PageRankGate ’07

One of the frustrating but entertaining things about the Internet is how different forums can become echo chambers for a specific point of view or interpretation of events. Lately, I’ve been reading PayPerPost member forums, and my starting to read them coincided with something that’s been disastrous for many users, especially those who make their whole living from paid blogging. Google made some PageRank adjustments that penalized bloggers who are part of PayPerPost, and possibly other pay-to-blog services. You can read about this in Wired here, and from PayPerPost’s parent company, Izea, here.

I use PayPerPost (PPP) very carefully. I find it an interesting concept, and I can also use the money. I think there’s an art into weaving sponsored posts into a blog in a way that’s seamless and seems organic, and of using the required links as a writing prompt instead of just blatant advertising. As a fan of suck.com from back in the day (“the day” being “1996″), I like to put a lot of links in my posts that lead to entirely random places anyway.

A lot of people involved in PPP are, to be blunt, not very good at it. Other than the ads their blogs also have Adsense blocks and other advertising. When someone does it well, though, it’s inspiring. New York Traveler, a blog I started reading recently, is quite good at using PPP seamlessly–often she puts up posts that I wouldn’t have realized were ads if they didn’t have the disclaimer and/or I hadn’t seen the advertiser’s listing myself. This is a clever way to pay the hosting bill or an insidious intrusion on Internet content, depending on how you look at it.

In any case, some people are blaming a Vast Left-Coast Conspiracy centered around the competition between PayPerPost and Google for the average blogger’s advertising space. This is crap. First, Adsense rewards people with higher traffic than the average blog–it takes a long time to build up to that first $100 check. I’ve been running Adsense on Rodent Break for almost three years now and just passed $40.00. (Maybe it would be more effective if I didn’t get as many ads for pest control and lab rat breeding.) For better or worse, you can get a much faster turnaround from PPP because they use PayPal and don’t have a minimum payout.

I don’t see Adsense and PPP as direct competitors. Adsense is seen on non-blog sites, and PPP has a very specific application that involves selling space in the blog’s content. I don’t think that the drastic pagerank cuts were fair at all, but I do understand that Google is trying to keep their pagerank system credible. PPP advertisers’ favoring of higher-ranked blogs and use of anchor text makes it clear that many of them are not going to start ignoring PageRank anytime soon. Most Internet users use Google, and that’s a large part of what advertisers are using our blogs to boost. Not their traffic, but the relationship between their sites and the keywords they want associated with those sites….in Google.