As you might have noticed, there are more and more blog posting services, out there – an automated broker-stype system selling blog posts for a one—time fee to advertisers…

to create BUZZ of course.

Well, frankly, since that whole “review” craze started last year or so you must admit it was all nice talk about “creating buzz”, giving your product exposure and mentioning yourself within a “topical community”

Sure, blogspot.com IS a community… but I doubt that bloggers that write about their mum and her dog, their favorite recipe as well as the anxiety attacks (and the pharaceuticals used to cure it) can be called a “topical community” when it comes to writing about HDTV Plasma Screens ... can they?

Just this week the so far leader-of-the-pack PayPerPost (when it comes to exposure and volume) released what was OVERDUE.... the Page Rank / Alexa Metric for buying blog posts.

Now you can restrict your blog posts BY

• topical category (which is good, but I’ve still to see those “major topic leader blogs on highly competitive topics)
• PAGE RANK (aka PR, aka green bar, aka It used to be important)

• ALEXA RANK (aka Traffic meter, aka let’s fake it with some hit bots and referer spam)

I tried to order some payperpost blog posts

and instead of writing PR7 blogs ONLY, Alexa rank max. 50,000 and bidding 6$ for a post (hehe) I filled out those fields.

And guess what guys, the minimum price suggest by payperpost (EXCLUDING their 35% on top “service” charge) was around $125 or more

Does it make sense?

YES, sure it does – link prices are based on traffic metrics mostly… at least until the whole world learns about trust (aka domain status) and topical relevance being more important than pagerank.

ReviewMe gave it’s sites a pricing based on these two factors (IMHO) from the beginning… you cannot even “suggest” a low balling price there.

Oh – and the new sponsoredreviews service suggests that you can earn from $10 to $1000 … so if you got a PR9 blog, I’m sure the $1000 for the perm link will be possible for you.

Is this link selling?

YES, absolutely.

If you want a link from a post on a blog of PR3 min it will cost you $10

(meaning a perm link on a PR1+ page)

If you want a link from a post on a blog of PR4 min it will cost you $12.5

(meaning a perm link on a PR1+ page or hopefully a PR2)

Is this selling page rank?

Please read the above paragraph and judge for yourself.

Does Matt Cutts like this?

Naah, I bet he won’t.

And as you know, you shouldn’t mess with Matt (AKA show him your sites for blacklisting, thanks Jim for that great laugh last night)

But will all sites get blacklisted?

Naah, I bet that won’t happen either… at least not on a large scale.

It’s because you have that “editorial review” thing when you are buying a link from withing a blog post. Bloggers can ALWAYS judge if your site selling payday loans is a ledgit site or not, and probably they can decide if the link to with with “Pay Day Loan” or “payday loans” or just loans.

In fact, they COULD even NOT link to you … and just mentioned your site’s url… that’s called editorial discretion of the blogger.

But, the only problem – that post will get rejected when PPP does their job for the 35% cut … making sure all the links required are in there and are good.

Is this legal?

Well, sure man. Nobody can threaten you to not sell links on your own website. Not Google, not Matt Cutts and SURE THING not the FTC or any other of those choppy big US organizations…

I’ve read some ramblings some days ago where people discussing if link selling was LEGAL at all… OMG. I knew it… your editorial discretion and free speech at risk.

I have no doubts that not only Matt Cutts is on the payrole of Google, but a shitload of lobbyists in the US government and all sorts of organizations like the FTC (at least that’s what I read in the Google story).

Now if they pay all those “don’t sell links” preachers, we have to see some effect.

And of course with the twist of “deceptional advertising” (which blames people for promoting products with wrong promises and false claims) the FTC had a nice pitch to introduce that whole “disclosure policy” thing, which is a good thing at all to avoid people rambling soo positive about a shitty product just to make a PR1 link happen.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s ok if people disclose that they are reviewing stuff for money.

But does that make a difference when it comes to that shitty PR1 link on that 3 months old blogspot blob with 2 backlinks from the 2 friends of the lonely kid earning some extra pocket money?

No.

But does that make a difference for Google?

Yep. It sure does.

With all those footprints of links to Disclosure.org, and “I disclose”-Buttons, as well as the HUGE “Sponsored Pay Per Post” buttons you see in every second blog now they have all the means to identify sponsored posts to blacklist them for … guess what?

SELLING LINKs :-)

You won’t notice much when that happened, except that the link juice transfered from that shitty PR1 page goes down from 1.0 to 0.0 .. nothin more

Google has the technology to interpret, understand the meanings of content, and there are patents out there that even diagnose the “mood” and “tonality” or a writing (aka positive or negative twist)

But, as you can imagine, it’s not scaling yet.

The recent Google infrastructure updates brought back what we had in 2003… more regular page rank updates… rolling page rank updates… I’ve seen pageranks assigned at lightspeed of a few days if good domains linked to pages on other good domains…

Ok, so they fixed the stuff that stopped working in 2004 on a large scale and got more flexible.

But it’s years until they can rollout the current state-of-the-art text interpretation thing…

And until then, they can hunt down link networks not only by statistical patterns (for recip links), but also by simple patterns like “links.html” filenames or a simple link to the “Sponsored by PPP”-button :-D

And judging from that, it REALLY doesn’t matter if you can formally restrict your paid reviews by page rank or if you hide that (“Min PR3”) somewhere in the text…

It just makes sure the pricing get’s a lot easier, chunking in more money for posts on the few high PR blogs in the network… :-)