Pay per Post Blogging, Google, Adsense, and Spam

I've been looking around lately at various blogs that do pay per post and, by and large, I've been fairly impressed. The writing very often seems good and incorporates much of what a blogger would ordinarily have said in a standard posting.

So, what's wrong with pay per post then? Does the mere fact that Google doesn't care for pay per post invalidate the entire concept? Of course not. It all comes down to the individual (the blog and the blogger), certainly, but pay per post can be a wonderful incentive for the creation of good web content, content that benefits users.

An analogy to this might the submission of websites to web directories, which google actually encourages in their webmaster guidelines. As long as the directory is not a free-for-all, everyone-gets-included link farm, there's no problem. The fundamental criterion, of course, is the notion of editorial discretion, and from google's point of view, in the case of directories, as long as that exists, directory submissions are on the same level field as the democratic votes cast by websites for other websites.

Editorial discretion, in the case of blogs that engage in sponsored reviews and pay per post, may not be entirely overt. But read a few blogs that participate in PPP and you'll see that not every PPP blogger accepts every potential writing offer, and what one PPP blogger writes in a review for a product may be dramatically different from what another blogger writes. Posts by different bloggers on the same subject are differentiated by the injection of anecdotes and personal insights.

Contrast this to the many thousands of horrendous sites that have been spawned by the adsense program. The vast majority of these sites exist for no other reason than to capture web traffic (whereas a good PPP blogger would likely blog whether there was a financial incentive or not...of course, the financial incentive being present is better) and they have become a scourge and a pestilence upon the entire web, resulting in widespread content theft and copyright infringement (another way that bloggers and adsensers are distinctly different: the vast majority of adsense publishers can't write worth sh*t and can barely string more than five original lines of text together without obscuring any intended meaning). For more information on how widespread this problem is--this problem that is the literal baby of Google and its IPO--simply do a search for the terms MFA (made for adsense) and Scraper (or scrapers).

The effect of adsense upon the web has been, by and large, not a healthy one. Yes, it has dramatically altered the dynamics of content creation and distribution and allowed small site owners and bloggers to monetize. But for every genuine blogger and site operator out there, there's easily a thousand scammers who churn out automated scraper sites and steal content all day long. The phrase DMCA has never been so popular.

PPP blogging produces writing that is far superior to adsense writing and not only invigorates blog writing, it provides an incentive for the mere act of blogging, minus (so far, at least) many of the shadier aspects that go hand-in-hand with the adsense publisher network.

So, why then, is google so opposed to pay per post? The answer is quite easy: link dependent algorithmns.

A good system of ranking sites, of course, must incorporate the value of inbound links to a site and must, further, determine the value of such links using variables such as anchor text and pagerank, while discounting factors such as inbound links generated by private website networks (I know too many people who run spam networks), blog spam (not such an issue anymore), paid advertising link runs (is it fair for a site to jump to the top of a niche because they can afford to buy 50,000 inbounds?), and reciprocal arrangements (can it truly be a democratic vote when the reason for two parties linking is simply to boost one another in the serps?).

Without a doubt, most of the effort these days that goes into ranking sites within a link dependent system has to do with identifying and discounting spam. But what is spam? (I can hear Morpheus talking in my head: "What is real?")

Is spam the purchase of advertising links on newspapers? Not necessarily. Both the advertiser and the newspaper would tend to define it simply as a-d-v-e-r-t-i-s-i-n-g.

Is a reciprocal link spam? Not necessarily. Recips existed way before google and their purpose was to generate traffic.

Are blog comments spam? Not if they're made for the purpose of commenting versus the simple aim of getting a link.

What, then, is spam? These days, spam is whatever google chooses to call it, simply because their system, while the best around, cannot sufficiently discern spam from...the real.

And for this reason, any advertising that is not connected to adwords/adsense may be labeled spam by the "don't be evil" crowd sitting in the googleplex. Likewise, any advertising link that doesn't employ a rel=nofollow attribute in a link may be labeled the same.

If you engage in PPP blogging and don't use nofollow on your advertising links are you at risk? Maybe, maybe not. If your traffic comes in mainly through non-search-engine conduits (link lists, blogrolls, directories, forums, etc), you probably have nothing to worry about because you have nothing to lose. If you depend on search engine traffic...it may be a different story, or not.

However, from all appearances, even in the worst case scenario, a small scale link seller (i.e. blog or mom-pop site) would probably only have their ability to pass reputation stripped and nothing more (deindexing is not likely).

Under this scenario, a penalized site or blog would have its own search positions preserved though its ability to give juice might be cutoff at the tap. Which, of course, might only leave adsense left as the only viable ad-revenue-generation mechanism.

How incredibly convenient for google, eh?