Rock Ranking
Since late 2006 I’ve been subscribed to RockStartup, an online reality tv-show that follows the development of a company known as PayPerPost (now IZEA). I’ve loved watching the show; seeing inside a well-provisioned web-based company and all the dot-com hilarity that ensues. However, I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the company’s main product “PayPerPost”.
PPP, in a nutshell, allows advertisers to create “opps” which are opportunities to blog (essentially). Bloggers can accept an opp, write a story based on that opp (usually something about a new product) and get a cheque for the trouble. Generally the post doesn’t have to be positive and the post must have a disclaimer so the readers know it is essentially a payed ad.
As I sit here in Adelaide airport waiting for my boarding call I got to reading a Wired magazine article on PayPerPost which enlightened me to the fact that Google has now added a “Search and destroy” feature to it’s spiders so that any blog with a “backed” post awards the offending blog a big fat zero on the PageRank-o-meter.
Somehow this seems somewhat hypocritical considering that Google’s biggest revenue-raker is advertising and particularly ads in-a-page. As stated, I’m not 100% sold on the PPP thing and I’m certainly not a member, so to a degree I understand that ads disguised as posts is an issue. But, PPP requires their bloggers to disclose which posts are money makers and something about Google vetoing a websites’ PageRank in this circumstance just smells funny.
