Make Money has noticed that there is rather a hoo-ha going on at the moment with the recent page rank changes. Lots of high PR sites were demoted and in some cases quite drastically. The conjecturing has been widespread and lots of points of view been aired.
My very good friend Grizzly Brears posted an extremely in-depth article on this subject on his blog, Make Money For Beginners. Here’s the gist of it, although I highly recommend you follow that link and go read his post for yourself.
The most popular theory for the PR drop is that the sites and blogs that suffered the worst were those that were selling links. Ok, but it doesn’t stop with the obvious programs like Text Link Ads. It also seems that Google was sending out a warning to all bloggers to refrain from selling links AND from writing paid reviews to make money, which if you read between the lines is just another way of selling links.
That has been made all the more clear by the restrictions placed on bloggers by sites like PayPerPost who enforce the rule that links required to be placed in the review must not be altered in any way. That prevents the blogger from adding things like Target=”_blank” to force the link to open in a new window or tab, and more importantly rel=”_nofollow” to stop the search engine spiders from following the link to the site and endowing it with link juice.
Here’s my take on this.
I was already writing paid reviews to make money for PPP on my older and more established blog, The Honest Way when Google gave it a PR3. One could conjecture that if the big G wanted to stamp on blogs writing paid reviews to make money, it wouldn’t have been given the PR3 in the first place.
Another thought is that PPP don’t just accept high PR blogs for reviews. The Honest Way was PR0 when it was accepted and there were always paid reviews to write. Why would PPP bother with low PR minnows if it only wanted to see high ranking link juice?
Curiouser and curiouser!
Another thing. PR is absolutely useless unless you’re going to use it to make money.
Traffic is king for selling affiliate products. It’s a numbers game - the more visitors you get through the door the better chance a fair percentage of them will buy the product and you make money that way.
Losing ground in Google’s SERPs may be a blow, but not a fatal one, as there is still Yahoo and other search engines who make up the other 50% of searches and they don’t have a page ranking system as such. Meaning they don’t penalize you for selling text links or writing paid reviews to make money!
I get a lot of traffic from Yahoo especially to some of my niche squidoo lenses which do make money, so there will always be “life after Google” - assuming that Google will go for the jugular and try to kill off the likes of PPP by tightening the thumb screws around the blogs who write for them.
But will they?
What’s the difference (in the search engine’s eyes) between writing a 200 word review of a website (and including a link) in your blog to make money and writing a 400 word article (with your link) and posting it in an article directory?
One you make money from and the other brings you traffic and link juice to your own site. But Google doesn’t have the ability to see the difference! At least not yet.
The way around the apparent problem of text links for money is to add the rel=”_nofollow” to the anchor tag for paid links and take a chance that the paid review sites will let it go. Maybe you should wait until they’ve approved the post, but there is always the chance they will find out that you’ve altered the link and throw you out of the program.
Is losing a great deal of money worth the risk just on the conjecture that Google MIGHT be penalizing sites for writing paid reviews?
I wonder?
It gets worse. Apparently, there is also a scheme (I’m reliably informed) that the big G has introduced where it asks you to report sites that are writing paid reviews.
WHAT THE???
Now that is going too far. Big Brother at it’s worst. Snitch on your rivals to get them booted down a few rungs of the ladder and make yourself look good.
How disgraceful!
That’s pretty low and well below the belt. I sincerely hope it backfires spectacularly.
2 comments ↓
Hey Terry,
Great post and thanks as always for the mention.
It appears that the almighty Google can’t actually find a reliable way to track paid links and the sites that suffered from a PR drop for paid links were the result of a manual review rather than the algorithm. John Chow is the most obvious example but the fact that others like problogger had their PR drop reversed after the fact shows the likelihood that things were done manually.
It would explain why it seems that only the big well known sites were hit with penalties - they were easy to find. Sites like ours wouldn’t be so easy from a manual perspective. This is of course unproven but it is the best theory I’ve heard to date to explain the recent PR update.
Hope your enjoying sunny Spain - minus 5 C here and snowing yet again - just lovely! Ha.
Cheers,
Grizzly
Hi Grizzly,
I reckon that has to be the best explanation, especially as The Honest Way was already doing paid reviews and got a PR promotion. That would also explain why G is trying to set up a snitcher’s network to catch the evil wrongdoers - after all, how dare anyone try to make some money if it doesn’t involve the Gonster (now that’s a catchy term I just coined!).
It’s all quite pathetic when you really think about it!
By the way, snow is great when you can look at it from inside a nice warm house - going out in minus 5 sucks! It’s still in the low 20’s daytime here but the mercury is gradually falling… brrrr!!!
Terry
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