Google Goes After PayPerPost
written by John Chow
If trying to beat up Text Link Ads wasn’t enough, Google has got its sights on a new target: PayPerPost. CEO Ted Murphy is claiming that Google is going after bloggers in the PayPerPost network and reducing their PageRank from whatever they previously had to zero. That’s right, zero!
Murphy is of course calling foul for what he see as Google trying to defend their “monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising.”
It is no coincidence that Google has gone after some blogs that utilize PayPerPost and many of our competitors services. We offer a very attractive alternative to AdSense and are leading a charge to provide real monetization for everyday bloggers. Unlike the Google AdSense black box, we are palms up when it comes to revenue share and give bloggers the lions share of advertising dollars that they deserve.
Murphy also took a shot at TechCrunch, asking how come Google doesn’t de-rank them for making posts that thank their sponsors.
I find it laughable that high profile bloggers like TechCrunch aren’t being penalized in the same way. Perhaps it’s the fact that they use AdSense. Perhaps it’s the fact that they are silicon valley insiders and are invited to special Google events. Either way I don’t see the difference between a sponsored post in our system or this sponsored post. Both are paid for, neither use no-follow.
TechCrunch rebutted Murphy’s statement in this post.
In what looks like an attempt to fight back against the Google machine, PayPerPost’s parent company, IZEA, is working on something call RealRank (code named Project Goo Gone), an alternative to Google PageRank. Hopefully, that works better than the Blogger Choice Awards. Have your PageRank been affected for being a PayPerPost publisher?
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Wow! This is crazy Google!
Google is starting to piss off a lot of people and companies. Is this now a turning point from their ethos of just “not being evil”? Have GooGle had enough of being the nice guys and are now turning on the internet users because they have gained such a huge market share that it just doesnt matter any more?
I went from 4/10 to 0/10 in the last page rank update, so yea, it affected me.
its effecting everyone i know!
i think google is just making a point. they will eventually get back to being google and make everyone happy.
Ok, as some of the regular readers may have noticed that I have defended Google about the TLAs issue, but I think I will slam Google this time. I mean, punishing someone who writes a sponsored post is just totally absurd!
Hey Google! - What’s next huh? PUNISH PEOPLE USING ADSENSE! What idiots!
Money control is the only thing that comes in my mind. I actually got upset about all the penalizations when problogger gained its pagerank back, its than when I really felt that Google hits your pocket and doesn’t really care much about the algorithm but rather to have the control of the money and sit back on the seat who they think is dangerous.
that by itself shows the worthlessness of pageranks…google “Page rank” can be renamed “bitch rank”,nothing based on quality…they give you page ranks if you oblige them…
I was at PR4, then I went to a 3, then to a 1, now I’m at zero. The process took 2 weeks.
I have a bunch of other sites with static crappy text that get 1-2 visitors a week. Yes, a week!!! They went from PR0 to PR2.
I know, it is a very
time
PR5 to PR0 … this sucks for me
“RealRank” Haha. I just find it funny how Google are destroying their own ranking system. Unless they heavily penalize the actual serps rank and not just the ‘toolbar’ pagerank its all a joke.
That will be next.
When that starts to happen then Goog’s SERPs will begin to become a lot less relavant.
Google is acting like a silly child right now, if they don’t change, everyone will start using Yahoo.
I couldn’t care less. I’ve got a 0 two days ago, but the traffic is actually up, and so are the earnings. It’s true that I’m shown very weak PPP opportunities, but I wasn’t writing that much anyway, so the loss is minimum.
I have the same happening here, but then I only realized that my PR got bumped to 0 just now. However the search engine traffic today and in the last few days was not affected at all.
Yeah. Same here, my pagerank is 0 now. I have since removed TLA and pay-per-post stuffs for the time being. But, my traffic is actually increasing.
At first I didn’t really care that my 6 dropped to a 3 - hey Argus was coming so nothing to worry about. It quickly became apparent that PPP didn’t view my see it the same way since all the good opps dried right up. They really fucked up in peoples eyes by not grandfathering the high PR sites. Especially when they knew of the coming drastic Google PR changes.
Each actually got punished at PPP for our lowered pageranks. Now that boys and girls is totally fuc|<3d up. Don’t get me wrong. I love Izea to death but they treated us wrong on this one.
*hands up* My PR 5/10 blog and a big bunch of PR 4/10 dipped to zero. I can handle that because I reaped a lot of moolah already. But I have several sites that are static ones (on WP but I don’t update it, use it more as CMS) which got hit as well. These are community sites I run on a voluntary basis, using my own money, for bereaved parents and critically ill children. I guess I got bitched slapped across all my dozen plus blogs because of the association with PPP.
BTW, John, we are on Yahoo for make money keyword. You #6, me #8. Out of a BILLION pages. That’s why I had no choice but to severe ties with all paid posts and text links on my Make$ Money$ blog.
I read that Murphy also stated he thought Google was looking for words like ReviewMe and PayPerPost in text, and using that as a way to penalise people. Looks like sponsored posts should start thanking the sponsor if they want to disclose - keep who you are using out of the equation entirely. Failing that, just go ahead and don’t disclose - not the end of the world.
On a broader note, if MS was criticised for its desktop monopoly, then Google should be getting equal treatment for their attempted monopoly of the web (wait until their Mobile OS hits the phone market).
I second you simon. We all should dump google for trying to be the god of internet. Google doesn’t own internet, it’s just a search engine.
If google continues to do something like this, the fall of google is only a matter of time. I hope some one soon comes up with a better replacement of google.
Well John Chow is still using text link ads, so it’s all good!
But John Chow doesn’t care about what Google thinks. He got more power than them.
Yeah, he got slapped already… So, he fought back.
I’m not taking any chances… I just removed the PayPerPost snippet of code from my site.
Nothing new here - big boys trying to run the little guys out of town. It’s annoying but part of business life :/
Yeah, my PR5 blog plunged to PR0 in the last week - I had no idea why. Well, the $900 I make from PPP a month sure beats the $25 I make from AdSense!
Your comment put everything into perspective on the latest Google nuking!
Yeah, but how long are you going to be able to making $900 a month from PPP when your pagerank is 0?
I would say for quite a long time. PPP is going to replace PageRank (or just make it more obsolete in their opportunity system) in the next couple of weeks with RealRank.
More information here :http://community.izea.com/blog/2007/11/project-goo-gon.html
What site do you use PPP on? … not deepmarket i`m guessing.
Though I agree that PPP has been responsible for the proliferation of a lot of USELESS BLOGS, there are a few out there that spin the opportunities tastefully. It’s really not fair for them to kick them all. However, this isn’t the first time that PPP has been picked on. A while ago, Technorati curb stomped myself and a whole bunch of other blogs for dabbling in PPP.
Moving forward, I thought it was safer to not do PPP at all. I also felt better about myself because I didn’t have to give products “Positive” or “Neutral” reviews.
Unfortunately, it’s not just PPP that is being targeted, it’s many kinds of money making ventures that rely on linking… Google is trying to control the linking market, whether that is the direct object or not of the whole PR exercise. Hence, I am beginning to see ‘monopoly’ flashing everywhere as they try to bend everyone to THEIR will… It’s not just a question of whether you do or don’t do PPP… it’s a question of whether or not you link to external websites for any reason, and whether or not you are willing to use ‘no_follow’.
So, if you think you are free because you DON’T use PPP, then you really need to think again:
“When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent; I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent; I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews, I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
Am I being too dramatic?
Kenneth
Nope.
So when is Google going to penalize Techcrunch for using Text Link Ads?
TechCrunch doesn’t use Text Link Ads. Text Link Ads is a TechCrunch advertiser and sponsors. Now if Google starts going after sites that TLA advertises on, then that enters a whole new level of evil.
What is ironic is that you will find Google AdSense ads for TLA on sites that have lost PR for using TLA.
If Google was being evenhanded here they would penalize Techcrunch as well for being affiliated with TLA, just as they’ve punished other sites that have mentioned or advertised PayPerPost, yet did no sponsored posts (as many bloggers appear to be reporting).
I think Google is trying to say to those TLA publishers to watch out… mmm May be next target will be TLA and Sponsoredreviews?
I don’t think most bloggers who use PPP have anything to worry about. How is Google going to find all of them anyway? Besides for most of them the paid posts don’t remain on their homepage too long and since Google most likely doesn’t index them daily I doubt they have anytime to fear. I don’t use PPP myself but my friends do and their Google PR has remained the same so far.
They’re easy to find if you’re good at finding patterns in linking structures over the world wide web.
I wonder who might be good at detecting patterns in linking structures over the world wide web… Hmmm… :/
Wow. I started writing a post about why my PageRank dropped to 0. I didn’t even see this post yet or about Google going after PayPerPost. So I’m right too. I put a link from my post to this post to get some credibility. Man this sucks.
PageRank Drop to 0
i just went down to pr 0 today. it took my 3 month to build up a pr4 close to pr 5 blog and i took google 2 weeks to go from 4 to 2 and now from 2 to 0 !!!! there must be a way to strike back !!!
We’ll we can’t really do anything. Just hope for the best for RealRank.
You can do something. Ban Googlebot. Allowing Googlebot to crawl your site carries with it an unspoken agreement. You send me traffic, I contribute my content. Break that contract and lose your privilege.
What good would that do? As we can see from what just happened, you need Google, Google does not need you. You ban the bot, and you get delisted or get old content.
Cat and mouse game? More like the Terminator against Sarah Connor. Undoubtedly, these decisions will soon apply to ReviewMe too.
Maybe we should all start a revolt and get all our readers to start using Yahoo instead!!
It’s time we bloggers fight back!
We can replace:
Google search with Yahoo! or Dogpile;
Gmail with Yahoo! mail or Hotmail;
Google Reader with Bloglines;
Blogger with Wordpress or LiveJournal.
If Google keeps up its current nonsense, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing.
My blog Aaron Cook Dot Com™ suddenly went from a PR4 to a PR0, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why…unless it has to do with the PayPerPost widget I have on the main page. If that’s the case, then I think Google is crossing the line.
Just further proof that Google is evil.
I know a lot of people comment saying, “Well, it’s Google’s index, they can do what they want with it.” The problem with that line of thinking is that Google controls over 50% of search. Getting de-listed by Google can have a huge impact on your traffic.
How would those same people react if Alexa dropped them from their index because of the content of their site? As flawed as Alexa is it is also blind.
Remember, Google is an advertising company that uses search to sell it’s advertising inventory. They see anyone who is not running AdSense as a competitor. The easiest way to fight back is to remove AdSense from your site. Unless you