BinaryWolf

Your Blog Has Been Rejected by Pay Per Post

Last month, I signed up with the PayPerPost (PPP) “sponsored posts” program where bloggers get paid for blogging. I was curious about their program and wanted to get an inside look at the PPP site.

The next day I received an email from PPP:

This is a notification to let you know that you blog, BinaryWolf Blog, has been rejected for the following reason(s): Thank you for your interest in PPP. We are unable to approve of your blog right now. Your blog contains ‘nofollow’ tags, which basically mean that search engines do not index or crawl your pages when searching.

So I replied to PayPerPost:

I’m aware that some of my links have those tags but what does that have to do with your service as long as the link(s) from the PPP paid post does not include ‘nofollow’ tags?

PPP’s response:

After double checking with Google techs, we can clarify that having nofollows anywhere on the page will block the page itself from being indexed or followed.

Therefore, if your page contains nofollows in the header or around other links, excluding your comments section, but the PPP links have tags that state ‘INDEX, FOLLOW,’ the page would remain unindexed.

Excuse me, I don’t think so. I contacted Google support about nofollows and Google’s response was:

Hi Steve,

The information you received from PPP isn’t accurate. Rest assured that using nofollow does not impede our ability or illingness to index the page that tag occurs on.

Please do feel free to provide me with contact info for PPP so I can politely correct their misunderstanding.

Regards, Adam, on behalf of the Search Quality Team

Other bloggers have complained about nofollow tag problems with PPP. I followed up several times about this issue with PPP with no response from them. Weak customer service reflects badly on any business no matter what your excuse is.

Three weeks later, PPP eventually gets around to sending their response:

Hi Steve,

Thank you very much for your patience. During the past couple of weeks we have experience immense growth and we are currently expanding our current staff to better communicate with all of our members. I do apologize for the wait, but I hope that I can provide some more answers for you today.

Blog reviewers were originally checking for nofollows in the manner that Google and other sources had identified. The way it was explained, nofollows located in the template, regardless of where they were (outside of being in the comments) still affected the blog’s ability to be indexed. We now know that that is simply not the case. Thanks to better research and do the input of members such as yourself, we are now only looking at the meta tags for nofollows.

Wikipedia is not (is it ever?) wrong. Thank you very much for your understanding. Please resubmit your blog for approval.

As of todayI have not resubmitted to PPP - not because of this issue alone.

Thoughts on Sponsored Posts

I think it’s a good idea to be up front about paid posts. Let you readers know that a post has been paid for. Just for the record, I have not written any sponsored posts for this blog. If there were any, I would clearly label those posts as sponsored.

At the end of the day, PPP is really about having a paid backlink on your site pointing back to the sponsor’s website. I believe that in many cases you are not required to write about the product or service in a positive light as long as you have the link, so you are free to give your honest opinion. Here’s a long thread about the pros and cons of sponsored posts.

My recommendation is to sign up with a company like Text Link Ads if you want to display paid backlinks as a steady revenue stream, without having to write any sponsored posts.

Tags: sponsored posts, paid for blogging, PayPerPost, backlink