Raven’s Range
Blather around a virtual range

I’m still not friends with Google. Having just submitted Raven’s RV to PayPerPost which until last November was actually providing me with a nice steady stream of income, I discover that I have a Google page rank of zero. For those late to this adventure, page rank is the “industry standard” for judging the worth of a blog website, and the higher you rank the more money you can earn…allegedly.

Now, I have incoming links and a wealth of articles from just three months of posting there, so all I can think of is that the “stain” from my first Google-slapped blog has seeped through to the second, and that I can assume it will happen with the third and fourth blogs, too.

This is very annoying, especially since I’m receiving reports that larger more influential sites who do sell paid links are not being Google-spanked, and also that sites with no incoming links and nothing beyond an initial “Hello World” post have been assigned page rank.

In other words, for all that Google is claiming to be protecting the integrity of its search engine–which is fair enough–its actions give the lie to such claims. It is not acting consistently across the board and it’s that to which I object the most.

De-Googlifying

For my part, I’m boycotting Google to the extent that I can. I still use maps, because nobody else does those so well as Google, and I still use their advertisements because a) I haven’t yet made a concerted effort to find an alternative and b) they owe me money, but not enough money that if I canceled now I’d actually get paid.

Want to hear something funny? In two years of hosting ads for this company, I’ve earned a hefty $6 from my click-throughs. I was earning on average $500 a month from my paid posts.

But I’ve found alternatives to just about everything else–while realizing that the infusion of Google into the internet world is both scary and rapidly approaching monopoly. It was highlighted last year when they fixed up Blogger comments so that non-members could not post a link: I don’t know if they suddenly started losing a lot of bloggers, but they sure fixed it pronto. ;)

The decision to blog for money

There are many who’d call me names, some of them inappropriately nasty, for doing paid posts. I’ve lost respect for a number of high-profile bloggers who’d rather use inflammatory language to bring eyeballs to their site than present a balanced viewpoint.

But that’s okay. I know that they have no respect for me so they wouldn’t care what I thought. ;)

At the time, I put some considerable thought into whether I would do paid posting, and concluded that it would be perfectly all right to make money online so long as it were done in an above-board fashion. I figured that it would be no worse than having ads, perhaps even more interesting, and my instincts on that have pretty much been borne out. As far as I can tell, those who don’t like them skip them, and I get some nice comments on my paid posts.

Anyone who’s read Raven’s Roads where such posts are now few and far between will know that I make it very, very obvious where the paid posts are. If the header graphic with the jingling coins isn’t a dead giveaway, the in-post disclosure and the category name would consolidate it. You’d have to be a complete and utter dork to miss that these posts were sponsored. ;)

Disclosure is a problem

The trouble is, there are options in the paid-post world not to be this open. For my part, I refuse to do site-wide disclosure, the practice of putting a little label up saying “yeah, some of these posts are for money but I’m not saying which.” It makes me uncomfortable, but it’s still an option, and those who use it seem to be hanging onto their page rank and ability to get posts a little better than those who don’t.

I dabbled my feet in the pond of another company until they started giving advice that struck me as truly dishonest: they advised posters not to disclose at all, dumping us all back in the bad old days of this fledgling industry–before IZEA got (more of) a clue and insisted on disclosure.

PayPerPost/IZEA could definitely do better

Many of the “Posties” (the rather twee name that is given to those who do paid posting for IZEA) have felt abandoned by the company after being given a page rank of zero. From having plenty of choices–enough, indeed, to ensure that we could pick something relevant that we enjoyed– we now rarely find an opportunity. And you know, I still won’t write about cosmetic surgery or mail-order brides from Russia. Sorry.

I get the impression that there are many thousands of people sitting there hitting refresh waiting to see if they can catch some of the crumbs. To be frank, I can’t be bothered to do that–I take what I can and what’s relevant, but am working on other projects until this whole thing shakes out.

The IZEA forums are full of complaints about feeling abandoned, and it does feel that way–whilever IZEA offers page rank, the very system that cut out a huge chunk of their Posties, to advertisers, it’s like a slap in the face. And to see them advertising on Google is worse still. But then, they’re in it for the money, not because they are in love with their Posties, and I think that many of the paid-posters forget this.

Fortunately, or so I now hear, IZEA is going to eventually exclude Page Rank from both IZEA and its new venture, Social Spark, which was due to be launched in January but pushed back so that their own competing blog ranking system, Real Rank, could be rolled out sooner.

This is all well and good, but those several months in between are kind of hairy, and RR requires that a blogger install some code on his or her blog. Thing is, none of these ranking systems are “real,” but for IZEA to provide any kind of alternative and to go up against the big buys is pretty courageous.

They might even pull it off. We’ll find out.

Not helping its own cause

I don’t think the sun shines out of IZEA’s patootie, to be honest. They’re the best of the companies I’ve tried, but they still have issues. I’ve done several posts which, due to their system’s failing, I couldn’t submit–and they refuse to pay. More than anything else, this has alienated me from the company.

I went to the forums to see if others were having the same experience, but the core of Postie-dom seems to be almost cultish in its ability to close ranks and protect the mother ship. I was told (not in so many words) that I was ridiculous to expect to be paid for a post that I couldn’t submit. If the IZEA system fails, they opined, I should just suck it up.

But if I’ve done the work, they have logs and can tell what the problem was. They can figure it out, pay me, and fix the problem. In fact, it’s their responsibility to do so.

Often, my posts are rejected because there is (allegedly) no disclosure in them. What this means is that the reviewer didn’t pay good enough attention. Once, notably, a 200-word post was rejected for having 199 words (actually it had 201). It’s the stupid, niggly stuff like this that is off-putting and I think that the company could implement better training and maybe even put off its bigger projects until it gets its own support system under control.

Conclusion

I’ve been intending to write this post for some time, figuring that someone out there might be interested in my experiences and opinion. It’ll be interesting to try out the new version of PayPerPost and SocialSpark, especially if they really play Google-ball by having nofollow tags on their paid links. I wonder if I will ever get my page rank back? I’m not sure I really care about it any more.

To be honest, I’ve become so accustomed to not using Google that I figure I can just do without them. Unlike the big sites who rant about how terrible all the paid-posters are, I don’t feel any great need to slather my blog walls with ads. ;)

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