Business Blog

PLOG: A blog that is monetized via pay per post and paid site reviews.

(I’m sure there are other acronyms, but I’m coining this one for this post…. )

The argument has raged on for a couple of years now whether or not it’s kosher to do paid reviews and offer paid links on your blog. But there are some that still insist that this is not a problem and that they rank well in the search engines.

Which may be true. For now.

But some of these bloggers are not listening to the stern warnings handed down from the Google Gods. Who have made it extremely clear that if these links are not marked with a “nofollow” tag or somehow otherwise controlled, (robots.txt configuration, etc) that they will be found and penalized.

Here’s a quote from Matt Cutts who works for the Search Quality group in Google:

“It should be clear from Google’s stance on paid text links, but if you are blogging and being paid by services like Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, or SponsoredReviews, links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.”

In the same page, he goes on to clarify that this also can greatly effect the site paying for the links.

“If someone is buying text links to try to rank higher on search engines, they’re already doing something intended more for search engines than for users.”

In fact, the page is all about how people can report paid links directly to Google. Kind of a “snitch squad” composed of every webmaster that uses Google Webmaster Tools.

So back to PLOGS and anyone considering using this method to monetize. In a word, DON’T!

The money you can make is minimal compared to other ways you can make money blogging. If you built the blog specifically for the purpose of making paid blog posts, then know that you will probably someday be penalized for it. You may have good ranking now, but it’s very likely that you’ll lose that ranking in the near future.

Probably the most famous example of this in recent news is John Chow and his very popular blog. Which, if you do a Google search for John Chow you’ll see that his site is nowhere to be found.

Why?

Because he broke the rules and Google punished him for it. Now he doesn’t even rank for his own name. Granted, the publicity he’s received has probably close to evened off his traffic losses, but I’m going to bet that he’s still kind of sad that he lost all of his listings. You can certainly bet that it had an impact on his bottom line and advertising revenue. Even if he says it didn’t.

Ultimately, it’s Google’s decision as to how they can continue to provide the best search results to their users. Let’s never forget, it’s their website. They can decide that they want us all to wear funny yellow hats and post a picture of it on our site in order to get listed. An extreme example, but let’s be clear, we want to run our websites the way we want to, why is that so many website owners want to groan when Google says they want theirs run a certain way too?

Simple. If you want to continue to get listed, you play by the rules. If you want to rank better, read what they have to say. Many of the mysteries in SEO are not mysterious at all. Google and the other engines post them on their blogs and in their webmaster sections, for all the world to see.

All you have to do is take the time to read it. Or talk to someone in the know.

Like me.

If you would like to discuss search engine optimization for your blog or website, give me a call. My office number is at the top of this web page. I’d be happy to discuss white hat, acceptable methods for optimizing your pages.

Tags: Blog SEO, Google, John Chow, Matt Cutts, seo, SPLOGS

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