, but their own system coming in approximately 1 month.

Adam Lasnik

Adam Lasnik from Google commented on the Sphinn story for Danny’s post.

I totally understand and support tough-but-fair evaluation of our methods, but at the end of day, I’d hope the majority of folks here would agree with our goals of aiming for a more leval playing field on the web as well as a greater surfacing of quality content.

It doesn’t seem like they are trying to level the playing field to me. From my evaluation they have been on one hand quite surgical in which sites to take out, and on the other hand have not paid any attention to the quantity and quality of the content.

Here are 2 quotes from Adam from April when interviewed by Eric Enge

Two, taking a step back, our goal is not to catch one hundred percent of paid links. It’s to try to address the egregious behavior of buying and selling the links that focus on the passing of PageRank. That type of behavior is a lot more readily identifiable then I think people give us credit for.

That’s one of those things where typically you know it when you see it. As I mentioned, our interest isn’t in finding and taking care of a hundred percent of links that may or may not pass PageRank. But, as you point out relevance is definitely important and useful, and if you previously bought or sold a link without Nofollow, this is not the end of the world. We are looking for larger and more significant patterns.

As I pointed out on Sphinn, I have over 1800 pages indexed, and of those over 1500 are showing in the /* supposedly primary index.
That actually compares very well with many PR6 optimized sites, and better than most.

Among those pages are 9 pages from which I linked to clients who hired me to review their service or website. Those reviews typically took between 4 and 10+ hours to perform and write the content, to receive between $35 and $130 in my pocket, pre tax.

Obi Wan would certainly, at this time be saying “Adam, these are not the paid links you are meant to be looking for, move along”

Maybe Google have identified PayPerPost as a bigger long-term threat not only to their search index, but also to their monetization of the web, than what was currently only about links that were easy to identify, such as those in the sidebar.

Rather than trying to tackle the mass of 50,000 PayPerPost bloggers, they are highlighting the most prolific or prominent bloggers using the service. Sure they have also hit the Stanford Daily very hard, but that is just one very visible site.

Shoemoney has been saying “Don’t Make Google Look Stupid”

I honestly don’t think PayPerPost currently are making Google look stupid, but the danger for Google is allowing them to grow.

Some more great discussion on this from Rob and Meg, and thanks to Snoskred for the support – Hmm legal fees paid by Nigeria maybe? ;)

One point raised in the comments of my last post by Tomaz was about the Review My Post links, part of the PayPerPost affiliate program. With close to 400 clicks in the last 10 months, and 3 conversions, it is not ideal, as so few people who click through qualify for PayPerPost. If everyone who filled in the application form was accepted, it would be worth $0.75 per click which isn’t shabby, and hell as far as I care the link can be nofollow – it is just a great way to help someone make some immediate cash – maybe PPP will improve the conversions.
Anyway short term, I am going to remove the button for Review My Posts – that is the only minor concession I am going to make.

I don’t sell PageRank.

Whatever change Google have made in the data held about my site, it doesn’t seem to have prevented any of my content ranking, and unfortunately it is impossible to say what data they are working on to begin with.
They could well be using a dataset from 1 year ago in their experimentation with some new algorithms, or just as easily some data from last week.

The Toolbar PageRank Trap

• Google created PageRank
• Google created a way for people to see PageRank
• Google created a way for webmasters to access PageRank via API

Google seems determined to penalize anyone who mentions PageRank within their advertising as an indication of the value of the advertising or review service provided – essentially they are assuming that a mention of PageRank within such material means that the intention of the site owner is to sell PageRank.

I suppose that this assumption is the same as assuming that if a good looking female consultant, writer, TV presenter or speaker includes their photograph as part of their promotional materials, that the primary service they are providing is related to the sex industry.

Services such as PayPerPost, ReviewMe, Text Link Ads, Text Link Brokers & Sponsored Reviews do include Google PageRank among their listing and value criteria, and I do realize that a higher PageRank does make advertising more attractive to advertisers.
If you hadn’t noticed TV presenters, all things being equal, are often chosen based upon looks and not just intellect, lingual dexterity, and professional reputation.

Google themselves use PageRank within listings as a signal of quality. As an example, here is a page which contains a listing of SEO related blogs which have been selected for quality of content. The Google directory is an exported copy of the DMOZ directory, and inclusion within the SEO sections is highly prized.

PageRank could easily be looked on as an indication of INFLUENCE.

A blog with a higher PageRank might well have a lot less readers, but those readers will be more influential. As an example whilst Vanessa Fox no longer works for Google, and probably has far fewer subscribers that I do, I know she is a lot more influential.

Paid Post Arena Visibility

It is true I am highly visible in the paid posts arena, I have been included in a press release for PayPerPost, they listed me on Wikipedia and I have a prominent profile in their PPP Direct service (Ajax – no PageRank).

They even mentioned me in one of their promotional opportunities about PPP Direct, highlight that I had written a review about it, but there was absolutely no requirement for anyone to link through to me.

Despite the fact that PayPerPost list my PageRank among other metrics within their directory, I strongly believe that I am not “selling links” – I look on what I write as a form of consultancy, actually quite low paid consultancy considering the time I invest in the few site reviews I do accept.
The PayPerPost interface is a little limited in the specification and notification department, as are most enquiry forms for any business. As you would expect, a lot of additional discussion of requirements happens after an initial equiry, and within that discussion I insist that any links I provide will be editorial, with my own choice of anchor text.
That being said, I am SEO aware, I write articles frequently on how to give people useful anchor text, and if I determine I wish to highlight a particular web document, I am going to link to it using the best anchor text that I feel is appropriate.

In the Webmaster guidelines Google themselves state:-

A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you.

I am very comfortable explaining what I do in regards to paid reviews, I believe the content I create is of the highest quality, offers good value to my clients (I don’t like to look on it as advertising, though that is a component), and I also feel that if any of my clients were speaking with their competitors, they should feel quite comfortable pointing out the reviews I have made of their sites to their competitors.

In many ways being open and comfortable explaining what I do could be what has led to what seems to be a penalty in my displayed toolbar pagerank.

Only A Visible Penalty?

From what I can determine, the reduction in toolbar PageRank for this domain is the only thing which has happened.

• My pages are being indexed frequently – in fact my content appears in Google’s index just minutes after it is published, and a large amount of my content is reindexed every few days because it is often being updated.
• Google seems to be crawling everything – I can’t call this “deep crawling” because my site is actually very flat compared to most blogs, with the majority of pages no more than 2 clicks from the home page, and heavily interlinked.
• Whilst Google no longer reports supplemental results pages directly, the difference between a standard “site:andybeard.eu/” search and “site:andybeard.eu/*” search is minimal, indicating that as much as 85% of my pages are in the primary index. I don’t block a fair number of my pages that might be regarded as duplicate content from being indexed. As Google representitives have stated many times supplemental results are mainly due to lack of PageRank being passed to the pages, and not due to duplicate content. It is true that duplicate content pages often have very few links, thus end up as supplemental results, but this is more a by product.
• Most of my content appears to be ranking as well as it has ever ranked, actually in many cases better than many of my peers talking about the same products, publishing content around the same time.

Potential Unusual Factors

There are a number of potential unusual factors in the links I have received to this domain over the last 6 months which might be looked on by Google’s bots as possible things to flag, and I am going to list every single one of them, totally openly.

• The Dofollow List or D List – My site was added to a list of Dofollow bloggers that grew and spread into a blogging meme. I didn’t add myself to the list, and I didn’t spread it in any way. The links I received from it were all very targeted as they were deep links to my list of Dofollow plugins, but without any useful anchor text.
• Technorati Train – I had been exchanging Technorati favorites with my readers for some time, and Maki @ DoshDosh decided to do the same. I linked through from one of my posts to Maki, and Maki added me to a list of blogs that exchange favorites. That list was picked up and turned into another long meme from which I received a number of deep links.
• Indexed Search Results – I have 2 or 3 pages on the site where I pick up an RSS feed of the last 100 links to a post on my blog, or someone else’s, cache the results so it isn’t constantly hitting the server, and output the results. In many ways this is almost identical to what Google provide their blogspot users in the form of “linkbacks” to their posts.
• I have one page that pulls in search results on a specific keyword from Technorati, and again caches the RSS results, and outputs them to the page. The web page in question is very useful, in fact just as informative in many ways as a Mahalo search result – appropriate really because the topic is… Jason Calacanis – I have had some decent links to the page as well, from highly credible sources.
• How do you differentiate between keyword stuffing on every page… and “Web 2.0″ ideas like tag clouds? I have growing tag clouds on the bottom of my single “post” pages – they are useful for users, and give me some SEO benefits for moving juice around, but at some stage, on some very busy posts, it might become a little excessive, and dilute the value of the content.
• Dofollow – removing nofollow from comments in itself has risks for 3 primary reasons
  • Overall juice leakage – I have some pages with close to 200 external links, often to unrelated sites – those same pages might have 500 or more internal links to compensate but it does need to be considered on a busy blog.
  • I encourage people to use pingback or trackback when linking through to one of my posts, and encourage linking to posts rather than to my root domain. Unfortunately that is also a form of reciprocal linking between highly related pages on the web, because one page is invariably discussing the same topic as the other.
  • Linking to low quality domains – I moderate comments and trackbacks quite ruthlessly and apply my comments policy – I am sure some low quality sites slip through, but in general I know the blogs of most of the peole who link to me and who comment
• David Airey was recently having some problems possibly due to some links he sold, or maybe due to the birthday competition and specifying anchor text. I donated a prize to the competition – prize givers were not given any real indication on how the competition was going to be run, although David did ask for us to provide a description of how we wanted to be linked from his page – I am not criticizing David over this, and my rankings for particular terms which people decided to copy and paste have increased – it is a lot like article marketing and author resource boxes – is article marketing with a resource box soon going to give you a Google penalty? I doubt it, which is why I am surprised over Google’s attitude.
• I have one link out there for a large donation I made to a WordPress Plugin author – the link was offered freely after the donation was made, and the place being linked to and the anchor text is totally logical. I seem to remember links for charitable donations, or I suppose other donations are not what Google are meant to be targeting, but if the links look the same as a list of paid links, with a PayPal button underneath, I am sure Googlebot and even a human inspection might misinterpret why a link was given. I will be restarting donations to plugin authors soon – I paused it partially due to it being overshadowed by other WordPress development competitions which were also giving links to sponsors on high ranking domains, and supported by Automattic.
• I have some links from some of my other domains pointing to this site, to relevant content, or to meet legal requirements in the UK
• I have content being syndicated, both with permission and without. It generally contains links to the original article – I don’t hunt down people syndicating my content, and I publish it under GPL, so I can only require some kind of attribution, such as a link anyway.
• I started a meme back in January to boost awareness for MyBlogLog communities of quality blogs – I have seen even Google employees take part in blogging memes that offer some value

Paid Reviews or Consultation or Selling PageRank?

I don’t sell links on any of my domains for a number of reasons, but if I was going to include unrelated links if anything it would be to my own niche sites. To my knowledge I have never clicked on a link labeled “Sponsored Links” though I have clicked on links that were display advertising. If I was to sell display advertising I would have it running through a tracking script.

Here is a full list of the paid reviews I have written on this blog

So I have written 9 reviews, and turned down as many or more, some of which weren’t very relevant, but mainly because I didn’t have time… time for me is the biggest factor, it is what I believe people are paying me for. All links I give in such reviews are editorial

My readers seem to enjoy my paid reviews. I don’t think I have ever had a negative comment, in fact much the opposite many readers have linked to my reviews as an example of how such reviews can add to a blog, and to the web as a whole.

Plea Bargaining

Google have an attitude that if they decide you are guilty of some misdemeanor based upon their guidelines, you get a penalty.

Guilty until proven innocent?

The penalty I seem to have received is a major drop in my visible PageRank, and based upon the ranking of some of the sites I have linked to for certain phrases, may also have affected my ability to pass PagerRank and other ranking factors… globally, not just on a per page or per link basis.

The standard procedure to have some kind of penalty lifted is to fix whatever you have done wrong (in Google’s eyes), and submit a re-inclusion request through their webmaster console.

Unfortunately this isn’t really guilty until proven innocent, it is more like guilty until you repent.

If some slimy snake-oil SEO has discredited your site with various practices that Google doesn’t approve of, you eventually have a chance of re-inclusion, as long as you admit you did something wrong, rectify the problem, and vow never to do it again.

But what happens if you think you have done absolutely nothing wrong?

PayPerPost Is My Payment Processor

I use PayPerPost as my payment processor for the review / consultancy services I provide as an alternative to using PayPal or Google Checkout. They do take a small additional fee, but they also provide a very useful escrow service, and provide me with traffic. PayPerPost are certainly within my top50 referrers every single day and I believe it is targeted traffic.
I receive probably as much traffic daily from PayPerPost as I receive from other services… per month, though I know I am lucky to be a featured blogger, and that other bloggers might not receive as much traffic from the PayPerPost Direct site.

I have had someone show disrespect for my blog for displaying the PayPerPost logo, actually it was someone who used to write for DownloadSquad after I criticized them quite strongly for complaining about splogs, and then linking to the culprit… without using nofollow, just like The Guardian in their recent interview.

What would happen if Google decided in the future that PayPal isn’t a “trusted” payment processor, and is a poor quality signal?

Surely Google can’t give me a penalty for displaying my payment processor on my blog?

Quality Symbol Not Indication Of Ability To Pass Juice

The general public look on the little green bar on the Google Toolbar as a signal of quality, that is what Google tell them.

Here it is in Google’s own words

Wondering whether a new website is worth your time? Use the Toolbar’s PageRankâ„¢ display to tell you how Google assesses the importance of the page you’re viewing.

But a penalty on my visible Toolbar PageRank isn’t what Google are telling their users. Google users think my content is of less value, and has less authority. They don’t understand that Google also apply modifiers to the green bar which may be for reasons other than quality.

My content is still ranking in Google, thus Google still looks on my content as being the same quality.

The Google PageRank currently being displayed to my visitors is a deliberate manufactured lie to my visitors.

It is also a lie to potential advertisers – I don’t sell links, but I do sell my authority, and my hopefully increasing PageRank was a positive signal of quality relative to my increasing status withing Internet marketing and Search Engine Marketing.

Tarred & Feathered By Google

Google are going the route of humiliation as a deterrent to people using services such as PayPerPost, both bloggers writing content, and advertisers (PayperPost advertisers include corporations such as Ford Motor Company)

I am not going to defend the position of “Paid Links” which take 3 seconds to approve. That is an advertising value vs gaming search engines debate, and is not something I am involved in, not even under cover.

I spent over an hour on Skype with a colleague last night, about 3am because I just happened to be at my computer, giving him some reassurance on something SEO related. Before the conversation he asked how to pay me, and my consultancy rate. I don’t do that kind of SEO consultancy, it is not part of my current or even future business model.
I am sure however if I had stated $60 or even $100 per hour, I probably would have ended up with some work with his client just monitoring things. I could probably charge a lot more within more specialist niches where I have more experience.
If I spend 5 hours or more on a review on this blog and get some financial compensation, it doesn’t cover the value of my time, so how the hell can it be looked on as selling links just to game the search engines.

The money is just a token gesture, a way to filter requests so that people think about relevance.

At this time I am not worried about the 15,000 visitors Google send to my blog every month.

Google are attacking my personal brand, my business, and my integrity.

It Is Not Just My Domain

I have checked a number of domains that appear to have had an unusual decrease in Google Toolbar PageRank. I am not going to name them as I don’t believe that is the right approach to take.
Just as I have over the last 6 months, since April, each of those sites has continued receiving quality inbound links, but seems to have been hit with a penalty.

Lets Just Assume This Is A Mistake From Google

If Google had hit my rankings at the same time, then this label they have placed on my site as being of poorer quality might have been justified, but as ranking prominence has remained, it is a false representation of my site’s value.

I don’t think really think Google intended to defame me so I am going to keep cool and see if they fix the problem over the next week or so. Who knows they might even decide to issue a public apology to those they have been misrepresenting to their users.

For previous coverage, please refer to my posts about Google Paid Links, and the highly informative Gevil

Edit – I made a mistake with the Gevil link, it should have been to the .org

IF THERE’S ONE LESSON from TiVo Stop||Watch, it’s that relevancy outweighs creativity in TV commercials–by a lot. The ads on the “least-fast-forwarded” list aren’t funny, they aren’t touching, and they aren’t clever. And they don’t have big budgets. The top three overall in June (the latest month for which data are available) were CORT Furniture, Dominican Republic Tourism, and Hooters Restaurant. Several throw 800-numbers at you at the end.

But all of these ads are well-tailored to their audiences. For example, during prime-time broadcast TV in June, the No.1 least-fast-forwarded campaign was for home-gym brand Bowflex. Bowflex placed prime-time ads exclusively on professional wrestling on the CW Television Network–just the kind of show that might lead a viewer to reevaluate his or her own musculature and check out a home gym. Leaders on the overall least-fast-forwarded list, which included all advertisers that ran at least 20 spots during any time on any channel, were often those that advertised during daytime on cable, where shows have smaller, niche audiences, and it’s easier to deduce viewer interests, according to TiVo.

Of course this is taken almost as natural phenomenon in online advertising these days, because we have all grown accustomed to targeted advertising generating better response.

However online there seems to be a strange turn-around that advertisers are trying to hide the fact that viewers are being sold to, or that somehow there is money involved with a promotion.

Your Local Hardware Store vs Walmart

If you go to your local hardware store to speak to the resident expert for some professional “handy man” advise, you know full well that whatever he recommends (that he sells in his shop) he is making money on. In fact he might well be making as much or more than Walmart per sale, though Walmart probably have cheaper buying prices driving such professional stores out of business.

Small hardware stores haven’t been driven out of business because customers thought they gave poor advice or poor service, they just have a hard time competing on price, and they might not carry as wide a range of stock items in a sense of “one-stop shop for everything”.

Which Toothpaste or Brush?

Dentists / Dental Surgeons are provided with free samples all the time, hell I used to be given them as presents when I was a kid each time I visited a dentist. I think most parents trust the opinion of their kid’s dentist – and continue using the same brands they are given.

Disclosure Online

When you walk into a shop you expect to be sold to, but you don’t know which product the shopkeeper makes the most money on, which brand he has a special deal with, and the same is true in shops big and small.

Displaying some form of disclosure policy is like having a shop sign – once you have some clear disclosure, there is nothing wrong with suggesting products your visitors might benefit from and making something from doing so.

Don’t Be Scared Of Making Money Blogging

• Be genuine with your audience. A sponsored review or paid post isn’t going to break the social trust with your audience.
• Stick within your niche – whilst you can experiment with widening your niche, pay attention to page views both on your blog and in feed readers to give you an indication of interest level in your content.
• The best way to build trust with your audience is to give genuine opinion… to actually have an opinion. Even if some of your audience don’t agree with you, they will respect you for it.

My paid reviews are not cheap, but they are often worth it – people are paying me for my expertise and time, not for the editorial links. (I wonder if I could be placed on the “paid links whitelist”)

Note the $ amount displayed is what I would have received had I accepted this as a paid review.

Keyword Research Gadgets

Aaron from SEO Book provides lots of free SEO tools, and most of them are very useful and well written. In this case if Aaron is smart these tools might also include some affiliate links for the premium versions of some of the tools such as Wordtracker, but all the tools are very useful as a free version anyway. I haven’t checked for affiliate links, but I know hosting these tools does cost money so I hope Aaron makes something on the back end.

This Is What They Look Like On Your Site

As well as being able to include them on your Google desktop / iGoogle, you can also insert them as javascript on your site as a useful tool for your readers. This is much easier than installing Aaron’s scripts on your own site, though he makes those available for free as well.

Note: You will have to click through to see these

Include These On Your Site

Here is some code to include these on your own site, and for those smart people out there, they might notice a difference in the code that I am publishing to what Aaron has published. That hint is worth 1000s of $ to smart internet marketers.

The Keyword Research Tool

<p><script src="http://gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://tools.seobook.com/google-gadgets/keywords.xml&synd=open&w=342&h=495&title=SEOBook+Competitive+%26+Keyword+Research+Tool&border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C0px+solid+%23999999&output=js"></script><noscript><a href="http://tools.seobook.com/google-gadgets/">Free SEO Tools</a></noscript></p>

The Link Analysis Tool

<p><script src="http://gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://tools.seobook.com/google-gadgets/link-data.xml&synd=open&w=342&h=350&title=SEOBook+Link+%26+Research+Tool&border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C0px+solid+%23999999&output=js"></script><noscript><a href="http://tools.seobook.com/google-gadgets/">Free SEO Tools</a></noscript></p>

So this could have been a highly relevant paid review for some free tools, but I wrote about it for free.
Then again my last paid review for Aaron he linked to me and I didn’t pay for that and it probably sent me more traffic than I sent him.

This post will no doubt be an interesting test to see if Google assign any link authority to what its broken algorithms for paid links might detect as being a paid post.