Tag Archives: payperpost

Rackspace Cloud (Mosso) Link To Us Payola

By Andy Beard | Published: June 10, 2009
I am actually a fan of your new Cloud Servers service. There are some huge benefits in using your service that as both a marketing geek and affiliate I can highlight and potentially drive you a lot of business. However today you have just introduced a payola scheme that will make every one of my clean affiliate links look like a paid link, thus I am going to have to nofollow every single link I give you, forever. You want me to use badges like this, and in exchange will give me "Goodies" of an unspecified nature. Powered by Rackspace Cloud Hosting - Formerly Mosso Powered by Rackspace Cloud Hosting The links are visible, nothing is hidden, but all the same it is effectively a paid linking scheme. Here is what they said in an email sent to customers
Our New "Link-To-Us" Program We're also launching a new "Link-To-Us" program today. In essence, customers who post new links or change their old Mosso links on their websites to our new http://www.rackspacecloud.com site will receive special goodies. The more sites you post a link on, the more great stuff you will get. How cool is that? Please check out all the links here: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/links Thanks so much for being a part of the Rackspace family, and please keep the feedback coming so that we can continue to build the most complete and easy-to-use cloud platform on the web.
The sad thing is this would all be unnecessary if you just made some minor changes to your affiliate program.
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Lowering The Google Red Flag – Sidestep The Cash Hungry Bull

By Andy Beard | Published: February 15, 2008
Lowering the Red Flag SmallWith all the previous discussion of paid reviews and my unwillingness to raise the white flag or bend over, this post is going to come as a bit of a shock. 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.
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IzeaRanks & RealRank – How Many Lies Can You Tell Your Advertisers?

By Andy Beard | Published: January 10, 2008

Lets face it, bloggers love stats and rankings, even if they are based upon meaningless data. For some it is an ego thing, or just a measure of their own worth or progress to achieve whatever goals they have set for themselves, and for others it is monetary. If you want to sell advertising on your blog other than PPC or CPM based, you need to have some kind of carrot to wave at advertisers to encourage them to part with their advertising dollars.

Adage Power 150

Over the last few days for instance I noticed that Advertising Age have rejigged their

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Techcrunch Now Nofollow Sponsor Links

By Andy Beard | Published: December 29, 2007

I would like to congratulate the Techcrunch team for finally coming to the realization that linking to sponsors within posts, without using nofollow on the links might be in violation of Google's Webmaster guidelines.

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

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Google Dictating Nofollow For ALL Links From Compensated Content

By Andy Beard | Published: December 28, 2007

As I had hoped, ( http://community.izea.com/blog/2007/12/an-invitation-t.html ) Ted Murphy had a chance to chat with Google's Matt Cutts at Pubcon

It seems Google want all links within content that "wouldn't exist without payment" to use nofollow, but seems to be focusing on services like PayPerPost, and not other forms of links which wouldn't exist without compensation.

  • Matt Cutts frequently links to Google from his personal blog - if he wasn't employed by Google, those links would likely not appear as frequently.
  • Google employees link to outside sites all the time, and they are frequently sites that are "flying the Google flag" in some
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Before I deal the FUD “I’m going to ask you to put on your regular user hat”

By Andy Beard | Published: December 16, 2007

I have had a chance to deal with the odd email over the last 2 weeks whilst moving house, but I knew I should respond to this paid links post by Matt Cutts as soon as I was able to do so with some level of detail.

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

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ZeroRank – More PageRank Carnage (Round 5)

By Andy Beard | Published: November 15, 2007

I have been receiving emails and comments today about yet another PageRank downturn for multiple sites.

Andrew Ooi has compiled a short list of Malaysian sites, many were previously as much as a PR5 previously, and currently show a PageRank of zero (a white bar)

Examples include:-

Colleen's Simple Kind of Life and 5xmom

The numbers seem to be stable across multiple data centers

There doesn't seen to be any change in prominent Search Marketing sites such as Search Engine Round Table and Search Engine Journal, and other popular bloggers such as Emom and Yaro still seem to

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Will Google Offer Amnesty To SocialSpark & PayPerPost Bloggers?

By Andy Beard | Published: November 12, 2007

Since the first real information came out about Izea's (PayPerPost) new SocialSpark service, that is in testing but will formerly launch in January my excitement has been a little tempered.

As I wrote in my initial preview of SocialSpark, there will be new metrics for gauging the authority and influence of a blog, to help determine advertising spend, not only based upon traffic and demographics, but also on past performance with CPM and CPC data also being made available.

With SocialSpark, any required links will be nofollow, though there is an option for editorial links without a nofollow.

All the negotiation about

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SocialSpark.com Preview – PayPerPost Goes Googley?

By Andy Beard | Published: November 11, 2007
I have been listening to PostieCon via Ustream and chatting in the Meebo chatroom, and at the same time exchanging a few emails with Ted Murphey about Izea's (new parent company of PayPerPost) new Advertising marketplace, SocialSpark.com Social Spark

What Is Social Spark?

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PostieCon Live

By Andy Beard | Published: November 10, 2007

I decided to put together a mashup so I can see the chatroom for PostieCon as well as the Live Ustream feed for my own use, but thought I would post it here on the blog for anyone to watch what is happening.

There are some great speakers scheduled, and some announcements coming later in the day.

A great feature is the ability to ask the speakers questions from the chatroom.

I wasn't able to go to Vegas for Blogworld or Postiecon, but fortunately Postiecon are on the ball and are providing a way for anyone to learn something from the expert line

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Plausible Deniability Just Doesn’t Cut It Mr Arrington

By Andy Beard | Published: November 10, 2007

I actually don't care about the facts in the current drama over Michael Arrington not attending 2 sessions where he was scheduled to speak, possibly because he didn't agree in person to speak.

Plausible deniability is the term given to the creation of loose and informal chains of command in governments and other large organizations. In the case that assassinations, false flag or black ops or any other illegal or otherwise disreputable and unpopular activities become public, high-ranking officials may deny any connection to or awareness of such act, or the agents used to carry

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The Pied Piper Of PayPerPost?

By Andy Beard | Published: November 6, 2007
Pied Piper of PayPerPostOver the last year I have given a fair amount of coverage to PayPerPost, who now house the service along with other endeavours under the name Izea. 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.
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Controversial Izea While I Slept

By Andy Beard | Published: November 1, 2007
IzeaSometimes I really hate timezones, especially when a company I closely follow (and even take a couple of punches for) makes an announcement. PayPerPost and now Izea Fittingly I think Colleen should have the first link, she has been a postie for a long time, is a top earner, and has been taking an equal amount of punches being on the firing line. Colleen highlights the fact that PayPerPost have been planning to have a new domain for their Argus platform for some time, and it is only logical that Argus is not housed under the PayPerPost moniker, because PayPerPost will only be one of many services provided. People who actually monitor the PayPerPost blog of course knew this was coming a month ago. Dan, and investor in PayPerPost... well now the parent company Izea, seems happy about how money is being spent. That is important, I am sure the Izea.com domain name cost a lot more than $9 from GoDaddy. Here is a link to the official Izea Press release on the new corporate entity.

Mixed Reactions To Izea & PayPerPost

As always with anything related to PayPerPost, there is a lot of controversy, and mixed reaction. I have covered the more positive stuff so far, so what follows is the more neutral or negative opinion.
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Penalty Confirmed – But I Don’t Sell PageRank

By Andy Beard | Published: October 8, 2007

Danny Sullivan has managed to get some feedback from someone at Google confirming there are visible PageRank penalties being applied, as much as a -2 on what is displayed on the Google Toolbar.

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

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Dancing With The Gevil – Defamed By Google?

By Andy Beard | Published: October 6, 2007

A number of my readers have noticed that Google have been making some minor adjustments to the displayed PageRank on a few sites, and Josh quite rightly pointed out that the displayed PageRank on this domain has for some reason been reduced.

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

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RSSBrief – PayPerPost To Directly Compete With Feedburner and Google Reader?

By Andy Beard | Published: September 14, 2007

The guys from PayPerPost might cause a lot of controversy, but there is one thing that I doubt anyone could deny, even their most harsh critics… they are smart.

They bring out interesting, useful, sometimes controversial or disruptive products, but they are certainly market leaders not the following pack.

In the case of RSSBrief, they are taking on an existing market, RSS Readers, and in many ways it seems they might also step into reputation management and RSS Search.

I have a feeling even Jason Calacanis is going to like RSSBrief because it will help him with reputation management for Mahalo… but

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Targeted Audiences Like Being Sold To

By Andy Beard | Published: September 7, 2007

An article on Business Week highlights research carried out by Tivo to determine which adverts people watch and which adverts they skip.

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

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Sphinn Greatest Hits – Could The #1 Be Some Useful Content?

By Andy Beard | Published: August 31, 2007

John Andrews currently has the top rated article on Sphinn with a truly brilliant display of link baiting and social media awareness.

I am not sure I am going to be able to knock him off the top spot, and this very post will probably gain him a few more votes, but I would like to think that one of my older articles could at least be a contender.

If This Content Is So Good, Why Hasn't It Been Submitted Before?

There are a number of reasons why my old post on Wordpress SEO and Dynamic Linking might not have

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Will The FTC Investigate Google & Matt Cutts For Paid Links? (updated)

By Andy Beard | Published: August 22, 2007

I don't think so but…

  • Matt probably earns a salary from Google as head of webspam
  • Matt has been with Google since 2000, so probably has a few stock options
  • If Matt says something about a new Google service that encourages other bloggers to write about it as well, it probably has an effect on Google's share price, so there is a specific financial incentive.

We have seen how blog discussions can have both a massive positive and negative influence on large company share value, especially with Apple.

Full Disclosure From Google - No Way?

  • Matt doesn't have a comprehensive disclosure policy - he does have
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OIOPublisher – Paid Reviews & Paid Links

By Andy Beard | Published: August 15, 2007

OIO PublisherThere would be a gaping hole in my content coverage if I didn't mention the release of OIOPublisher, who are trying to find a way to totally cut out the middleman in both paid reviews and paid links.

They won't be taking a cut from sales in any way, and all deals are done directly between advertiser and site owner.

So How Do They Make Money?

The plan is to charge for premium listings in their directories on a monthly basis, and the fees so far proposed are reasonable if they can get traction, though that might

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PayPerPost Receives $7M Additional Funding & Launches Direct Marketplace

By Andy Beard | Published: June 12, 2007

Just 2 weeks ago PayPerPost launched their PayPerPost Direct service and I wrote one of my typical in-depth reviews about why I believe that this new offering really changes the paid review landscape.

Read more on PayPerPost Receives $7M Additional Funding & Launches Direct Marketplace…

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PayPerPost – Review My Post Landing Pages

By Andy Beard | Published: May 28, 2007

Some time ago I tested the Pay Per Post “Review My Post” links with marginal success.

The success rate was marginal because although lots of people clicked on the links in a fairly short period of time, I had a very poor conversion rate.
The biggest failing was that all they presented to a user after they clicked through was a subscription box, effectively the same as if you clicked “signup” on the PayPerPost site.

Read more on PayPerPost – Review My Post Landing Pages…

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Letting Other People Write The LinkBait

By Andy Beard | Published: May 27, 2007

A lot of the things I write go completely over the head of many of my readers, and in some ways that is actually a concious decision which certainly costs me a much higher readership.

Read more on Letting Other People Write The LinkBait…

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Exclusive – Pay Per Post Direct Changes The Paid Review Landscape

By Andy Beard | Published: May 24, 2007

Pay Per Post had first mover advantage within the paid review arena, and initially concentrated on providing a framework for the purchase of mass market buzz marketing. Competing services such as ReviewMe and Sponsored Reviews were launched, and these concentrated on one-to-one requests for professional reviews.

Dan from the Venture Capital Florida Blog, who is a managing partner of Inflexion Partners hinted to me in a quick email exchange that Pay Per Post had some very significant changes coming in the very near future, and he was certainly right.

Halfway through writing this review of PayPerPost Direct I

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Results: Top Wordpress Plugins (April 2007)

By Andy Beard | Published: May 7, 2007

It is hard work giving money away, and it seems it is hard work voting for which Wordpress plugin author should receive $100.

Whilst it might appear that there was an increase of votes this time around, with 29 votes instead of 24, that doesn’t allow for the fact that 8 votes were added as a bonus. Thus there were only 21 fresh votes.

Read more on Results: Top Wordpress Plugins (April 2007)…

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PayPerPost Buys Zookoda – Maybe I Got The Jump On Techcrunch

By Andy Beard | Published: April 24, 2007

Zookoda
A few days ago I saw a number of my readers had grabbed an “opp” with PayPerPost to predict the acquisition they were going to announce this week, in fact today.

Read more on PayPerPost Buys Zookoda – Maybe I Got The Jump On Techcrunch…

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Google Paid Links – Google Sliding Down The Slippery Slope of Evildom

By Andy Beard | Published: April 16, 2007

Matt Cutts has again been writing about paid links and has also jumped into the sponsored themes discussion, invoking the power of the Google Webspam team from behind the protection of a carefully worded disclaimer.
As Matt says:-

Read more on Google Paid Links – Google Sliding Down The Slippery Slope of Evildom…

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Bloggers Choice Awards – Blog Awards Go Social

By Andy Beard | Published: April 8, 2007

Bloggers Choice AwardsWhat do you get when you combine some backend functionality similar to MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog with a Blogging Award?

The Bloggers Choice Awards

Here are some key points

  • Accountability – you can see the unique votes and who voted – they do ask for some personal details from the voters which I think is a good thing for that accountability. If they ever release the demographics it will be interesting

Read more on Bloggers Choice Awards – Blog Awards Go Social…

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PayPerPost | Ted Murphy vs Jason Calacanis The Ultimate Showdown?

By Andy Beard | Published: March 27, 2007

For some this will already be old news, but I feel I have to include this video just to show impartiality when discussing disclosure, paid posts and Jason Calacanis.

I first started to watch on Sunday morning, and as was typical with my connection, even at Podtech’s lowest quality setting, it was watch 10 seconds of video, wait 30 seconds for it to cache some more.
Then for some reason the stream connection broke and didn’t restart. The payer insisted that I start watching from the beginning again – no chance.

Read more on PayPerPost | Ted Murphy vs Jason Calacanis The Ultimate Showdown?…

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WOMMA Should Watch Who They Quote And Especially Who They Link To!

By Andy Beard | Published: March 20, 2007

I came across an interesting piece on the WOMMA blog that unfortunately falls well short of what you would expect from such an organisation.

As always I am not a lawyer, and this is just for entertainment purposes. I am sure WOMMA have some lawyers though, so they really should take a lot more care with what they state and how they state it.

Read more on WOMMA Should Watch Who They Quote And Especially Who They Link To!…

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Sponsored Reviews Now Live – In Depth Review

By Andy Beard | Published: March 12, 2007

Yep this is a sponsored review, though it was something I was intending to write about anyway, to announced that Sponsored Reviews is now live and available for both advertisers and bloggers.

Read more on Sponsored Reviews Now Live – In Depth Review…

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Is PayPerPost The Only Subject Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis Agree On?

By Andy Beard | Published: March 7, 2007

PayPerPost’s Ted Murphy sent an email to Valleywag asking if they would be interested in doing paid posts. As would be expected the email was posted, and drew some criticism.

Scandal

Read more on Is PayPerPost The Only Subject Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis Agree On?…

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Disclosure Policy Feedburner Feedflare

By Andy Beard | Published: February 6, 2007

For many people, my Disclosure Policy Plugin was looked on as overkill. It seemed all they really wanted was an overall disclosure policy on their site, and to use a link in their sidebar.
Adding something to their feed content was generally looked on as a good idea, but all the additional functionality wasn’t really required.

Read more on Disclosure Policy Feedburner Feedflare…

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Paid Reviews Hots Up

By Andy Beard | Published: January 15, 2007

SponsoredReviews.com enters the payed posts arena joining Pay Per Post and Reviewme. In many ways continuing a review model that has been around for more than 5 years. I read it first on Techcrunch, but looks like Blog Herald got the scoop.

Read more on Paid Reviews Hots Up…

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Performancing | PayPerPost Deal Off

By Andy Beard | Published: January 5, 2007

Nick Wilson has announced that the deal is off.

In some way it is a shame as I believe PayPerPost could have steered metrics into something exceptional.

I will still most likely use it more, but only if I can host the open source application myself without providing it as a service. I wouldn’t want to use a service that is hosted by a “bunch of SEOs” i.e. potential competitors.

Read more on Performancing | PayPerPost Deal Off…

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Paid Links | Hindsight gives perspective

By Andy Beard | Published: December 29, 2006

Paid Links

It is five years, almost to the day that Yahoo started charging $299 per year for a listing in their directory as this article on Pandia clearly illustrates.

The main benefit of being in the Yahoo directory isn’t traffic, it is pagerank / trustrank. Who actually uses the Yahoo directory for anything other than listing their own sites?
It is many years since I went to Yahoo to lookup an entry for anything other than a competitor in a niche.

Read more on Paid Links | Hindsight gives perspective…

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Disclosure Ethics and Pay Per Post

By Andy Beard | Published: December 21, 2006

I have been offline for a few days, so time to play catchup.

Techcrunch and Pay Per Post seem to have a love/hate relationship. Who will Techcrunch write about now that Pay Per Post with their requirement of disclosure can no longer be pinpointed.

Read more on Disclosure Ethics and Pay Per Post…

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Nofollow | SEO & Dynamic Linking | Disclosure

By Andy Beard | Published: December 3, 2006

Here are some more links discussing the use of NoFollow for SEO purposes.

Seo Blog has a solid overview of how each search engine treats nofollow.
I am not sure the final conclusion regarding Yahoo and treating nofollow for ranking purposes is correct. I know many people who have done well with blog comments with Yahoo search, even on blogs using nofollow. I haven’t got any recent data.

Read more on Nofollow | SEO & Dynamic Linking | Disclosure…

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Disclosure Policy Generator

By Andy Beard | Published: October 31, 2006

Payperpost have launched a new site DisclosurePolicy.org, which features a very simple disclosure policy generator.

They provide you with a series of example phrases which you select, and eventually generate a final Disclosure Policy.

Read more on Disclosure Policy Generator…

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  • RAP Bank

    I have just signed up for RAP Bank myself - call this a mini-review.
    It seems to be one of the smartest ideas for a long time as a great way to consolidate 100s of affiliate programs under a single entity for promotion.

    It is also one of the best implementations of WordPress I have ever seen.
    It is not without its bugs, as this is effectively pre-launch. For example I just found a bug in the keyword based search RSS feeds (yes RSS feeds for any term will be hot), but it looks like they might be onto a winner.
    Check it out - signup for the basic service is free.

    >Affiliate Program

    P.S. It is not immediately obvious who is running the site, but looking at my Paypal receipt (yes I signed up for Vendor Plus) I believe the site is run by Bill Ortell From Rap-Extras.com who is RAP certified and does the membership add-on that is highly popular.