TechWag

Payperpost now Izea launched a public rebellion over the whole concept of page rank last night with a call to arms for bloggers who have suffered a page rank penalty in regards to their relationship with Payperpost. While there are few accurate ways of measuring how popular a blog or web site is, the idea of metrics is critical when determining how much someone can charge for a sponsored post on their blog or web site. Page rank is one of many ways of determining the value of a blog or web site. Other equally flawed measures such as technorati, alexa, and comscore show that there is a long way to go in actually getting a real number when it comes to the popularity of a blog.

While we work with Izea at times, there is one thing that Izea needs to also address. The quality issue that they have with some of their sponsors, if you sign up to take a look at what is being offered, some of it is little better than spam. If an Izea sponsor says do not put in “sponsored article” then that means (at least to us) that they know there is a quality issue with their request. There are few if any requests for a sponsored article that make sense for a technical blog, and while there are many requests for mortgages, products, and calling cards, there is a quality issue here. If people willy-nilly take any sponsored post, that is not in relationship to their blog, it looks like a splog, and they will take the page rank penalty for it.

The two sides of the story here that is not mentioned in Izea’s community blog post calling the world to arms and recommending that folks write their congressman over the whole issue arises one more issue. Not just one of quality, but one of impartiality on the part of Google.

The whole text-link ads system is another company that has been about obliterated off the Google indexing system, and people who use text link adds also suffered a page rank penalty. From a standard viewpoint, this could be construed as “evil” as both Izea and Text Link ads compete for space on a blog or web site. Using page rank as a club to have bloggers and webmasters conform to Google’s idea of the internet can be construed as “evil”. When the ante is raised so that Forbes, and other good solid news organizations take the penalty because they didn’t do something that Google liked, that can also be construed as “evil”.

So here we are at a cross roads, and one where bloggers and webmasters need to understand the risks and rewards of using particular advertising systems in conjunction with Google, or just a competing system. There are risks, and there are rewards, page rank is not the sole determinate of the value of a blog or website. The only real question at this point people need to ask themselves, is the risk worth the reward, and if it is, carry on doing what you are doing.

Tags: web 2.0, google, business, Politics //