Foreign Perspectives

Things were trundling along quite nicely with the business of sponsored posts until a couple of weeks ago when google decided to pull the rug from under a promising cottage industry and downgrade the pagerank of thousands of blogs to zero.

Ordinarily, pagerank (the little green bar you see if you have the google toolbar loaded) for a particular site would typically go up or down by one each time google loaded the revised pageranks ie usually about once a quarter. However, this time around they decided to target bloggers who wrote paid posts and dropped those targetted down to PR0.

The effect of that to those bloggers hit by such a downgrade can be quite devastating. For example, a typical PR2 domain would be able to make around $20/day vs $5/day for a PR0 domain and that’s just the bottom end of blogs. A PR4 domain can pull in $40, PR5 perhaps $100 per day and remember that some blogs went from PR7 to PR0 overnight. Remember too that many bloggers run multiple blogs. Say they were pulling in $500/month per blog with four blogs running that would equate to a reasonable wage of $2000/month which may have dropped to more like $200/month if all their blogs were targetted by google.

The biggest player in this market is PayPerPost with over 100, 000 bloggers signed up for their service and they’ve hit the panic button of course. Ironically, they were about to roll out a new blog ranking scheme just as google struck and that’s been speeded up somewhat. Unfortunately, the other players in the market probably won’t be able to access the stats from that ranking system directly and certainly wouldn’t be keen to use a competitors ranking.

Google’s answer? Add nofollow to your links. I did that a few days ago and now find that already one other blogging service won’t accept my posts anymore. Shame really as their posts were almost always interesting to do. I suspect that effect will roll out across a number of other sites too which’ll just serve to concentrate the power with PPP. Surely that can’t be a good effect from googles actions?

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