A Time of Magic

Going by the uproar in some blogging sites, Googles latest pagerank review has very squarely targetted those blogs that write paid posts this time around.

The reason they’ve done that is, in principle, simple: they don’t like people buying links. Of course, it isn’t as simple as that because they’ve not (yet) gone after directories accepting paid links yet they are very much aimed at a straight payment for a link. The snag is that they’d then need to remove some fairly major sites from their directory including yahoo so this probably isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Instead they’ve targetted the little guy who writes an article with a link and gets paid for that. The money for those concerned can be quite significant yet is peanuts compared to the charges that, say, yahoo collects. After all, a typical blogger would get $500 to $1000 per month vs $300 per link that yahoo gets.

So what’s the difference? Well, the problem for Google is that the articles provide links in context which therefore do pretty well within the Google index whereas a paid link in a directory (even if it’s yahoo) doesn’t do nearly so well in relative terms.

Of course the problem with Googles approach is that these articles might well be paid but that doesn’t stop them being relevant to what people are searching for. Effectively deleting those taking paid posts from the index just devalues the index. Besides, when are they planning on removing the paid adverts that they take themselves?

Related posts:

1. Lost your pagerank and want to get it back?
2. How are blogs picked up and published anyway?
3. Where should you host your website?
4. Money from thin air?
5. Will everything eventually be “free”?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 9:56 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.