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Posted by John Lockwood on March 18th, 2008

This is Part II in our article series on Paid Reviews.

Should you write paid reviews on your site? Most bloggers would be honored to be asked, even if they’re not freelance writers and therefore already thinking along the lines of getting paid to write. For freelancers it’s a natural, that’s true by definition. You pay me, I write something.

Some bloggers make a few extra dollars writing paid reviews, and top bloggers make a lot of money at it. Do you want your site reviewed at JohnChow.com? That’ll be $500, please. That’s not a bad rate for an hour or two of writing.

Paid reviews do have some problems, however, and you should know about these before you start offering them on your blog. In this Article, I’ll discuss the main technical objection to paid reviews — that Google might penalize your web site for having them — and show you how to solve this problem.

Google’s Position on Paid Reviews

To discuss Google’s position on paid reviews, we need to understand why people would pay you to review their site. What is the customer for a paid review hoping to gain?

There are two basic reasons someone might pay you to write a review about them:

1. The Customer Wants a Direct, Human Boost in Their Reputation and Traffic
   We all know about celebrity endorsements. Where would the Craftmatic bed be without Lindsey Wagner, or the GAF Viewmaster without Henry Fonda? Celebrity endorsements are just a form of personal referral, where someone’s paying someone they hope you’ve heard of to endorse their product. Paid reviews are a small scale application of the same basic thing. You pay someone to talk about you and link to you, hoping their readers will find you and then buy something, or at least that they will start reading you, enjoy it, and tell someone they know to buy something.
2. The Customer Wants an Indirect, Computer-Friendly Boost in Their Reputation and Traffic
   Another reason a customer would want a paid review on your site is that search engine algorithms like Google’s also consider a link to your site to be an endorsement of its content. If Brian Clark of CopyBlogger.com links to Inklit.com like this: Online Copywriter, then according to the Google’s page rank algorithm, Inklit.com is more likely to be about an Online Copywriter than if he didn’t. In other words, the link gives my site a reputation boost on Google that’s every bit as important as the human reputation boost I would receive.

OK, back to Google. As with so many “what is Google thinking?” sort of questions, the best answer to Google’s position on paid links comes in an article that Matt Cutts wrote. In this case the article in question is Selling Links That Pass Page Rank.

As you might expect, Google doesn’t care at all about item 1, but it does care about item 2. Google considers buying paid reviews to be a form of link buying, and devalues pages or sites that engage in it for attempting to artificially manipulate page rank.

Practice Safe Endorsement: Wear a Link Condom

With the invention of blogs, many people started commenting on other people’s blogs to get links back to their own site. To combat this, Google invented the “nofollow” tag. The idea was that you could add a bit of code to the link to mark it as being one that the webmaster himself did not endorse.

It wasn’t long before Google decided that not only should “nofollow” apply to links that other people write on my site — it should also apply to links that I myself write, if I’m being paid to write them.

So getting back to our earlier example, if I buy a review from Brian Clark and he wants to let Google know that he’s not cross-his-heart, pinkie-swear endorsing me, he’s just endorsing me because I’m sending him money to be insincere, he should choose the “safe” version of the following link:

So if you want to write a paid review and you don’t want the review to adversely affect your Google rankings, you should add a nofollow tag as shown above to your links. Many good blogging tools such as Live Writer have a way to do this without having to get into the HTML view and tweak the code.

Matt Cutts has also hinted that you should disclose in the article that the review is paid, though to my knowledge there’s no standard, machine readable way to say your review is paid, so it’s hard to see whether this is just Matt’s preference or something in the algorithm.