Is Google Penalizing for "Advertorials" On Blogs?

[staker2]

I recently read this article on the Business Week site:

Blogola: The FTC Takes On Paid Posts - BusinessWeek

I found the second part about Google more alarming than the first bit about the FTC. How exactly is Google penalizing? I write blogs all over the place and need to know what exactly to change to prevent any issues with Google. Is there somewhere I can go to look this up or is it just a mystery shrouded in Google's algorithms wrapped in a riddle? Is it just the mainstream media getting a tech story wrong, which happens?

[Niche]

Looks like they are after paid posts. Unfortunately, this statement 'Many have turned to the blogosphere, offering cash and products to amateur journalists in exchange for glowing reviews about their products.' implies that they have paid all review articles with the same brush

[AlexNewell]

I take everything in the press with a dash of salt and cynicism!

Is your blog losing RSS subscriptions or traffic?

Are you dropping like a stone in the rankings for your keywords?

If not dismiss the article!

All The Best

Alex

[SemAdvance]

First BusinessWeek has no clue about anything related to SEO.

Google does not downgrade paid blog posts unless the paid blog posts were done to manipulate organic search results.

For Businessweek to write something so irresponsible is why less than professional journalists are cutting the throats of traditonal media and forcing newspapers to close.

Inane articles without any basis for their claims and unproven statements such as the one in BusinessWeek would be a reason a newspaper editor would not publish such rubbish.

Seems BusinessWeek wants to join the fate of newspapers publishing fallacy without confirming their source....

Stupid is as stupid writes in its magazine.......

[jordy3738]

If these things are being done under the table how is Google going to sniff out the advertisers blog posts?

Are they just going to through all reviews in the same bucket and plunder the rankings if you have a tag that indicates a "review?'

[staker2]

Heh - based on the comments here and on the Business Week site it looks like my best bet is to write the article off. I took it seriously because it was in Business Week - I'm sure lots of others will make the same mistake.

I completely agree with the statement about irresponsible journalism. What a crock.

[promar]

You wont be penalized for posting in blogs. Blogs that don't use "nofollow" could be.

From Matt Cutts statement:

"If link in a paid post would affect search engines, that link should not pass PageRank (e.g. by using the nofollow attribute). Google — and other search engines — do take action which can include demoting sites that sell links that pass PageRank, for example."

[ChiefLee]

Google says a lot of things promoting "best practices" that they truthfully can't factor into their algorithm. I wouldn't be concerned by this.

[ronchalice]

staker2 - Irresponsible journalism is blatantly painting a "review" specifically designed to sell a product as "journalism" or "consumerism" or some other kind of "ism" - an ad is a freaking ad and should be identified as such.

SemAdvance - Newspapers may be struggling, but at least most of them follow the rules about tagging as "ADVERTISEMENT" some bogus "news" article that's nothing more than 500 words of shill. Google would be smart (and they probably already are) to anticipate FTC regulations and find ways to identify, if not necessarily downgrade in search results, articles that exist for no other reason than to push a product.

Just because anybody with a dialup connection can create a blog doesn't lend squat to either their credibility or ethics.

[promar]

Again fron Cutts:

"Google found multiple bloggers that violated our quality guidelines and we took corresponding action. Those blogs are not trusted in Google’s algorithms any more.

We do take the subject of paid posts seriously and take action on them. In fact, we recently finished going through hundreds of “empty review” reports..."

We talk, we read rumors, we often assume and we experiment - this is the nature of the industry. But if there is a clear "don't do it" warning form Google, I wont.