It’s been less than two weeks since Google penalized PayPerPost bloggers in the most devastating way possible – by resetting all of their PageRanks to zero and effectively removing them from the Internet.
PayPerpost, now called IZEA, is in the process of launching RealRank, an alternative way to rank blogs. But their advertisers are still looking for blogs with an actual PageRank to write about them (this helps with the SEO effort). The result? Freaked out PPP shills who are going to have to find a real job.
Bloggers are expressing their angst on forum thread. Among the more pathetic messages:
Oh. My. God. Oh my god! I can’t believe this is happening. I NEED to earn money with my blogs, I’m going to have to take every single opp I qualify for every day in order to keep up with expenses.
and this, from someone lamenting a negative comment on their blog (the second paragraph is a winner):
I’m trying to develop a thicker skin, I really am. But this is my livelihood, you know? This is important to me. When I started with PPP, I never thought I would still be doing it seven months later, or that I would care about it so much.
And since when is independence and paid blogging mutually exclusive? There is choice involved.
So much for the claims by PayPerPost that their bloggers only write about products they actually believe in. PayPerPost isn’t dead, but a big chunk of their advertisers are clearly bailing now that the SEO value of paid posts is gone. That’s bad news for the shill blogs that rely on PPP to pay the bills, but good for the blogosphere in general.
oh the phear…run little bloglets google is coming to destroy your incomes =) What are they going to do to those of us who just blog for the heck of it? Steal our lols…?!! /buries his lols in the back yard
We should take NO joy in what is happening to PayPerPost.
The difficulty that small businesses and new sites have in being competitive and the continual dominance of the search engines by large companies are the real problems.
PayPerPost and other are SYMPTOMS of the inequity of the playing field – and a cry of anguish among Webmasters who want to get a piece of the thriving online business.
This is a clarion call for the search engines to take heed of the frustrations of most Webmasters in getting traffic and links.
Having a small brick and mortar business or having a web based business and attempting to get noticed is a screaming ordeal.
Google and Yahoo and MSN would be fine with everyone being addicted buying PPCs and accept the inherent click fraud problems – as the only resort – but that is not the future most want.
Is it?!
Now if only Google can find a way to stop the fake blogs that steal content and republish with no link backs, then the circle would be complete.
Mike – the message you quoted as “pathetic” referred in part to the person’s fear about not being able to pay their bills. I seem to recall you complaining about the FM spat a few months ago and mentioning that you had payroll to make for your people.
Even if you disagree with what the PPP bloggers do, if you want to call other people “pathetic” for worrying about meeting expenses, you might take a little more care, otherwise you just look callous.
Sucks to be payperpost. Seems like a witch hunt to me.
I always thought Google was fair handed. It’s like they’re changing the rules just to make it so that PPP fails.
I wonder if they would have liked if somebody did that to them when they were starting up.
Don,
If you’re meeting expenses by shilling, it *is* pathetic. I don’t have a problem with calling things what they are.
MGZ
Hasn’t the business world always been cut-throat?
Isn’t what Google is doing illegal? Like Microsoft packaged their IE to kill Netscape? Too much power tends to lead to abusive. That’s why I stay away from using google to do my search nowaday
If I’m not mistaken mike you post links to your “sponsors.”
how is this different than payperpost?
if google decided for some reason (sponsored links??) to eliminate you from their search engine you’d have your traffic cut in half.
what comes around goes around Mike…
Mike,
Any ideas about why Google would reset my page rank? I have never signed up for PPP or any other advertising. I do not have any ads on my wordpress.com blog as they are not allowed.
I write about San Francisco Bay Area real estate and the 1031 exchange industry scandals.
My page rank was a decent 4 now it registers as zero on the widget yet in Stumble Upon tool bar it still shows me as a 4.
Oh well back to the drawing board
dean
Haha, all you lame bloggers are going to have to get real jobs like the rest of us. LOL.
This is why I don’t use Google anymore. They are far worse than microsoft. This “open” and “free” corporation is controlling the internet, and they need to be stopped. Stop using google.
There is a little something I like to call free speech, but apparrently google isn’t a big fan.
Michael -
Who the heck are you to call all these people and this business/revenue model “pathetic”? How arrogant.
How do we all look from up there, Michael?
I agree that this looks like a targetted hit, and, while Google has changed it’s algrothim in the past to take down tactics that it found odious, this is the first example I can think of when it sought to take down a particular company. I wonder how they square that with “Do no evil.”
@Don Jones -
Arrington just wants PPP and their like to die so he can charge even more to his advertisers for reviewing products/services. He never liked the idea of the average joe being able to profit by reviewing things (it takes away from his super-starness). Google would improve the Internet significantly more by seeking out splogs and killing them, rather than a bunch of small-timers – most of whom are very clear that their reviews are paid for.
You see, it’s totally different when Arrington says positive things about his advertisers (PageFlakes, OurStage, Brightcove etc) in his reviews. The difference? PPP doesn’t take a cut, and he charges a LOT more.
Fortunately or unfortunately, adapt or perish – basic evolution. Yes, I agree, we should take no joy in this, but who says that Google and company have to be fair? They do however, need to be ethical. And to that effect, I can do not understand the issue deep enough to be able to say whether they are or not.
Seems to me all this advertising has ruined the internet anyway. Nothing but marketting people terrorizing everyone with products that no one really wants. Sucking up page real estate.
I can’t really think of one product I recently purchased because PPP online advertisement inspired me to do so. And the few times I actually fell victim to marketting promotions in my youth were riddled with disappointment because the promised blessings of the devices were never realized.
PPP, Google, Popups, data mining, and Spam are all directly related to the fime people at PPP and other marketting companies.
Some people might need viagra and condom ads when looking error messages with MS Office application but I don’t.
michael since you (love to) hate PPP so much use nofollow when linking to them, this will keep your high authority blog from boosting their inbound link count.
rel=”nofollow”
Deadpool.
If you rely on traffic from Google, yet build a business that threatens their own advertising cash cow, then you are in trouble.
It’s like trying to build an ad network in Facebook. Sooner or later you will get stepped on.
You are so high and mighty, Mike.
You frequently get called out on the web as being an arrogant asshole with a long memory. I would suspect that most of your readers would recognize your talents and current impact on tech companies, but they would also consider you to be an arrogant asshole.
You just better hope that you continue to be in a position where people have a reason to kiss up to you because when they don’t, they too will have long memories about you.
What goes around comes around.
at the end of the day, its their game.. they can do what they want. If you owned a website and wanted to change it.. who’s going to stop you?
The bottom line is, Google’s algo department is a house of geeks. Geeks find PPP appalling in general and thats why the heavy hand came down. Its not going to even blip on their radar if PPP vanishes, or grows %3000 … either way.
Nice to hear that Google leveled the playing field for the common blogger again. Now everyone that had a PPP account can go start their own version of PPP. That’s fair.
Relying on PPP to pay your bills is a flawed plan.
Something really didn’t seem right about folks getting paid to write about our area when they almost all lived somewhere else. The reviews I’ve read about our products and services were a real disservice.
I know from at least one source that they negative response to the PPP placements never made their PPP campaigns worth the investment.
Pay Per Post is full of gray areas. PPP isn’t right or wrong in all cases.
Hey, now I’m freaking out! I’ve never touched PayPerPost my whole life, but still my PageRank is succenly 0! I’ve had 5 for a long time, and now it’s all gone! Is it just a mistake, or is it because I dare to use their competitor Text Link Ads, or what…?
If I’m not mistaken mike you post links to your “sponsors.”
how is this different than payperpost?
Disclosure, disclosure, disclosure.
If you say: “Here’s a sponsored post, or here’s a sponsored review” or “The following is a paid commercial message” then no one has a problem with it.
When you present shill content as authentic, that’s what people don’t like.
Why is so hard for you PPP defenders to grok this?
Google’s timing couldn’t have been worse…it’s going to be a real crummy Christmas (or Hannukkah) for all those PPP bloggers formerly making a living…but at least they have Mike to cheer them by calling them “pathetic”.
How long before Google penalizes any website that is NOT purchasing ALL their advertising through them.
This is quite scary that Google could change one line of code and put thousands of people out of business.
While I’m not FOR or AGAINST PPP it is clear that Google is going to have to be b*tch slapped by the FTC sooner rather than later.
Don’t be evil slogan may turn out to be the funniest thing to hit the airwaves since George W Bush’s state of the union speeches.
yep. pathetic.
PPP going to end of life soon…
Mike – continuing to try and generate controversy at others’ expense? I like how your minions (Duncan) chime in with “Deadpool” comments.
Guess its easy to slam people when you’re earning a living by doing it???
Nice work you got here…
I personally don’t like blogs full of PPP. Spruiking products is not what I think blogging should be about … rather I look to read people’s experiences and observations about things happening in their world. I’ll (reluctantly) accept that it is around and don’t mind good blogs with the occasional ad post. What really turns me away from blogs is overdoing the PPP so there’s more ads than meaningful content. (Mind you, a page full of Adsense before you see any actual content is worse). What really annoys me about PPP is bloggers here in Australia spruiking for products and services that aren’t even available here and which they could not possibly have had any experience of.
Just for the record, even though PR was reset to 0 for sites this does not have the effect of “removing them from the Internet”. First of all, Google is *NOT* the internet. Secondly, absolutely nobody has reported that their search engine rankings have been effected as a result of the visual PR changing. This is true for those penalized for being associated with PPP and those selling text links.
As usual, Google is going after the little guy with a business model that does not fit their own. All of the big sites like autoblog.com, etc. that initially got dinged on the paid links PR update have all been restored. Rest assured that the little guys haven’t and won’t.
This is one of the few times I’ve seen TC gloat over other’s failures. Hopefully one of the last?
Don
I’m more than capable of calling Deadpool without Michaels help, see my last post here. The model is collapsing around them, as I said previously it is no longer sustainable:
from Nov 16
The only thing I got wrong, the advertisers are bailing before the bloggers themselves. Guess I didn’t realize how much the PPP bloggers were into the program. If it’s any help, I do feel a little bit sorry for them, I know what it’s like to struggle to make a living from blogging, although having said that there’s a lot more options today then there was when I started out in 2002.
Although I feel for the bloggers who have converted their blogs into promotional engines for PPP, you honestly cannot say this wasn’t a long time coming. The PPP bloggers should have realized this a long time ago, I did consider this program a few months back but then saw the writing on the wall which is being made into BOLD right now, hence why I never wrote anything for them no got past the account set-up with PPP
Nice idea, a few years too late, back to the drawing board for IZEA. This obviously affects their entire “new” platform as well, I also doubt realrank will go anywhere as it was created just as a means of softening the deathblow google has unleashed upon them.
Jon
Eventually the exact same technology Google has will be replicated by independent SE companies in countries as far afield as Estonia, Kazakhstan and Fiji. Search Engine technology will become the internet equivalent of nuclear bomb technology, and will proliferate all over the world. Within 5 years Google will be irrelevant because there will be like 30-50 different “googles” all over the world which provide the exact same results, probably minus manipulation of this kind.
I would say PPP was dead even before they started out.
@Michael A.
I count myself as one of the first readers of this blog, always a great fan of it, but your postings turned to nothing more than cheap rant. Sad to see… the decline of your commitment.
@Duncan
What’s your opinion on Reviewme? What makes them so different? Why don’t you call them out and add them to the deadpool? Why don’t you guys have the guts to answer that?
I am glad you at least signed on Eric, who is a great writer and has expertise and doesn’t need to write cheap posts…just in the sake to bait traffic.
It’s sad, but I think Google has sold out to the man.
Maybe you should take the Izea ads after all, grab the money quick while there’s still some left.
I wonder how this will hit googles own income? Lets face it these sites might make a bit from adsense etc
I don’t support it but it shows that google is very powerful and can put people out of business with a simple change of their code. I am sure if Microsoft had this power they would be back in court.
What I don’t get is if these blogs were any good why are they worried about pagerank? I visit the same old sites every day and rarely come across a blog via google or a blog search site I normally find them from other blogs etc.
TechCrunch.com
equals
TechGrinch.com…
Even the green color scheme works!
Duncan,
You’re missing my point completely – it isn’t about the merits of PPP – it’s about Mike calling a post by a PPP blogger worried about how to meet expenses “pathetic.”
My favorite post on the PPP forums was a call to “Boycott Google”…. let me know how that works out for you.
These comments demonstrate the overall inability or unwillingness of PPP bloggers to understand where Google is in the food chain, why it is important that they not allow companies like PPP to prosper, and why PPP provides little to no value to end users (think blog readers).
Bottom Line: The internet enables a means of sharing information through content and when you allow advertisers to control that content, it creates a lose / lose scenario. You lose credibility and end users lose the ability to gain information. When you allow advertisers to control content and then hide or obscure that fact, you are deceiving your end user and the effects of that should be self-explanatory.
Let advertisers control advertising, not content. Let advertisers control content and you lose. It’s that simple.
I hope you all feel really, really good about yourselves tonight, belittling people less fortunate than you who actually write for charity and are not whores. There may be some who are, but I know too many who are not.
It’s easy for you all to laugh all the way to the bank; a bit more difficult for some of these good people you like to make feel inferior.
When Google gets rid of the splogs and malware served up in their search results I’ll actually believe they did this to ‘purify’ the blogosphere. Right now it just feels like they want to control the advertising models that they believe are the right ones.
Good luck with that.
Criminals, freaks, phishers, hacks and wannabes!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
SEO Mash wrote:
“Just for the record, even though PR was reset to 0 for sites this does not have the effect of “removing them from the Internet”. First of all, Google is *NOT* the internet.”
The fact of the matter is that, increasingly, it may as well be the internet, because it’s the portal through which most web surfers in the Western world explore the internet day-to-day. Since it has that status, it is, de facto, the window onto the internet. So, rightly or wrongly, it might as well be the internet for most of us.
I think the situation has a real-world analogy of a toll-road. Let’s say the Dulles Toll Road between Washington, DC and Dulles Airport. It’s an exclusive, express pay highway that offers great benefits to its users. But it is a proprietary road with private owners.
Now, let’s say Google is the toll road, and alongside it is the vast expanse of the public internet. Let’s say all these blogs are billboards visible from the toll road. People are paying lots of money to erect billboards, and even more money to fill them with content (like paid posts).
Now the toll road owners have put up physical barriers along the sides of the road, to block drivers’ views of most of the paid billboards.
The billboards are still there (the internet is still there), but you can’t see them from the proprietary toll road anymore.
But the barriers are on Google’s land. Therefore legally, Google had every right to erect those barriers.
The fact that they disrupt commerce and contracts outside of the Google orbit, however, is disturbing.
I can see a class action lawsuit against Google by PPP clients and others, on the basis of “interference with contract”.
PPP and its users could argue that Google induced them to enter valuable contracts and then pulled the rug out from under them midstream, making all those contracts worthless.
That’s a tort — a legal wrong — and Google may arguably be liable for this, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
I realize this is a stretch, but I can see some keen lawyers making this argument.
I’d love to put together a retort contrasting TechCrunch and it’s paid existence with that of several PPP blogs I find worth reading, and the “impartial” reviews of TechCrunch with those of several PPP blogs, but in all honesty I feel the effort would be wasted, as I don’t believe that you’d really pay all that much attention.
Instead, Ill simply point out that you’re in the same boat, just better funded. Get the hell over yourself. When did you become something better than a paid blogger?
TechCrunch has always had my respect and my readership as I’ve always found it to be informative and up to the moment. I’ve read the reviews, I’ve found myself interested in the opinions, and recently I’ve enjoyed the new editorial pieces.
But now that you find yourself “big” enough to make fun of the “pathetic” messages elicited by the little guy panicking because the tiny business they’ve put their own time and money into is going under, you’ve lost my respect entirely.
There is nothing special or righteous about the blogosphere, and it certainly doesn’t need defending from somebody who obviously feels they are so far above it.
You’ve outgrown and are apparently far better than your readership, and I can no longer relate to you. Your views and posts are becoming more and more blinkered, and I wonder when it was you last felt you could relate to a “regular” blogger outside of the valley.
Just so that you know, the rest of us do not put down others to make ourselves feel better.
If you do actually feel the need to respond, which I sincerely doubt, send me an email, because a response here will simply be in defense of your ego, and a preening for your cohorts – I won’t be back to read it.
btw. Put me down as well if it will make you feel better. I’m an easy target.
Mike,
You continue to amaze me with your distorted reality and misinformation. Let’s get a few things straight:
1. Google’s deranking was applied to many blogs, both inside and outside of our network. Google did not “reset all of our PageRanks to zero.” They hit some of our bloggers and those people are justifiably upset. They also hit countless other people who have never done a single paid post (unlike you).
2. We are fortunate enough to operate a marketplace large enough that there has been no effect on liquidity. We haven’t seen a decrease in advertiser spending outside of the Thanksgiving weekend. Today is actually an all-time record breaker for both advertiser and blogger sing-ups. We had over 130 advertisers signup today alone.
3. There is a general fear around the loss of PageRank in the blogger community. We had already committed to making “no-follow” a standard in SocialSpark before any of this mess and hope to roll out a no-follow option for PPP this week to address any concerns. While I don’t believe that Google applies their standards fairly, we want to provide advertisers and bloggers a framework that makes them both comfortable.
4. Speaking of no-follow I’d like to note that you include pagerank passing links to sponsors directly inside TechCrunch editorial. http://urlbrief.com/f591c9 – I wonder how long until you are PR0? Matt Cutts?
5. I personally think it is crude that you would mock those less fortunate. These people are hard working bloggers that do no worse than you. Come after me, but there is no need to kick someone who is obviously in a bad spot.
Hi Ted, I wish you the best of luck with IZEA but if this is a taste of things to come… you have an uphill battle with the odds set squarely set against you until you develop your own search platform. I really admire your entrepreneurial spirit and you obviously believe very deeply in your company.
Keep turning things upside down on the net… people keep kicking you in the face and you stand up for more! It will be very interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years.
Jon