Google Still Hating on Paid Blogs Posts
Back in the day you could buy your way to the top of Google by purchasing text links on various high-ranking websites. Then came paying bloggers to write about your company or product with a few in-content text links to boost your rankings. About 1 1/2 ago Google came with the smack-down and punished bloggers and companies that were using these methods or artificially increase their SEO rankings. Page Rank took a hit every where and people started panicing that the text link industry was dead. But is that really true? According to another recent report, sponsored blog posts are still taboo and the bloggers that do them could face penalites from the mighty Google.
So, it is just a bunch of scare tactics to take more wind out of the text link and paid-post industry? There is a dilema here…Bloggers need to earn a living with their blogs and selling advertising is a major way to increase blog revenue. Of course Google would just love everyone to put up Adsense on their blogs and call it a day. But guess what, Adsense doesn’t really have that high a yield for a lot of topics, so bloggers and webmasters have to use other ways to generate their revenue.
Personally I think if the merchant review is a genuine one based on the an actual review of the company or product I don’t see an issue with the blogger charging for a post. Does this really sway the search results in favor of the advertiser? Anyone that follows SEO or is involved in it knows that building your inbound links is still an effective way of raising your search rankings. Google has claimed it’s all about content quality, but can they really determine which content is better than others and which should be ranked higher? Because the answer is likely still no at this point, we can only assume that Google is still using other site factors like: site longevity, frequence of site updates, amounts of fresh content, how many inbound links you have, etc. This is why Google is stil hating on paid blogging, because they have to rely on these aspects of ther algorythm to determine rankings. The sponsored blogs can artificially sway the algorythm, so Google has to come out and warn against them. Personally, I would avoid doing many paid blog posts or paid text links. I think in the right circumstances they can work, but have to be done very carefully, through very legit sources. As fars as the “no follow” attribute, this is probaby a good idea for bloggers to do because the paid post can still benefit the advertiser as long as the post pulls some organic search rankings for the advertiser. At the end of the day, gaining a new organic listing for a competitive search phrases can still benefit the advertiser by providing a likely buyer that just read a review of their product or service.
Some good natural ways to increase your inbound links are posting on “do follow” forums and blogs. On forums you can set-up your signature links and really gain some nice inbound links by posting your butt off. Also doing really good blog commenting can gain you traffic and an organic boost. Blog commenting and forum posting has to be done very well and in volume to work effectively. Back in the day, black-hat SEOers would comment spam thousands of blogs and gain inbound links that way. Thankfully those days are over! I’d love to hear your opinion on Google’s rankings and paid blog posts.
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