It is no secret that blogging is the emerging force in internet marketing. This is why even corporate giants come up with their own corporate blogs. Blogs are also updated regularly. This gives search engines fresh material daily for them to index. Because of the regularity of search engine indexing, blogs are therefore seen as a very appetizing vehicle for companies to market their products and services.

What’s In It For Advertisers?

When bloggers avail of an opportunity to write about an advertisers products and services in exchange for a fee. These bloggers are required to embed keywords and anchor texts within the post that they create and publish in their blogs.

Keywords are the phrases that internet users use to describe the things that they want to search for in the internet. Anchor texts on the other hand are the hyperlinked texts that are clickable and which points to another page on the web. In sponsored post speak, anchor-texts are keywords that are hyperlinked that points to the advertiser’s web site.

By requiring keywords to be placed in the same post where anchor-texts are located, advertisers get a three-way action from these sponsored posts.

1. Blogs already have their readership. Think of a crowd vewing a marvelous painting by an artist. All of a sudden an ad appears right in the middle of that painting. It becomes a curiosity and the viewers are tempted to get to know more about the ad. Thus the advertiser gets instant viewership.

2. Organic search. When an internet searcher keys in the keywords that matches those of the advertiser, the same ones that are required to be included in the sponsored post, chances are, the sponsored post comes out as one of the hits. Of course this depends on the competitiveness of the keyword.

When the searcher clicks on the post, again, the advertiser’s link is shown. The good thing about organic searches compared to the number 1 reason is that unless the post is deleted by the blogger, the advertiser gets exposure everytime there’s a keyword search and the bloggers link is clicked.

3. Also, by anchor-texting an advertisers site to a specific keyword, the advertiser gets points for that keyword in search engine rankings.

Requiring keywords and anchor-texts within a blogger’s post seems like a fair deal in exchange for a couple of dollars in the blogger’s point of view. Most bloggers usually start out posting free content, and if they are paid for doing what they love, then that’s just fantastic!

Unfortunately there’s more to sponsored posts than meets the eye. To the ordinary paid blogger, writing the post, including the keywords and the anchor-texts, posting it in his blog, and getting paid for it is pretty harmless. And it is. Except that in the general scheme of things, these harmless posts get Google’s attention.

Enter Google the Dragon

By embedding anchor texts for a specific company in a post, what some bloggers do not realize is that this counts as an inbound link for that company. In Google’s PR algorithm, this is considered 1 editorial vote. What this does to the linked company is that it actually raises his PageRank rating!

Consider this; let’s say Company A has set aside $10,000 in advertising. So he goes into an online advertising marketplace like PPP to advertise. Say for example that of that amount, 10% goes to PPP as their cut. The remaining $9,000 is distributed to bloggers as sponsored post opportunities. If for example, the cost per opportunity is $9, and as usually is the case, all these opportunities are easily snapped up by bloggers who’d like to earn money for a few keystrokes. Effectively, Company A gets a total of 1,000 inbound links that translate to 1000 editorial votes. And were only talking about $10,000 here. What if the amount is bigger? Imagine what that would do to Company A’s PR rating.

This is where things get interesting. Google believes that this practice of inbound linking via sponsored posts, runs rings around their PR algorithm. They have already shutdown linkfarms– those companies who offer a lot of inbound links for a specific fee as this practice skew up PR– and now sponsored posts act like a variation of linkfarms but with higher stakes involved.

Compromise Solution

Realizing the stakes involved, and somehow coming up with a compromise solution, Google called for the inclusion of the rel=”nofollow” tag in these links. The nofollow tag basically tells the search engine that the particular link should not be counted as an editorial vote for the linked company.

This is how it works:

Ordinarily, links within the post looks this way;

With the nofollow tag, here is how it should look like.

<-a href="http://www.CompanyA.com" rel="nofollow">Penalize Me<-/a>

All Google was asking then was to include this attribute to the sponsored links so it wouldn’t mess with their PR ratings. Unfortunately, this was either deemed unacceptable by these online marketplaces or perhaps they thought that it was all just idle talk.

Advertiser’s anchored texts continued to fester all over the blogosphere unchecked until a few weeks ago when Google decided to take action. The result wasn’t pretty. PRs that were cultivated for years were lost in a single day, some in a matter of weeks. There were a lot of hairpulling all over the blogosphere. A lot of angry words were hurled against Google, only to fall on deaf ears.

Is there a cure? Or a way out for the sponsored poster in all this blog shed (harhar)? Basing on Google’s quality guidelines adding the rel=”nofollow” tag to the anchor text for your sponsored posts should be enough as a preventive measure. That should be a bullet-proof defense for holding on to your PR. Unless of course, the rumors are true.

Rumor has it that Google lieutenants tasked to implement the purge merely type PPP, PayU2blog, and other online marketplace names and then decimate the PRs of those blogs containing these keywords. This is a bit farfetched though but if this is the case, then God help us all.

If you have already received the penalty, and you want your PR back badly, you can always ask for reconsideration like what some sites have done. It could work but it’s not a guaranteed solution.

But still you can try. There were stories of Google actually giving back some blog’s PR after their request.

Personal View

What Google has done is level the playing field for all posties. This may be a good thing for those who derive their revenues solely from PPP. But for those who get their money streams from various sources while leveraging on their PR, then what Google did is gonna hurt like hell. In PPP’s model , a lot of opportunities are exclusively available to those who have higher PR ratings.

To PPP bloggers, PR has now become irrelevant. PPP is even coming up with their own page ranking and from what I’ve read so far, a big component of their RealRank is based on a site’s traffic. Google’s PR being more of a popularity widget, if there’s one thing that advertisers are after, it’s supposed to be traffic.

By eliminating the PR ratings of a lot of posties, in a way, Google has gone ahead and shot their own foot. I say this because by doing the things that they did, they have in fact hastened the creation of ranking alternatives that are designed to challenge PR’s supremacy. While this may be common occurence in a competitive market, with a lot of new entrants trying to topple the market leader, the big difference in this case is that there are a lot of disgruntled customers that are just waiting in the wings, ready to throw in their hats to the first audacious entrant who would offer them a somewhat viable alternative.

It’s only a matter of time.

Related Posts:

Introduction
1. What Is A Sponsored Post And How Do You Get A Piece Of The Action
2. The Compelling Argument For Advertisers
3. The Sinister Agenda