I have been reading a lot about the new buzz of the big G since some time and I now want to express my opinion about this topic. To start let me explain the meaning of this topic for those who are not so familiar with what I am talking.

What is actually a sponsored Review?

Assume you own a website or any services and you want to promote it. The latest most performing way to do this is to get your services or website (well whatever you want) to be discussed on a blog which has some decent traffics and hence people will know about it. So as a result the ‘advertiser’ which is the one who have requested the review, will get more traffics on his website from your blog. Another reason some advertiser would want to get a review done is for pagerank. When you will do a review for an advertiser you will be asked to set atleast about 2 ‘do-follow’ links to his website and hence increase his number of links toward his website… finally resulting in increasing his pagerank!

There are some companies like sponsoredreview.com who act like an intermediary between an advertiser and a publisher(the blogger) and normally with sponsored review you can earn upto $25 per review of about 400 words. Now some ‘creatures’ like John Chow can even earn $500 per review! But don’t dream as you are not a CHOW!

Now we come to the second term which is Links Selling.

What is Link Selling?

There are many companies which act as the middleman to sell links. For example assume you have a post about Kamasutra! So a condom company want to buy some links. He can pay you a monthly fee (most about $10 per month) so that you get one or two of the words to become a link to his website. So in other word you are giving him a backlink in exchange of payment. Why he buy the links? Simply as I said above to increase his pagerank and to get traffic from your blog.

Oki! Enough of the tutorial now lol. Now the topic of the day is that is Google right by banning sponsored reviews and links selling? You must know that Google has become very damn severe recently by punishing many blogs and website which were doing sponsored reviews and link selling! Infact big G sees these transactions as a way to mess with their search engine results ranking. How?

Look assume guy X is the ugly son of Bill Gates and he got daddy’s money and NAME to buy anything. So he can make the most asshole website of the world concerning the topic of ASSES and pay all bloggers $500 to give him a link! So assume he pay about 1000 bloggers to do that for him. So he is now having backlinks from 1000 top blogs! And search engine will think that his UGLY website which he copied from somewhere else is a mega star of the web! In another way he is messing with search engine results as he will be most probably be listed as the first star when someone search for ASS on google. This is just a foolish example. So to stop these practice, Google is now punishing bloggers who sell links! Do you think Google is being bad and evil by doing this?

Punishments? Well… for example you can get your beautiful PR from 7 to ZERO in no time. You can also disappear from google’s index and stop getting traffics from search engines! And eventually the blog dies! Now the question.

IS GOOGLE RIGHT TO DO THIS? AND WHY?

One question that strike my mind is how can their algorithm determine which link in a blog post is a paid link and which are genuine links? One problem is that I know of some blogs who have suffered these bans or temporary bans even though they were not selling links!

Google will never tell us how they determine these as people will definitely find ways to bypass these methods. Some possible ways google can determine if a post is sponsored? I am not sure of these but here are my views which can be right or wrong.
To start the websites are not scanned by human manually. There are bots who crawl all these trillions of blogs and website and these little piece of algorithm who decide your site’s fate! So can a piece of code really know which link is a paid link? In my opinion I think that they cannot! But instead these bots mostly look for possible evidence of link selling and then blacklist the site which is then banned either manually by a big G personnel or by other algorithm!

These are the possible ways I could think of that gives google the evidence that you are selling links:

1. A large amount of outgoing links in one single post! This might be an indication that you are selling links but well I would find it weird that I read a blog post of 500 words with 10 links! It can be taken as a sponsored review if the links are do-follow!
2. Some bloggers tend to write in big H1 that they are doing sponsored review. Maybe those google bots scan for such words and try to guess it you are doing sponsored reviews. Try avoiding linking back to these sponsored review site simply.
3. Keep a short blogroll only for the blogs you really read! Remove old blogs that are no more updating.
4. Linking to a lot of unrelated websites! – Yea assume your site is about Casino in Mauritius and most of your links are toward Condoms company, there is no such relations and it can or cannot be taken a paid links. (Well even if we know that they use lots of ‘it’ in the casinos lol)!!
5. By the way I also heard that a site can get banned for using Pay Per Play advertising!!
6. And the most dangerous of all is using plugins provided by link selling companies! I am not sure whether google bots can locate these, mostly if the companies keep giving new versions of the plugin! I am refering for Inlinks here. Do you think google can know if someone if using inlinks?

So what are the other ways you think google can determine if someone is selling links or doing sponsored reviews?

To end this little discussion, I’ll advise you people to STAY AWAY from sponsored reviews and link selling EXCEPT IF you place the links as NO-FOLLOW!

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