Comments on: SponsoredReviews.com Announces New Feature – LinkSets™

By: Keyword Research Services

Keyword Research Services — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:08:50 +0000

I agree with your comments about paid links David. It is silly for Google to wage their war against that practice. It is their own fault for sharing PageRank information with the public in the first place. They basically tell which links will likely help the most, yet they don’t accept that people will go after those links by any means possible.

I have purchased a large quantity of paid reviews for a previous website that I marketed. One problem is that nearly half the sites would drop down to PR0 at some point. Also with blog reviews, you experience a small rankings boost when the post is first published. Then after that post gets pushed onto page 2 and then into the archives, the benefits of those reviews quickly die off. So it isn’t a very good long term strategy.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 17:42:39 +0000

Fair comments.

I may test the water with one of our lesser sites first.

By: David Wallace

David Wallace — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 17:14:13 +0000

@Steve – Technically, yes Google would see it as “paid links” however, I feel that it is none of Google’s business what a site does – whether they sell paid links or do not. If you have read through other posts in this blog, you will learn that I am certainly for paid links and view Google’s stance against them as war. But hey, marketing is war anyway, right?

Blog reviews are really effective due to the fact that it is very difficult for Google’s algorithm to know if a blog post have been influenced by money or not. I would almost think it would have to involve human intervention and if you know anything about Google’s spam fighting practices, they like to do thinks algorithmically as opposed to manually.

What happens if they decide a link is paid? Typically they no longer count it or allow it to pass any value. That is why it is important that link builders continually monitor their links, especially those they are paying for on a regular basis, to make sure they are still adding value to their search marketing efforts.

I don’t see them banning the site receiving the link because they may or may not be at fault.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:49:36 +0000

I’ve just come across your site and I must say it is very informative and helpful, I can see myself spending a lot of time here.

Regarding this post – I didn’t realise this type of service was openly available. By doing this type of advertisering would G consider it paid for text links?

As we all know G doesn’t like buying text links and I am a bit concerned about going down the route of sponsored reviews because of this. What has your experience been? Have sites been banned through using sponsored reviews?