Want to read a bad business tip from a 17 year old? “Sneaky Ninja” suggests you backdate your PPP posts so they never appear on your blog’s homepage:
Theoretically, you could backdate an offer for Pay Per Post so that it never even made it to your blog’s homepage, and the editors at Pay Per Post would probably never know, especially if your permalink structure did not include the date in it. I tried this out a few times in my old blog. If you are producing a new post each day, then you can easily backdate a post for Pay Per Post 4 days or so before your current post and it will be approximately half way down your homepage.
If you do this, PPP will ban you!
Yes, it’s true the technology exists to backdate your posts; it’s even easy to do. Just scan down the right sidebar in the WordPress editing pane and find the “edit date” control panels. Check the box and select a date for your post. (The feature is generally used to future date posts so your blog can stay active while you are on vacation.)
However, you should never backdate a sponsored post for PPP. First, it violates PPP TOS. Not only that but:
- Pay Per Post always checks for backdating: Currently they check manually. Eventually, it will be easy for PPP to check using Argus.
- This trick is easy to catch: Both Pay Per Post and the advertiser know the date you filed your opp. I don’t care how clever you think you are, everyone knows you didn’t write the post before you even reserved the opp! (Anyway, online tools exist to determine when any web page first appeared on the web. These tools have nothign to do with WordPress and PPP can use them.)
- PPP will ban you. If you don’t believe this, watch the PPP movie! It turns out advertisers want the traffic that comes when a post appears on the top page of a blog. Go figure!
Can we fiddle with the dates at all?
Forward dating posts is entirely legitimate. Bloggers use it to space out non-time critical posts, or to fill in their blog while they are on vacation or for announcing contests or promotins. You compose your post ahead of time, set the time to a future date and then click “publish”. The post will appear on your blog only when the future date arrives.
If you do this you should read The Secret to Posting Regularly to learn learn how to ping the blog and RSS services at the right time. You want to ping when the post appears, not when you click “publish”.
Shifting dates is sometimes ok. Every now and then a blogger will re-date a post, adding a note that the post was previously published. Redating makes the post appear at the top of the blog. I used to use this for Knitting Carnival announcements because it was useful to keep the same date forever and accumulate information from previous posts.
One caution: if you are participating in something like PPP, you shouldn’t consider the re-dated posts a “fresh new” interim post. It’s not. PPP won’t let you just re-date old posts and shove them between new ones! (And yes, they can, and do, catch this.)
Final Analysis:
Don’t try to trick PPP by backdating sponsored posts to drive them off the front page. It’s against the TOS and they will catch you. It’s just not the path to making money online!
However, future dating posts can be a smart move to keep blog traffic up when you are busy with other things and can’t post regularly!
I can’t believe people would do that, that’s very shady. If you’re trying to make money from PPP, I think it’s important to build up a reputation as a honest blogger.
Wow, this is such a bad idea for so many reasons. It’s so easy to check, and be caught. Also, having the PPP post on your homepage isn’t really going to hurt you.
Oh and the small matter of using this technique is basically wire fraud!
Thanks for bringing this to everyone’s attention. You should make the link to Sneaky Ninja’s page no follow if you have the ability to do so.
That is so wrong for people to even think about cheating advertisers out of their money. Is it SUCH a big deal for a sponsored post to appear at the top? I would never do that. Anyway, thanks for the knowledge.
Nice post, thanks for the link, albeit the nofollow.
When I wrote the post, I wasn’t really talking about backdating it to other pages, although I did mention it, I’ve never done it.
I would sometimes just back date it by a few hours or a day maybe to behind another post…whatever.
But yeah, good post
What about for ReviewMe.com or other similar companies?
Gotcha, thanks
sounds like an interesting cheating method. but i wouldn´t wanna risk it. it´s too much you could lose by getting banned. mybe they won´t even accept any blogs from your ip in future at all…
I agree 100%! Don’t date-shift you PPP post. They will know, believe me they will.
I’m currently at my 1st month of suspension.. another month and I’m free… The 2 month suspension of my blog on PPP is the result of that backdate posts.
Don’t do it ayt?
Wow - that’s a bit sneaky. If you’re a responsible blogger you shouldn’t have to backdate your PPP posts anyway because you’ll only be posting about something you can endorse. In an ideal non-mercenary world anyway!