Google Penalizes Pay-Per-Post Bloggers
Izea CEO Ted Murphy made a recent post about Google’s new “modification” of PageRank. It seems that Pay-Per-Post bloggers have had their PageRank dropped to zero overnight prompting Murphy to claim, “Google has proven that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance.”
This incident has created a lot of buzz about whether Google has a noble end in mind or if they are simply trying to defend a “monopolistic stranglehold” as Murphy says on search and online advertising.
Pay-Pre-Post bloggers are required to say somewhere on their site that they use Pay-Per-Post, but it isn’t necessary in individual posts. This may be the reason for Google’s PageRank punishment – the search giant may be trying to maintain their search purity and avoid misleading searchers with paid posts. Murphy, however, believes that Google is working against bloggers that make a living from the Pay-Per-Post services they offer simply to prevent AdSense competition.
Surprisingly enough, the sites that had a drop in PageRank haven’t really seen any adverse affects such as a drop in traffic. If this remains true, then many people believe the point of Google’s dropping the blogs’ PageRank to zero may be something else entirely. Some believe it’s a move by Google to show how unimportant PageRank actually is. However, others believe that Google’s internal results have shown that paid links and Pay-Per-Post blogs do adversely effect organic search and therefore want to stop these activities immediately.
Either way, it currently seems that PageRank has little or no effect on traffic and so if your site has been doing well as is then you should be fine in search terms.
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