Comments on: Matt Cutts Discusses Paid Blog Posts…Again

By: harranmaben

harranmaben — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 08:38:52 +0000

very nice and informative post justin, you have elaborately learn whole topic, and now i am convinced with your thoughts, i have made my blog yesterday dofollow for commentators because i thought they will have some benefits if they are genuine, for us we can easily judge our readers and their comments but for algorithm it is more difficult then we estimating. very serious issue this is. hope that google will find any way to fight against this dramatic issue.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:34:15 +0000

Since I don’t see it as competitors, I’ll say that it depends a lot of whether someone gets irritated enough at a blogger that they then go and report someone to Google. I don’t think either of us will have that kind of worry, but it’s really no matter because all that might happen is that you won’t end up with any page rank, and let’s face this fact; almost all of our blog posts have no page rank anyway.

By: Justin

Justin — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:14:58 +0000

You bring up a great point, Mitch. I think that Google isn’t going to penalize you on its own unless your html code makes it obvious that it is a paid review (ie coding from a website like payperpost). My concern is if a competitor reports one of my sites as having paid links in order to gain an advantage. Hopefully Google will honestly look into these reports before taking any drastic action. I would be interested in seeing if anyone from Google has addressed either of our concerns yet.

I’ll have to search around and see what I can find.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:19:20 +0000

It's an interesting topic, Justin, and I'm thinking that it's also a dangerous topic in a way. I tend to write a lot of reviews on my blog, and I don't get paid for any of them. I made that a policy a long time ago, and the only review I wrote when the person knew it was coming was when I held a contest and that was the prize. Now, Google could come along and ban my site for writing paid reviews, but I haven't written any. I also haven't added the "nofollow" because, one, my blog is a dofollow blog, and two, this is supposed to be America, where we're innocent until proven guilty, and one would hope that I wouldn't be presumed as guilty if they came to me and wanted me to prove that I wasn't paid. I mean, how would one prove that something didn't happen if there was no prior contact anyway? So, we'll see how it all goes. I do fully understand, though, their issue with those folks who write paid reviews, and it can be traced back to a certain company, because they feel it throws off the algorithm. However, in the long run, just because something may be paid for doesn't necessarily mean it's not the best place for a person to go for whatever their needs happen to be, right? Mitch’s last blog post..The Keys