Disclosure: I received no compensation for writing this post.

Up until about 3 months ago this blog enjoyed a PageRank of 3, and a temporary PR5 which was probably due to the Google Dance, then during the last update it vanished.  This didn’t make sense to me as I didn’t think I had broken any guidelines, my backlinks were increasing as well thanks to the number of downloads of my free templates.

So I started to dig deep in this blog to try and determine what the cause was.  I immediately thought of the referral links I had on the blog, both in posts and in my sidebar.  Google frowns upon buying and selling links so I removed all sidebar widgets, paid links in the sidebar and all ads that weren’t Adsense.

Today I received an email from IZEA, it’s a pay per post type of web service, I had signed up for it some months back but never did get any paid posts and had completely forgot about it.  The email was regarding 6 major blogs that were paid to do a review for Kmart.  I read the post and perused the list of 6, I noticed ShoeMoney.com was on the list.  ShoeMoney is a blog I frequent for inspiration and ideas so I checked out his post.

After I read his post I looked up and noticed on my Google Toolbar that his main page had a PR6, I was dumb-founded, how could a blog who has numerous posts that he was paid to post have such a high PR.  Some would say must be because of the number of backlinks, but that wouldn’t matter if you are breaking Google guidelines about doing these types of posts.

At first I was furious, immediately thought that Google was making exceptions for certain high profile blogs and was trying to think of a way to ask Jeremy Schoemaker how he was getting away with it, but I thought, perhaps a little digging would be the best approach.

When it comes to questions about Google I always turn to Matt Cutts, if anyone would know the answer he would.  I did a search for paid posting and pagerank and found an article he had written about it here.  In this article the following line caught my attention;

In the same way that a regular surfer would want disclosure to know if a post were paid, all the major search engines also want to make sure that paid posts are adequately disclosed to search engines as well. Google’s documentation for webmasters gives examples of how to do that.

Now before I go any further, one possibilty of participating in paid postings without Google knowing would be to do what I suspect ShoeMoney does, mask the URL using a plugin that changes link referral URLS to look like another link on your blog then using robots.txt and tell Google not to index that directory.  So for example:

http://www.somesite.com/refid=555 to http://www.pliggs.com/sites/somesite

then in the robots.txt file I would put :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /sites/

but again, I didn’t want to bother Jeremy by asking so I kept looking, I visited Google’s guidelines like suggested in the Matt Cutts post mentioned above for more answers.

Turns out I was wrong about paid posts to a certain degree.  Bloggers can still participate in these ventures and it will not effect their PageRank providing they do the following:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Looks like my idea with the robots.txt file was on the right track afterall.  Another thing you should do is disclose when a post is a paid post like ShoeMoney.com does:

Disclosure: I received compensation for writing this post.

After reading Matt Cutt’s post and the guidelines at Google, I then went back to the post at ShoeMoney about Kmart and sure enough the link to IZEA was a nofollow and the disclosure was at the top of the post.

Some of you probably already knew all of this, but I figured since I didn’t know there has to be someone else who doesn’t as well, or at least I hope I’m not the only one.

This discovery leads me to believe that it was probably the text links I had on this blog and the IZEA javascript code that caused the issue with my PageRank, hopefully the next update will see a return of my PageRank as all of those referral links have been removed.

So, am I the only one that didn’t know any of this?

Clarification: ShoeMoney isn’t the only one who posts paid posts, folks like John Chow do it as well.  I also want to ensure that no one thinks I was attacking ShoeMoney, I respect him and enjoy his blog, it was simply his blog post that got me to thinking about PR and compensated posts, plus any chance to link to his blog is a bonus.

Hopefully I won’t wake up tomorrow to a nasty comment or email from him.