Just when you thought the Internet couldn’t become any more cynical, along comes Payperpost.com, a site that pays “professional bloggers” to pimp products and services. Here’s the deal: if you have a blog, you can pick from a list of products and services to write about, and each one has a bounty that you will earn once your article is posted and approved by the company that’s paying for it.
For those of you who don’t have a background in journalism, there is supposed to be a huge, big, massive, ginormous brick wall between Editorial and Sales. That means that editorial should never be influenced by the people who pay the publication, but Payperpost flies right in the face of convention and does exactly that.
After running along completely without ethics for their first few months, they have now added a disclosure requirement thanks to FTC regulations, so their bloggers have to disclose that they were paid to post their articles. Okay, so it’s okay to be a slut as long as you disclose that you’re a slut, I suppose.
What really interests me, however, is the possible implications for search engines, and in particular, Google, who put a lot of weight on inbound links. A key point to think about here is that despite their happy, shiny marketing copy Payperpost will not be used by professional bloggers. A real blogger lives and dies by her reputation for honesty and impartiality, so they could never afford to put a disclosure on their site saying that they were paid for an article – their reputation would be shot, and it would be all over. Payperpost isn’t hiring professional bloggers, they’re hiring paid bloggers.
So, what good does it do to hire someone to write about your product if their blog isn’t a big, popular one? I’ll tell you: if you hire enough of them, the collective weight of their links to your site will give you more weight in Google. Although it isn’t written anywhere on their site, Payperpost’s purpose seems to be to help companies increase their Google rankings, so they can drive cost-effective traffic to their sites.
With dozens or hundreds of bloggers writing about your product, it shouldn’t be too hard to build a high relevancy rating at Google. Just tell the bloggers to link to your site using the text “Green widgets” and to talk about green widgets in their articles a lot, and before long you’ll show up on Google when people search for “green widgets.”
So what is a search engine to do? Google can try to give less weight to these paid blogs, but it’s essentially impossible for a machine-driven search engine to tell which blogs are paid and which aren’t, so Google will doubtlessly be fooled, and may end up full of spammy links thanks to little old Payperpost.
The only definite solution is to go social. People (as a whole) know what’s good and what isn’t, and will filter out the garbage that’s being linked to from a hundred paid blogs. Jimmy Wales is apparently working on a new social search, but it’s quite a ways off from being relevant. Perhaps Social Q&A will step up to fill the void?
