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You are here: Home / Latest News & Algorithm Updates / Paid Blogging – The Dirty Little Internet Secret

Paid Blogging – The Dirty Little Internet Secret

March 5, 2009 by Jason McElweenie

If you are a blogger or you are thinking about getting into blogging to increase your revenue from your site please take heed over recent blog posts concerning paying someone to blog for you or your company

A recent report from Forrester, as reported by Adage, states that marketers should pay bloggers to write about their experience. This type of thing is done a lot but it generally gets the blogging community up in arms when someone blogs for pay.

We have suggested to clients that they invite bloggers and photographers to their events to help generate traffic to the blogs and in turn to their sites but we don’t suggest you outright pay people to say nice things about you. Forrester is suggesting you do but Google, especially Matt Cutts tells you not to.

Here’s where it gets tricky.

If you are going to pay someone to blog about you and say good things Google doesn’t want to have anything to do with it and if they find out you never told them about it they will penalize your site/blog. Google requires that all blog posts have the ‘no follow’ tag applied to all posts.

From Matt’s Blog

“My bottom-line recommendation is simple: paid posts should not pass PageRank.”

nofollow What Matt is referring to with PageRank, if you are unfamiliar, is the system at which Google ranks pages in it’s algorithm based on keyword relevance. Google does not support paid links and having someone write a blog post for you is considered a paid link. Think Payola

Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t people to say how great you are you just can’t use it to push your sites ranking up. If you are going to pay someone to talk nice about you make sure you tag your posts with ‘no follow’

The Adage article quotes Forrester’s author Sean Corcoran who imparted this advice if you are to have someone blog for pay.

Forrester’s Paid Blogging Advice

  • Be transparent and disclose all financial relationships
  • Bloggers should speak in a genuine voice and be vocal even when they have something unflattering to say about the sponsor
  • Be relevant — don’t try to push car tires on a beauty site
  • Listen to the bloggers in the community
  • And, of course, follow the "no follow" rule

 

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

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