How many bloggers are going to stop using services like Reviewme.com and Text-Ad-Links because of the recent Google pagerank penalties? If the blog is well known and is already making a pretty penny using those services, they are most likely not going to stop. The middle of the road and lesser known blogs will probably start to have second thoughts. I know I have. I havent done a whole lot of sponsored blogging, just a post here and there. These Google cuts change things.

Google-Page-Rank-DropsA lot of people complained and there has been a lot of discussion on this but I understand what Google is doing. Sponsored post and paid links are a way to buy page rank. If you have paid to have a blog post written about your website from a bunch of blogs with a high page rank, you are getting that page rank shared with your blog. And it isn’t the natural organic way of getting links or shared page rank, which is what Google really wants. One of the reasons why everyone heralds Google as the best search engine is because of the relavancy of the search engine results. Page rank and SERP comes in part from people linking to each other. The natural and organic way of linking to others comes from relevance of the linking that websites are doing. Once you throw money, paid links and sponsored blog posts in the mix, it messes with that "relevancy". Google is just trying to regain order on the way they do things. If everyone keeps linking to everyone else through some sortof of sponsored way, eventually you will do a search at Google and have a lot of sponsored links and post cluttering the first page of search results.

The problem I had with all of the Google pagerank cuts is that they "just happened". No warning, no press release or announcement, one day people woke up and had "20% off" their page rank. I’m not sure what would’ve been the best way to handle this but there shouldve been a heads up, a grace period where people could fix things before they were penalized. Something where Google announce…

"If you are selling page rank through either sponsored post or paid links you will get penalized in your page rank. We are giving you 30 days to correct this. Go to Google.com to find out if you are in violation and what you can do to fix it before time runs out"

The problem would be how to get that message to the masses. You couldn’t expect Google to try to email everyone. I’m pretty sure many bloggers would blog about it, just like they blogged about the pagerank cuts. But would that be sufficient? One thing I noticed in a few of the blog post I read on the topic is that these rules have already been in Google’s terms of service. Then I think about it and the reality is that many, if not most people probably do not read the whole "terms of service" for any website or service. I know Ive had an experience where I was in violation of Google’s rules and didn’t know, it didn’t even occur to me that what I was doing was wrong.