Dear Google:
Did Google bitch-slapping my blog for just using the words Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, Payu2Blog and other paid companies?!? Even though a blog hasn’t run a single post from these companies? !!!! ??? !!!!
Of course, it’s not as though I can ask Google to tell me. But, from Ted Murphy’s fingers, I learn this:
We now know from some of our friends inside of Google (thanks “bob”) that they are now looking for phrases such as PPP, PayPerPost,ReviewMe, Payu2blog, etc. in the text of your post. For that reason I would suggest refraining from using any type of this text in the body of your posts, sponsored or not. When you disclose thank the sponsor, not PPP.
Not mention these companies names!?
Of course I also mention these company names constantly. I even joined them all. After all, my niche is creating plugins that help bloggers who monetize do so. Joining the programs is essential to developing appropriate tools for these bloggers and understanding which features are useful.
But if Google’s blog could actually detect followed paid links they realize I have none from these companies!
In fact, if the Google meisters had any brains, they’d figure out one of many of my plugins are of inestimable value to their search engine.
Google meisters might ask, like what?
No Follow Old Spam Links:
You know what this does?
If a paid blogger runs paid a paid link, they can automatically no follow them after the contract period expires. That’s right: the links switch “no follow” after a set number of days. (The blogger can pick. I think I set mine to 60 days).
Sure, I know Google might not be thrilled with temporary follows, but sheesh! Your ‘bot is constantly crawling. Don’t you think it can’s see these things go “off”? The two I posted way, way, way back went off long, long ago. (Like earlier than May or at worst June!)
Guess what Google. Other bloggers use my plugin. Their “nofollows” turn on after a number of days.
So Am I supposed to never say Pay Per Post?!
Now assuming I lost page rank for posing the words Pay Per Post. What the heck amd I supposed to do if I want my rank back?
Andy Beard describes how I can request re-inclusion in Google’s ranking system. Evidently, I’m supposed to figure out what I did wrong (by guessing) and then undo it.
So… is mentioning PPP a violation of the guidelines? Am I supposed to delete thoese evil words, promise never to type PPP, Izea, Social Spark, PayU2Blog, ReviewMe or Loud Launch, ever again, and then ask Google if they’ll consider giving me page rank?!
Seriously?!
Oh, and if I can’t say these words, can others? Like, say the guys at TechCrunch, who seem to be permitted to say “Pay Per Post” with impunity?!
Hey, if Google wants to bitchslap me for posting the words Pay Per Post, Izea, Social Spark, or whatever, I guess they can do so. But … well.. sheesh!
Related Posts:
Comments
65 Responses to “Dear Google:”
Leave a Reply
So what are you going to plead guilty to?
You might be interested in this stuff on Matt’s blog too.
I nofollowed the link because the site contains compensated reviews of Google products that aren’t disclosed.
Do any of your plugins that you offer install a link to your sites? I’ve seen a trend of wordpress developers sites being slapped up pretty good lately. At most you’d think they’d just devalue the automagic links, but maybe there is more to it.
It’s just an unsubstantiated observation by me at this point, so your millage may vary.
John almost every Wordpress theme developer sells links, even some of the core developers.
Wordpress was effectively funded by paid links and leveraging Google juice, and even now their linking structure is a linkfarm on Wordpress.com
What am I going to plead guilty to? Nothing! What can I plead guilty too?
Writing plugins posties like? Saying PPP? Review me? What?
If Google knows something I don’t know, they are going to have to tell me. ‘Cuz right now, I’m way too busy doing other stuff to wrack my brain figuring out what they might have bitchslapped me for.
Anyway.. it this doesn’t cost me anything ‘cuz, remember, I pledged not to run sponsored posts for three months after I ran my Alexa game test! I even quit PPP over it.
I rejoined because I want to help them test Argus, but I specifically didn’t post anything!
So the irony is… ROFLMAO!…
@John-
Many of my plugins contain a note requesting people be nice, and write a post. Many do. Some contain a toggle that lets people elect to include a link, but actually recomends people turn that off.
In some cases, the reason for the toggle is to help people trouble shoot the plugin. For example, Kontera Control puts some javascript in the footer. But some templates don’t call footer(). So, to help bloggers know what problems might arise, I give them a toggle. When it’s “on” it shows a link to my blog. When it’s “off” it turns off.
I ask bloggers to turn it off.
None of my plugins force auto-magic links.
I’m not defending Google’s actions, just reporting what I’ve seen lately. Several theme and plug-in authors have been saying their site’s PR was dropped in the GWHG. They could have been actually selling links as well, I haven’t researched the issue that close.
As far as the developers go, well, it sure wouldn’t be the first time Google has two sets of rules depending on the popularity of a person/site.
@John- I understood you to be just sharing information. Yes, it’s true that Google doesn’t like auto-magic links dropped by plugins. However, I know when I get a link, and the links I’m getting are for my plugins are in post. Often, they are posts by people who write about their favorite plugins.
Lucia’s Linky Love is popular right now. So is my CPU Plugin Hog Detector.
Also, since many complement each other, a number of blogger are explaining HOW to use the plugin collectively to achieve different goals.
So… I think the vast majority of the links for my plugins are editorial.
If others are right, and just having some text on your site that says “pay per post” could be what they key off of to penalize those types of blogs, you should go back through every reference of those and change the text so it won’t match any more and see if that suddenly gets you out of the hole.
Change all the text references to something like “P@y Per P0st”.
Hmmm… I should write an article about using spammish techniques for escaping penalizations when you’ve been unfairly penalized.
Try this to please Google:
blah blah <em rel=”nofollow”>PayPerPost</em> blah blah
@Silver- yes. In principle, this means that everyone who wants to blog about ppp can now write “pay per P0st”. Heck, I could write a plugin to do it for everyone.
But…
a) I want to know if that’s really what Google is doing (heck, I can even randomize, so Google will need to “read” Pey Puhr P*st” and other variants.
and
b)If it is, that’s just stooooopid on their part!
@Sebastian: I did have some auto-links to PPP through A links. They were in tiny url. But, they weren’t paid links- so I don’t see why Google should ding for just that. (Though, that may be why they dinged.)
I also could nofollow every and any link to PPP. But is it Google’s policy that a blogger can’t give editorial links to PPP?! Even when talking about PPP? Can I link to Ted Murphy’s post about IZEA?
I guess I have issues on two levels:
1) How would I get back PR and
2) Does Google really want to dictate our editorial links?
I’m frankly not that concerned about my PR. I vanished because I’m buried under work. But, I have to wonder: How is Google going to use links to gauge quality if they actually prohibit blogger from deciding who they will link to?
The whole probabalistic under pinnings of Google’s search theorem will melt if that happens!
Lucia, maybe those links were the issue, but look closely at my HTML code to understand the joke.
Ahhh… sorry. My husband had just gotten home and I was boiling water for spaghetti.:)
You know, after a while, I really don’t think it has to do with paid posts or paid links.
I’ve stumbled upon a stupid blogger, who happily speculating this zerofied PR of ours, and cursing us paid bloggers for our paid posts, etc. Then, he happily showed a search page of his stupid site name, which showed up top of the list. (his search was really dumb, anyone with that kind of search would end up top of the list)
And guess what? His PR is 0, which I think he didn’t realize it. Obviously he is anti paid blogging, obviously he should be in Google’s ‘good book’.
I’m not going to promote his blog, giving him the benefit of traffic. If you are interested, you can email me.
To clarify my joke, Google certainly does not penalize you for mentioning PPP services. They *might* scan for those strings to feed queues of human reviewers.
TinyUrl stuff doesn’t prevent Google from figuring out a links intent and its final destination by the way. TLA for example *is* considered a “bad neigborhood”, hence uncondomized links to their site get red-flagged, regardless whether you redirect via TinyUrl or not.
If you see a loss of Google traffic, file a reconsideration request. As long as they just express a lowered opinion of your site by manipulating your toolbar PageRank, don’t worry, provided your site is squeaky clean with regard to their guidelines.
@Sebastian-
Strangely, I think as “news” goes, my experience isn’t so much “I lost rank, and that’s a problem for me. How can I fix it.” The question is: “I lost rank, what does that tell us about Google’s ability to detect paid links, or slap who they want to slap?”
I know tiny URL doesn’t keep Google from following. What I meant was- I had been linking to PPP when I mentioned them. I also link to Review Me, when I mention them- and I also link to TechCrunch, AndyBeard, or any other web site that I mention.
In cases where I mention something fairly regularly, I enter the url in the ‘aLinks’ plugin. I know that I happened to have used a tinyURL for PPP. I didn’t mean to suggest that that would prevent Google from detecting them- it doesn’t. Google knows where the tinyURL goes.
What I mean to say is: those links weren’t paid posts or paid links. They were the normal editorial links, that happened to be done with tiny URL.
But, yes, I did have editorial links to PPP.
So, if the Google slap is supposed to be a a message that bloggers shouldn’t post paid links, and that Google can now detect them Google seems to be publicly misfiring. What they seem to be showing is the can’t detect them. That, and not my personal PR, is the interesting story for SEO.
If this is the case, my airing this story should suggest some experiments those working in SEO could try. They could try deleting all references to PPP and competitors. (I could write a plugin for Wordpress users.) They could see if their page rank rises.
If that works, that will suggests bloggers can hide all the paid links they wish provided they never talk about PPP or ReviewMe etc.
That would be a truly ironic result!
Strangely, enough, I don’t plan to request a re-inclusion. The reason for this is simple: Big Bucks Blogger is not my money making blog!!!
This is the blog I write to record my own observations and reflections as I learn about SEO etc.
So, in some sense, if Google slaps the PR to negative infinity, I want to watch that happen. If they can’t catch their mistakes on their own, I want to report that.
If I request a re-inclusion, I will actually thwart my ability to observe how this current episode of Google spanking pans out.
You might be interested in this post, Lucia -
Is Google The New Terrorist?
Sorry you got slapped - I got slapped too
Boycott Google in response is my answer. How can I ever trust them again now?
Snoskred
Lucia, although everybody talks about paid links when it comes to toolbar PR deductions, that’s not the one and only cause for penalties, and warnings like in your case. For ages Google also penalizes for linking out to so called bad neighborhoods and other artificial linkage. In Google’s eyes penalized services like PPP, TLA and other link brokers and link networks aren’t legit link destinations, hence they require link condoms in order to avoid manipulations of their rankings. That has nothing to do with paid links like uncondomized affiliate links or paid posts.
@Sebastian- it would seem what you are saying is true.
Yet, the odd thing is, it cuts against the entire theory that underpins Google’s use of links as communicating relevance to Google!
In general, if one is never permitted to link “X” when one discusses “X”, then how is the search engine to find the most relevant pages containing information about “X”?
And what are bloggers or news agencies that in the niche that “talks about ‘X’ to do”? Use super-secret code words along with a glossary giving translations like;
“mashed potatoes” = PPP
“french fries” = TLA
“Yukon Gold” = “ReviewMe
I understand Google’s sensitivity with regard to PPP and TLA and paid links, but you do see the dilemma from a sort of statistical-informational point of view! But, even they must see the problem here.
In anycase: if it is their policy that one may not link to PPP, or Izea, and that will result in a penalty, they likely should just say it publicly in their web master tools. Because, as far as I am aware, unless linking them IS the ding, I am not linking to “bad neighborhoods!”
From Google’s POV a first result discussing Google’s PPP penalties is a better result than the banned PPP site (=bad neighborhood) itself.
Of course you can link to PPP with rel-nofollow crap. 
I am glad people are getting slapped, I warned of this many months ago and had a big argument with Aaron Wall on his blog. This is when I realized he and others were bad seed. Andy, come on, you need to open your eyes and stop defending what can not be defended dude, you make some great points but then foolish ones all over the place man, what’s up?
This site surely is not banned because each post ranks pretty strongly for it’s titles.
You should not be mad at google, you should be mad at those who offered you dangerous advice.
You are also lucky though people, remove what is considered spam and be done with it, you will bounce right back because goog is a forgiving engine, I would be much more ruthless.
@Seobuzz box. Did I say I was angry with google? Sebastian also doesn’t appear angry with Google.
We simply discussing what seems to have a happened.
But with respect to the advise you are giving me, precisely what should I remove? Are you seeing paid links here? Nope. Are you seeing a lot of negotiated traded links? Nope.
What you are seeing is a blog that
a) discusses what I see in the SEO/ monetizing niche
b) writes and disseminates plugins.
In the normal course of blogging, I have mentioned all the major companies in the paid-link, sponsored review etc. area.
Is this somehow a bad thing?
BTW: Yes. It is interesting that I still retain rank on my titles. That’s useful information for bloggers.
No not at all, the only bad seeds are the ones who promoted PPP knowing full well they were screwing bloggers, this is why there can be no defense and no blame given to google on this one.
Let me try to go figure out how you were “google slapped” in my spare 3 seconds…
I thought a lot whether to add a link to my site for the comment or not. I finally did as I had older ones too but:
——————-
DISCLAIMER: I didn’t pay a dime… (I’m cheap!)
——————-
I’ve been away for the past few days and I noticed your post. I thought it was a general post of a theoretical situation as I don’t have Google toolbar in Opera. But I switched to Firefox and …
WHERE’S YOUR PR?
PS: Did you also experience any (organic) traffic loss or was it just a cosmetic bitchslap?
@Subliminal… I haven’t run numbers. My traffic is down, but then… I hadn’t posted in a week. So, that would explain most of it.
I’ll look at the number and compare search traffic. That seems the most reasonable thing to do.
I just meant traffic from Google (not other sources you have). New posts don’t matter.
Just curious if searches drop too or they just want to make sure you don’t s3ll any m0re l|nks (as if you did) hence they drain the greenies from the Toolbar.
5liminal- I need to run statistics tomorrow to check. I figure give it a couple of days and then report.
My sense is that search traffic is not drastically changed, but I haven’t run numbers.
One thing is for sure: Dragon Tatoos continues to referrer spam!
Lucia,
I believe that form within Google Webmaster Tools is for a different purpose- when they remove a site from their index.
Sorry to hear about the slap.
Hello there….Indeed interesting … Good Reading
It could be a number of things and not just one butu who really knows? Only Google
I am glad people are getting slapped, I warned of this many months ago and had a big argument with Aaron Wall on his blog. This is when I realized he and others were bad seed. Andy, come on, you need to open your eyes and stop defending what can not be defended dude, you make some great points but then foolish ones all over the place man, what’s up?
Check out my article, “PayPerJokes Crime and Google Does Evil - My First Review” Google doesn’t care about you or about doing no evil. It’s just a SAYING to put you in a trance so they can crush you like a bug when it suits their purposes.
[...] recent doings continued with Lucia discovering that she’d received a penalty, even though she never did a paid post on her [...]
You seem to have vanished lately. No sign of you at knitting fiend, stumble… I hope you are enjoying whatever it is you are up to. TTFN.
There doesn’t seem to be any consistent evidence that this is actually happening.
I will just be continuing as normal.
Its stupid for google to penalise bloggers for discussing their own sphere, and what about the poor “wooden post makers” that just want their customers to “pay per post” - google will have slapped them down also just because of a generic terminology being used?
The situation is interesting. I’m a PR0 blogger too, but I’ve actually been writing sponsored posts. Not as many now though, because advertisers are still fixated on PR and there aren’t many opportunities that pay above $5 for PR0.
As far as the NoOldSpamLinks plugin goes, I prefer to do it manually by putting on the nofollows myself and just moving them to different non-sponsored categories.
We are witnessing the disappearance of a good coder and blogger thanks to Google.
Do not QUIT!
That is 100% correct Matt Ellsworth.
One thing is natural drop in PR and another is drop to 0 from a 3 or 4 before. (This blog had 3 before.)
Due to rearrengement of PR you can not drop more then 2 positions … actually 1 but I’m being nice.
This is penalty not PR drop.
Seems to me there is absolutely no obvious correlation between drop in PR an selling of links. My blog crowdwisdom.de fell from PR 5 to 0…
I got slapped pretty hard on a few of my oldest and most successful sites and for pretty much the same reasons as in this article, just mentioning PPP in poss or having it mentioned on my forum. My number of quality backlinks had only grown since the previous update and I never bought or sold a text link. I sell advertising banners on some of my sites but the anchor text is an image, so it’s not the same as a text-link, plus 90% of the ads aren’t permanent.
I do run a successful blog directory and a social bookmarking site and I noticed a tremendous amount of the bloggers hitting out support forums expressing their sorrows over losing Pagerank.
IMHO, Google created Pagerank, they inflated it and now they have gone overboard with punishing people. To me, it reminds me of an experience I had in fifth grade when somebody in our class did something wrong and the teacher and principal put us all in a room and said we wouldn’t be allowed to return to class until somebody stepped forward with who had done it. Well, we sat in that office (as a class of 30 kids) and we all knew who was responsible but I’ll never forget the solidarity because we sat there for 4 days (not doing any schoolwork, it was like The Breakfast Club) and in the end the guilty parties were never caught and punished and we were allowed to retrn to class after a four day hiatus. I think the blogosphere *needs* to show solidarity and as webmasters turned their pages black over ten years ago in protest of internet regulations, bloggers need to turn their Adsense ads black for one week in a show of solidarity.
Unfortunatley, ten years ago, the internet was full of bright, spirited individuals all working towards a common goal. Once the marketers and salesmen discovered it’s power, there is no longer any solidarity.
Thanks for the heads up. I refrain myself now from using the PPP initials even though I referred to the newest internet advertising - Pay Per Play - in my latest review.
Tsk. Tsk. I hope this issue will be settled. I’m sorry to hear about your status.
Cheers!
Dulce
I think it’s pretty unfair - Google bitchslapping people. It’s painful enough already to loose some PR but with a total 0? Thanks too much..
I think that mentioning those companies was a big factor.
I have several blogs, and one that I’d mentioned those companies on (as well as doing a couple of posts for them) went from PR 3 to 0. Another one that didn’t have any mentions stayed at 4.
[...] Review Me, Smorty or other venues. I won’t even mention the name of one, due to the fact that some people got hit with a Page Rank penalty for even mentioning their company. I’m not one to give [...]
I know some people think that Google might change their mind on this eventually and stop penalising bloggers for using PPP. I guess we will have to wait and see.
Google has been bitch slapping a lot of site on the web with a broad sword. Taking out the good with the bad.
I wonder what happens when people want to search for these things? Will anything come up?
the other day my new site that i dedicate for PPP purposes got slapped too
took google 4 months to detect the activity.. that’s pretty dangerous
Once in a while google gets her period and decides to dump whoever she happens to be sleeping with. They’ll fix this, if it is indeed true.
I think that mentioning those companies was a big factor.
I was reading the hide sponsored category plugin and saw this article. Does it mean the plugin wasn’t enough to hide ppp articles?
It’s funny that you used those words that many times in a post about why another blogger said to not use them. I laughed hysterically. I do sponsored post every now and then but I often write something like…. This post was brought to you by
hi, sorry to hear about what happened with google, they are doing it to everyone! Something must be done.
Hey Lucia where’d you go anyway? I miss your posts. (:
Man, what happened to freedom of speech? Damn…
They must really have a good algorithm to catch so much.
Wow.. I mean what are Google trying to do, quell the free speech that we have by penalizing sites that use said words ??
Very weird behavior if you ask me, and i really think they should think a bit more about such things, else you can easily get an “uprising” on your hands. *chuckles*
how did u react to this thread (; I agree completely (;
I didn’t know Google was so strict when it came to blogs. No paid links, no mention of pay-per-post… Google seems to be losing its “free” image.
Thanks for your great information. I love your article. Hope you will post more interesting information for us.
Very nice and useful post.This is both good reading for starters and experts.Thanks for sharing.Will be referring a lot of friends about this.Thanks a lot.Keep blogging.
Great Post, I Like It.
Thanks for the information
Thanks for your great information.