Foreign Perspectives

Google seems to have its sights on the blogging community and specifically on those that get paid for some of their posts. How come?

Well, basically Google doesn’t like the concept of people being able to pay for links. Unless, it’s Google, of course, as they make quite a bit of money from adwords which is a system of payment for links.

However, the paid links aren’t really the problem for them. What appears to be more of a problem is that the links that the bloggers have been creating are in context. So, if you’re looking for information about, say, credit cards then the theory is that it’s much more likely that a blog talking about them will pop up to the top of the Google search results because the links that they’ve got are in context whereas a normal directory entry for credit cards wouldn’t come up so high because that’s just a link out of context.

However, not all bloggers have been hit by this which has muddied the picture somewhat. Nobody outside Google really knows for sure why some are hit (sometimes from PR7 down to PR0) whereas others are, so far, unscathed.

I’ve looked at some combinations of them and one possible common thread so far is that those who’ve been hit seem to write site reviews when they’re paid whereas those that haven’t been hit tend to write an article around the topic requested and just add the links to that. Whether this is true in all cases I don’t know but it would seem a logical thing for Google to hit: those doing the general article have a “real” in-context link whereas those doing a review have simply written a paid advertisement.

If my reading of it is correct then ironically those who have been doing exactly what the advertiser wanted them to do will have been hit whereas those who did what the advertiser needed (ie a link truly in context) have, so far, come through OK. Think of it like an enhanced version of the advice that some of the paid sites offer: rather than asking would anyone read your blog if the paid posts weren’t there, ask yourself if the article you’ve written would be valid without the link to the advertiser. If both apply to your blog, then you’ll have a much better blog than you would otherwise and chances are that Google will be happy about it too.