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Paid Posts Require the Nofollow Tag
While I am waiting for Andy Hagans to get a few moments to answer my questions about Reviewme.com one has already been answered here by Matt Cutts from Google. As I had thought, paying for people to blog about your product, service or self will require a nofollow tag if you are concerned about ranking in Google.
Matt also quickly implies (listen closely) that the disclaimer that Reviewme and others will use (designating a post as “paid”) might not be good enough.
So will paying per post pass page rank benefits? Doubtful, and it could even devalue ones site if they get too heavily into this new form of link building. In other words, if it influences search engines Google will not allow it to go forth and prosper.
As for how Google plans to police the vast network of paid blog posts algorithmically, I have no idea or care to know.
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November 21st, 2006 at 11:23 pm
One might wonder why a company who preaches “build your sites for people and not search engines” supports and encourages the use a tag that is used by bots and not people. Sure you can make it visible to humans but the only reason for doing so is to see what a search engine thinks of the link.
November 22nd, 2006 at 7:49 am
It’s all about avoiding linking to and from neighborhoods Google determines are of low quality even if you do not agree.
I link to several sites not favored algorithmically in this blog and am seeing the reduction of my sites value in Google.
Use of the nofollow is a very misunderstood thing for sure but it does make sense if you are Google and looking to tighten the leaking faucet to increase your earnings, reputation and footprint.
I would like to remove the nofollow in comments in here graywolf if you can do a post sometime on how to accomplish this task.
November 22nd, 2006 at 8:02 am
use this plugin
http://www.semiologic.com/software/dofollow/
Al thought you may want to clean up things like comments from “upskirt” and “loose diamonds” from pages http://www.seobuzzbox.com/shoemoney-interview/#comments
before you do.
I agree about the neighborhoods, I just think Google is being a bit “selective” about how they use the “build for people not bots” concept. You may be writing content for people but if you don’t build it with bots in mind you are doomed.
November 22nd, 2006 at 8:37 am
Thanks, yeah I haven’t paid much attention to where the links are pointing in comments but will clean them up now. Do you have rules for the types of linkage you do not allow?
November 22nd, 2006 at 9:05 am
If your name is a keyword and I don’t know you personaly … instantly gone no research at all. Use url that looks off topic I’ll look at you and see how spammy ya look
November 22nd, 2006 at 12:08 pm
Hey Aaron and Graywolf,
I puzzle over the design for people and not search engines position once in a while too. Don’t get me wrong - I believe in the underlying intent wholeheartedly.
But even you are the whitest of the white, there will be times when you are doing things just for search engines. Nofollow is but one example. Putting a Noindex tag on a “formatted for printing” page (to avoid duplicate content concerns) is another example.
It just seems like there are times when the search engine needs a little help.
November 23rd, 2006 at 3:18 pm
Why would you ask Matt what he thinks ? You knew the answer ahead of time.
November 23rd, 2006 at 7:14 pm
Those disclaimers vary from how they’re written to where they are in the post which I think might be more of a concern to Google. Here’s some review disclaimers (in quotes) and/or their position.
“Please note that this is a sponsored review and i sincerely expressed what i felt about the service”……..at the end of the post in bold and a smilie face.
“As part of the review process I have to tell you that this review is Paid For”.,….first sentence.
“[This review was sponsored through ReviewMe.com]“…………at the end of the post in smaller font.
As you can imagine they were everywhere in between the above examples. Of course not all the blog posts I saw had disclaimers most likely due to the fact they weren’t getting paid to post.
The best example of this is at John Chow’s blog where he pointed out what he called ” some serious flaws in the way ReviewMe accepts sites and does its pricing”.
And guess who was paying attention? Andy Hagans reponded right away to those “flaws”. Talk about brand management. Now its time to dance with Google.