Read Part 1 of 2: Cat and Mouse Games With Search Engines
In my post yesterday, I outlined the ongoing battle between Internet marketers and the search engines, namely Google. In summary, while Google is trying to provide what it considers to be the most relevant search results to consumers based on search queries they type, Internet marketers hope to offer web sites that may or may not be considered as relevant by Google, to appear high in front of the consumers in search result listings.
The problem for the marketers is that Google has taken away all the “easy” ways to game the search ranking algorithms, such as stuffing of keywords in the body of the page and setting up link farms to artificially gain popularity. The most important ways to gain in the page rank index within the Google algorithm today are:
1. Get high quantity of back links from other “important” sites,
2. Generate unique content not available elsewhere on the Internet,
3. Change / update / add to content frequently,
4. Do the 1-3 above for a long time, consistently.
While marketers clearly understand what they need to do for #2 and #3, accomplishing #1 is not easy. Somehow, they have to “convince” other popular / important sites to link to them. Without additional incentives, this becomes long and unpredictable process for marketers, something that their investors will clearly not be patient with.
And thus, PayPerPost and most recently, ReviewMe were born. Both services provide means by which marketers are able to pay popular / important publishers to provide back links to them, embedded in the middle of other content that search engines will find and process.
Interestingly, both PayPerPost and ReviewMe have advertised a different business model with some subtle differences between them. They have both touted the value of using bloggers to generate the buzz for the advertising sites. While PayPerPost allows marketers a way to solicit mostly positive reviews, ReviewMe offers bloggers an opportunity to be more impartial in their reviews and get paid for any review, whether positive or negative.
However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the battle is not about traffic that marketers would generate from the reviews of their sites / products / services. If it was about the traffic, different compensation mechanisms would prevail, such as cost-per-click (CPC) or even cost-per-impression (CPM) business models. Furthermore, there would be no need to restrict blogs to a certain size – any blog should then be able to generate traffic and receive proportionate compensation for it. Witness Google AdSense or Amazon Associates which allow almost any publisher into their programs, tracking payments as low as $0.22 for clicks or sales they provide.
My opinion is that PayPerPost and ReviewMe are really in the business of gaming the Google algorithm much more so than they are in the business of generating the marketing buzz. Having reviewed various advertising offers on these networks, it is clear to me that advertisers are primarily interested in direct links than they are about publicity. All require bloggers to link to certain pages on their sites. And all prohibit small blogs from receiving any compensation, even though this long tail of blogs could conceivably represent 50%+ of their traffic. The main issue with small blogs is that their links are worth nothing in the algorithm of Google and thus are dismissed.
For a very similar perspective, check out Deep Jive Interests post titled How Advertisers REALLY Benefit from the ReviewMe “Revolution”.
Another good analysis from Greg Yardley titled Optimizing Your ReviewMe Purchase.
What we are seeing are the new players in the old Internet marketing / findability game. History is repeating itself and Google may already be hard at work to figure out how to defeat the new challenge to its algorithm. In the end, I am very low on the business model of ReviewMe (see my previous detailed analysis titled ReviewMe.com, a Business Model With Nowhere to Go). While I think that the PayPerPost model is slightly better, I am not sure I would endorse it as a long-term success, especially if Google figures out how to “punish” sites using these networks the same way they have done with the link farms.
Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
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