Caydel’s SEO Blog

This morning, ReviewMe, a new company run by Andy Hagens and Aaron Wall launched. Similar to some extent to PayPerPost or the upcoming LoudLaunch, ReviewMe is a site that seeks to link companies to bloggers.

The basic idea is this: You log into your account at ReviewMe, and submit your blog. If approved, you will provided a set of products, services or other items to review, with a certain amount of monetary compensation.

It also appears that your blog is listed in a directory on ReviewMe, through which Advertisers can browse. Each blog’s listing contains some statistics about the site, including Alexa Rank, Technorati Rank, an estimated number of RSS subscribers, and an overall ranking out of five stars for the blog. Each blog has a specific price attached to it, for which advertisers may purchase a post on that blog. I hope these rankings are updated often, as this blog seems to fluctuate randomly on each of those statistics. Currently, my Alexa and Technorati rankings are lower than typical.

One slightly disappointing note: While my blog currently carries a price tag of $40 for an advertiser to offer to sponsor a post, the share going to the blogger is only 50%. I would have liked to see ReviewMe follow other programs such as Adbrite or Performancing Partners in that they pay the blogger 70% of the total advertising cost.

Where ReviewMe stands apart from the crowd is it’s focus on full disclosure. In a bid to ethically remain on the white side of the line, they require their bloggers to include a disclosure policy in every post written for ReviewMe. This separates ReviewMe from other services such as PayPerPost where a disclosure is not necessarily required.

Previously, I have spent some time looking at PayPerPost as a way to monetize my blog. Unlike PayPerPost, you are free to express your own opinions about the products and services you mention; there is no pressure for your review to be positive. The view taken by ReviewMe is that the advertiser is paying for a review, not a sponsored praise piece.

ReviewMe seems to hold a lot of potential for the blogosphere. It seems to take on PayPerPost on a higher ethical level. While there no doubt will be some initial resistance by many bloggers on the idea of sponsored posts, this will provide ways both for marketers to get word out about their products, and bloggers to make a little extra money to cover their costs.

P.S. This is a sponsored review. Please note that this post represents my true views on the subject at hand.

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As I wrote earlier, I have been re-included back into Technorati, which is great. I am getting lots of traffic from them, and a few comments and links I otherwise wouldn’t have. I’ve also noticed another major surprise - autoblogs are now grabbing my posts from Technorati tag RSS feeds, which may lead to duplicate content and link devaluation problems.

The Good

Well, I may as well start on a positive note. By picking up my posts from Technorati, these auto blogs (linked examples) are giving me a bunch of backlinks I otherwise wouldn’t have had. Additionally, I have been getting the odd bit of traffic from these blogs, although people coming from these blogs don’t always seem to stick around. There are some up sides to the fact that I am getting syndicated all over creation.

The Bad

Of course, it is a bit of a downside that many of the auto-blogs are syndicating my content without any attribution of authorship, or anything to note that these are not original. This annoys me - I don’t care if people quote me to high heaven in their posts. Or, even quote the post whole-sale. But most real people have the courtesy to attribute what they borrowed from me. These auto blogs don’t even do that.

The Ugly

And wait, it gets worse. I am wondering to a certain degree how this will interact with the Google duplicate content filter. From what I know of the dupe filter, Google assumes that the first place they crawl containing a certain chunk of textual content is the proper owner. In these days of RSS feeds, and tag-searching, I have found copies of my posts on these auto blogs within 30 seconds of my posting them to my own blog. What would happen if they get crawled on one of these autoblogs first, prior to my blog being crawled? Would Google attribute to them the authorship, and leave me in the cold?

Conclusion
I am sure Google is smart enough to recognize spam blogs quite effectively, but I wouldn’t doubt that there is still some level of risk inherent in the process. Additionally, if we think about the situation in terms of link building, overall incoming link quality plays a large role in how much Google trusts your site*. Obviously, if you had a site referenced by 10 .edu sites out of 12 incoming inks total, you would probably be trusted more by Google than if yo had 10 .edu links out of 2,000 links total. The value of your incoming .edu backlinks is now more diluted by the vast mass of your link weight, and you have a lower average quality of your incoming links.

So, I am not sure what to think about this auto-blog copying issue. I would assume that everyone associated with Technorati has the same problems, whether they recognize them or not. Thoughts, anyone?

* Yes, I know. It’s a debatable subject in whether incoming link quality plays a role in whether Google trusts you. I personally think it does, so I am sticking with this viewpoint. Hate mail into the comment form, please!

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After nearly 3 months of constant rejection from Technorati, I have been taken back again. An hour or so, I noticed the Technorati Spider was travelling my site, so I checked the Technorati page for this blog, and sure enough, I was indexed again! I still haven’t heard back from Technorati supports about any of the support tickets I’ve submitted, but hey - I’ve never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth. This is really nice, since I’ve already seen traffic coming in from Technorati as well.

I guess I now have to take back some of the mean things I’ve said about Technorati with respect to this issue. I’m back in black…

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Over the last two months or so, I have been having a relatively bad experience w/ Technorati. As you can see on the right, I have a Technorati link. My blog is affiliated with Technorati; you can view it’s page here.

Over the last, well, 64 days now, Technorati has not been updating this blog within their index. Prior to this, I had been getting a number of daily uniques from Technorati to my site via their searches etc. I quickly noticed once referral traffic from Technorati dropped off, and within 5-6 days of the last ping/update by them, I submitted a support ticket (#46432) indicating the problem. A week and a half later, I submitted another ticket (#46842) to them, again relating my problem. I never heard back on either support request. Since then, I have tried submitting support tickets, but have had major issues with the support form timing out, etc., and I do not think I ever managed to get more tickets through.

This is unacceptable for a company as large as Technorati. If you can’t keep up on your support, you will not succeed in business. The only other reason I can think of for this poor experience is simply that my blog is small enough that it isn’t important enough to them in the grand scheme of things to rate proper support. If this is the case, once again, they cannot succeed since they are guaranteeing themselves some bad press.

Technorati - step it up a notch. Deal with my support requests. I have come across other people who are experiencing the same problems I am - take care of them. You are creating for yourself a reputation of poor service - this may be your death knell.

When Technorati is handling your site properly, it is amazing in terms of traffic, and is a genuinely useful service. But they can’t continue like this!

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