Tag Archives: sponsored reviews

Brain Solis and Techcrunch Blatantly Wrong About The Consequences Of Sponsored Reviews With Google

By Andy Beard | Published: May 26, 2009

Google does not penalize for paid or sponsored reviews but can penalize for paid or sponsored links that pass PageRank - Brian Solis & Techcrunch are blatantly wrong. 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.

Posted in Google, marketing | Also tagged Brian Solis, paid links, paid posts, paid reviews, techcrunch | Comments closed

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

Posted in Google, SEO Blog, blog monetization | Also tagged izea, nofollow, paid links, paid posts, payperpost, sponsored_posts, sponsor_links, techcrunch | Comments closed

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

Posted in Google, SEO Blog, blog monetization | Also tagged goog, Google, paid links, paid posts, paid reviews, payperpost, reviewme | Comments closed

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

Posted in Google, blog monetization, blogging tips, marketing | Also tagged gevil, goog, Google, paid links, paid posts, paid reviews, payperpost, reviewme | Comments closed

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

Posted in marketing | Also tagged paid posts, paid reviews, payperpost, review_me | Comments closed

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

Posted in SEO Blog, blogging tips, plugins, themes, wordpress | Also tagged payperpost, reviewme, search engine optimization, SEO Blog, sphinn, wordpress, wordpress plugins, WordPress SEO, wordpress themes | Comments closed

OIOPublisher – Paid Reviews & Paid Links

By Andy Beard | Published: August 15, 2007

OIO Publisher There 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

Posted in blog monetization | Also tagged paid links, paid posts, paid reviews, payperpost, reviewme, text_links, wpbankroll, wptextads | Comments closed

ReviewMe & Sponsored Reviews Updated

By Andy Beard | Published: June 25, 2007

Just a quickie…

I noticed that both Review Me and Sponsored Reviews have fixed their subscriber counts, and for those people using SEO For Firefox, you can see that that is now also reporting Bloglines subscribers correctly.

Posted in blog monetization | Also tagged paid posts, paid reviews, review_me | Comments closed

The Easiest Way To Pull Yourself Out Of Supplemental Results Hell?

By Andy Beard | Published: April 23, 2007

For those that don’t know, “supplemental results” are the bane of search engine optimization specialists.

Here is a great explanation of supplemental results from Rockyfied

Google Supplemental Results: Google supplemental results take pages on your site that have been indexed and put them into a sub database in Google. Supplemental results do not rank well but rather Google uses its supplemental DB to populate its results when they donâ€™t have enough results to show in a given query. This means pages on your site in Googleâ€™s supplemental DB will not help you in the serps.

Posted in SEO Blog | Also tagged paid links, search engine optimization, SEO Blog, sponsored_posts, supplemental_results | Comments closed

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:-

Posted in blog monetization | Also tagged Google, matt cutts, paid links, paid posts, payperpost, ppp, reviewme, webspam | Comments closed

I Bet You Missed Some of These (March 07)

By Andy Beard | Published: April 1, 2007

These are some highlights (in my opinion) of some of the content I have created over the last month. If I have missed anything out which you enjoyed or gained some value from, please let others know in the comments.

Posted in SEO Blog, plugins, reviews, web 2.0, wordpress | Also tagged aweber, blogging, blogging tips, blogs, blogsearch, can_spam, citations, digg, disclosure, dofollow, getresponse, gmail, google_blog_search, mybloglog, nofollow, pay per post, plagiarism, plugins, press, product_launch_formula, reddit, reviews, smm, smo, smpt, smtp_server, sociable, social-bookmarks, social_tagging, stampede_traffic, stumbleupon, subscribe_to_comments, tag, tagging, technorati, top_commenters, traffic_strategy, twitter, ultimate tag warrior, wordpress | Comments closed

ReviewMe Affiliate Program

By Andy Beard | Published: February 28, 2007

Coupon Code: trial
50% discount

ReviewMe have just launched their affiliate program, I am actually in 2 minds about it but will be displaying the badge in a prominent position for a few weeks in my header to see how things go.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged affiliate_program, paid reviews, reviewme | Comments closed

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.

Posted in Projects | Also tagged disclosure, feedburner, feedflare, payperpost, ppp, reviewme | Comments closed

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.