Last month, Matt Cutts gave strong hints that selling text links ads or writing product reviews for money could harm your blog rankings in the Google Search engine unless you embed the rel=nofollow tag:You want my links for traffic.. totally fine..just don't make it so they affect search engines..so that's why we say use nofollow..or use a redirect which is through robots.txtJason now points to another comment of Matt where he has reiterated the whole thing in a much clear fashion:
Google wants to do a good job of detecting paid links. Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.The outgoing links from your website / blog is a factor while Google calculates the relative importance of your site.
Our suggestion - Always play nice with Google since that will help you (and your site) in the long run. Infact, it is very tough to match the advertising revenue generated from search engine traffic with regular or return site visitors.
The future of "paid blogging" sites like ReviewMe or Payperpost is doesn't look very bright anymore.
Related Tutorial: How to Use Rel=NoFollow ?
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/12/stop-writing-reviews-for-money-or-face.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
How about Text Link Ads? TechCrunch promotes them enthusiastically and even has them as their primary sponsors.
Is it fair for Google to dictate fair-market link prices? After all, if links are a commodity to be traded, so be it. We don't disparage newspapers or television because they accept ads, do we?
Written on 12/12/06 2:18 AM
Thank you for the tips
Written on 12/12/06 2:47 AM
And how will google know if the link or post is paid for?
Written on 12/12/06 3:08 AM
I have offered a solution for it in my post "Pay per post is a sweet poison for bloggers".
Hope you will find it useful.
Written on 14/12/06 12:01 AM
Aji - I like that term "Sweet Poison" - sums up the whole situation.
Written on 14/12/06 12:09 AM
Also do not worry about Matt. It will be a big task and a bigger pain for him and his team to track paid posts. Google works on a simpler policy "smoke and mirror".
Only concern is for the Maven reputation that bloggers have now.
Written on 14/12/06 12:21 AM
The biggest argument against Pay Per Post is disclosure.
They haven't defined how their members should disclose, and leave it to the blogosphere to unravel what is the best way to handle it.
Over the last couple of days the FTC statement has been used as a way to also point the finger at pay per post, when in fact members of PPP earn so little for a a review it is insignificant compared to the earnings made by affiliates doing book reviews for instance.
There is nothing forcing a PPP writer to write something about a particular site. Advertisers are allowed to ask for only positive reviews, but noone forces anyone who doesn't like the site to write about it.
If you read some of what some lawyers have said regarding the most recent FTC opinion, affiliates who write reviews about products should be making a disclaimer as well.
Successful affiliates have a lot more financial reward from writing a review than any PPP writer.
As for Google, there has also been recently quoted a panel where a rep from all the top engines each confirmed that if there was just an occasional post, interspersed with other unique content, there is nothing to worry about.
The easiest way to handle disclosure on a Wordpress blog is my recently released disclosure policy plugin (under GPL)
Written on 14/12/06 10:21 PM
Matt Cutts screams in other words... BUY GOOGLE ADWORDS.
Yes, Google want us to forget all other advertising forms and only use Google Adwords & Adsense
Written on 30/12/06 6:05 AM
Does this means we have to close our Text_link_Ads account?
Please Amit write on this issue clearly as TLA is second largest income source for small bloggers like me as we don't have big reader base to sell products or amazon stuff! :-(
Also one more thing! Won't "rel=nofollow" will trouble TLA! As most TLA advertisers are interested in TextLink for search engine ranking as oppose to advertising!
Written on 16/8/07 7:35 PM