It’s that little “Blog Honour” badge, bottom right of my blog. I put it there after reading Stowe Boyd’s comments about Pay Per Post, and finding that honor badge on his blog. I actually couldn’t care less about my pagerank, it’s the principle of the thing, I’m metaphorically tilting at windmills just like all the other bloggers who wish people would quit making a mess of the web as they try to monetize it.
To get an idea of how roiled up the blogosphere got about this PayPerPost “Payola” scheme, count the trackbacks to the original Techcrunch post. Mike has blogged about it about it serveral times since, and it’s a controversy that PPP definitely encourages (even to the point of paying payola for people to post their point of view), because as they know, it’s all about the PageRank.
This is a from from a comment I recently made on TechCrunch, in which I indulged in an awful lot of alliteration:
For those of you who simply think Arrington has an Agenda related to his Advertising, I think you’re wrong.
People, PPP = Paid Pagerank Pollution. That’s really what it’s all about so far as I can see. I’m stunned nobody has used the “P” word in this thread so far. I mean, that’s the Point of all this, isn’t it?
The Pagerank algorithm doesn’t care if the reviewer said something sucked or not. All links are good links, more or less, in the same way that all publicity is good publicity, more or less. So it makes perfect sense to allow bloggers to pan the product they’re linking too – just so long as they link to it.
I’m presuming that most of the PPP customers are being advised by their SEO people (or are in fact SEO people themselves) because PPP links seem like a perfect way to drum up pagerank in a way that must be very difficult for Google to defeat. Of course over time they will figure out some algorithm for detecting PPP shills, er, agents, er, whatever they’re called, and will mark down their pagerank accordingly, but there will always be more willing to play the game. (For those of you new to this game, your site’s pagerank depends strongly on incoming links, and it is the #1 traffic driver on the net)
Now, if everyone declared on their posts that they were PPP agents in a distinctive and clear way, then Google could automatically discount those links as meaningless for the purposes of pagerank calculation, which would mean that the smart SEO people would stop recommending PPP, and eventually advertisers would pay a lot less per post.
So, I don’t think PPP will do that.
But Google has so much data they could just work it out algorithmically. Ie if PPP got *too* popular Google might just start watching for where known PPP shills link to, and detect new shills based on noting which other blogs link to the same place at the same time. All known shills could them have their pagerank docked from then on (pagerank is transferable via links, so if a source is “tainted” the easiest way to tweak the results is probably to decrease the PR of the source). However I suspect it would have to be making a genuinely large distortion in the search results before Google would care, and in reality Google no longer cares so much about search quality since they probably sell more adword clicks against bad natural results, and they’re so far ahead of the others on search quality at the moment it’s not really to their advantage to “try harder” in this regard.
So if Google doesn’t really care, what’s The Problem?
The problem is the collateral damage. I consider a business to be morally wrong if it destroys more value than it creates. And paying others to do the destruction for you is even worse. Currently PPP is slowly dragging down the average value and pagerank of all blog content – blogs are becoming just that little bit less trusted as sources of unbiased information, which is what everyone is looking for. However, balanced against that are the PPP agents who actually put a bit of thought into their post, are honest about the fact that they are being paid (and being honest means saying so within the post, or right next to it – posting a policy somewhere no one looks does not cound), and create little nuggets of value.
My strong hunch is that at the moment PPP does more harm than good. If they forced their agents to be transparent then it would swing back the other way and on average they would be creating value, but then they would probably make less money. So let’s watch and see what they do.
But giving it some more thought, I’m going to be more condemnatory. Mr Arrington gets it exactly right when he says that “their disclosure policy is like the Tobacco Industry sponsoring tobacco research“. Essentially, they’re damning themselves with this dangerous “disclosure” duplicity.
