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Since PayPerPost started I have been a huge fan.  They have up until now done everything right.  They kept everything above board with the Disclosure Policy Requirement.  They provided great control for advertisers (I have used them to advertise massively) where you could filter by geographic region, alexa traffic, google PR and many other criteria.  Now I always knew this was too good to last, I knew that the Link Fascists over all Google would ruin it.  My hope was PPP would plan ahead and be ready.  Well just days after Google Screwed over countless single moms who were making a bit of money, PPP announced that they were going to release a product called "Real Rank", I was cheering it on waiting for a great solution and finaly what everyone really wants a true alternative to Google's Total Bullshit PR numbers.

What PayPerPost has come forward with in my opinion is a joke and probably nothing but yet another way for Google and their team of Link Nazis to target, punish and slander participants in PayPerPost and others that dare to sell links on their websites.

Now before I go further I want to state that I may sound harsh about PayPerPost and their new product "Real Rank".  To be clear I am still a big fan of PPP and I want to see them continue to grow and provide both bloggers and advertisers with awesome service.  My intention here is only to be very clear about what sucks about "Real Rank", how to fix it and how obvious the solution really is.

In short I am about to give PayPerPost about 5,000 dollars in free consulting, let's see if anyone listens.

So let's start out with the obvious problems of the new "Real Rank" that PayPerPost is rolling out.  

Where do I begin?  First the system according to PayPerPost is pretty easy to "game".  The formula for Real Rank is as follows,

70% weighted towards visitors per day
20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
10% weighted towards pageviews per day

Anyone with a modicum of the dark side in them can see very easily how to game this.  Try this, take a few high traffic websites that are on various crap that have nothing to do with your blog.  Create a 1 pixel by 1 pixel iframe and frame in your blog. Presto an great deal of traffic from tons of varying IPs ever day.  Now hop your butt over to Findology, 7Search and other various cheap second tier search engines and blow say 2 bucks a day on random traffic at 2 cents a click that adds another 100 visits a day for 60 bucks a month. 

Then pop some links on your other sites click them every day form a little group of fellow posties and everyone take a few minutes a day to visit a "ring" and do some clicking.  Want to really up things?  Page views are the last factor.  So use wordpress and put in the Random Post plug in.  With this you put your blog domain this way, domain.com/?random and it redirects to a random page. Push 20% of your traffic to your random url and it all balances nicely. 

Now most of the blogs are PPP are small time as this Real Rank is based on your percentage of value compared to all other PPP blogs this formula could push you to the top 20% easily.  All this for a 100 bucks a month or less to qualify for the best opportunities?  Look I did not even mention other cheap sources of traffic or even things like Google PPC including their content network for visitors you can actually win as subscribers.  Nor the effects of just a few well SEO'd posts for a bit more organic traffic.

And what do you get as an advertiser for all of this?  The big screw!  PPP is successful because of LINK BUILDING anyone that thinks other wise is kidding themselves, this is the only reason the Google PR slap mattered in the first place and it is also the only reason they did it.

It gets worse though.  If you log into PPP you might see your RealRank as a blogger is 613.  What does that mean?  It doesn't mean anything to you because you don't know if you are 613 of 617 (bottom 1%) or 613 of 100,000 (top 1%).  Advertisers log in and they select your Real Rank as 1-9.  The two sides do not even pretend to match.  Hell even though this thing is a lead balloon at least tell the blogger where he or she is at.  Show the blogger a 4 or a 6 or a 3 not a pointless number.

So thus far I have shown

1.  Real Rank is easy to game and will not serve the advertiser

2.  Real Rank is only relative to other blogs in the system this means the actual value of a 4 vs 8 may be of very little difference

3.  Real Rank is a meaningless number because no one knows who is number 1 and who is zero and the blogger and the advertiser see different figures.

4.  Real Rank requires code to be on your blog that only a Blogger doing PayPerPost would use and therefore risks further punishment of PPP blogers by Google, who has already shown they are willing to do it. 

Think I am done?  Hell no, I just got started.

Next let's ask a very simple question.  "Does anyone want Real Rank as it is being proposed by PayPerPost today?"  First I again want to say I spend a lot of money for clients with PayPerPost and as an advertiser I don't want it.  It doesn't give me anything of value.  It tells me basically that a blog has decent traffic compared to the other blogs in the system.  This is not much more useful then Alexa which sucks anyway.

So what do I get as a advertiser with Real Rank.  Well perhaps screwed by bloggers who follow my system of gaming it above but not much more.  Look I like the "bursty" traffic from a PPP campaign it lasts a few days maybe but that is it. I am buying LINKS though as so are any other smart advertisers.  For links I care more about the links to the blog posting about me then any other factor.  If I can choose a post on a blog with 1000 visits a day with 20 incoming links or one with 20 visits a day and 1000 good inbound links guess which one I will choose?  The one with the 1000 other pages linking to it, why, it better serves my purpose in ranking my own site that's why.

Next let's turn to the bloggers and ask if they want "Real Rank".  I can tell you based on the comments on the PayPerPost blog the answer is no.  Now some posties may be savy enough to game Real Rank but most are just everyday people.  Housewives, Single Moms, College Students etc that found PPP as a nice way to make a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month.  These are the people Google screwed to protect their own bottom line.  Now it seems PayPerPost is screwing them further, though I don't think PayPerPost intends to, I think they are doing their best, just really missing the boat.

I think I understand this better as unlike most people I both blog for and buy from PayPerPost.  So follow this, now there is a woman in Detroit who has a blog about Managing Money.   She used to have a PR of a 5 from Google and I was willing to pay big time for a certain clients links on her blog.  Google did not care that she was saving for her daughter's college fund with the money from PayPerPost and they now say she is a PR0, which is a LIE.  Her blog still passes plenty of ranking value with a link, Google just ruined her ability to sell it.

Now here comes PayPerPost with real rank.  This lady only has a few regular readers and her "real rank" ends up being a 4 on my end.  I have no way now to reach this lady (if I believe "Real Rank") and buy her links unless I happen to know her first hand.  Now my only choice may be to circumvent PayPerPost and buy directly from her or simply not spend my money with her any longer.  I mean I don't want to allow bloggers with low real rank that I don't know to take my opportunities and I don't trust Google PR so what other choice do I have.

Now perhaps while her blog had low readership she wrote a great post when ever she blogged for me or my clients.  So perhaps I was actually PUSHING TRAFFIC and links to her blog. To demonstrait what another site said about mine or build link power to the site that already linked to me. 

You see how this works, before Google screwed the single mom in Detroit everyone was doing good.  I got good posts and links, the blogger got paid fairly and PayPerPost connected us and got a fair fee for helping both of us.  

So again how does Real Rank help this situation?  It does nothing for me, it does nothing for the Blogger in Detroit and it makes all of us unhappy with PayPerPost. 

So I guess the next thing to ask since I am so good at putting this thing down is if I have a solution?  Indeed I do!

The Solution 

This is actually so simple as to be laughable.  I happened to figure it out after reading another post from the IZEA blog today about this turd they call Real Rank. It took me no longer then the time to finish my Starbucks Vente Capuchino to come up with a much better form of "Real Rank".  Here is a solution I think everyone actually spending or making money in this mess would love not to mention thousands of others who would love a real alternative to Google's PR which no longer is valid so far as the published values go.

The first step is to understand what PayPerPost has done thus far is 100% reactive.  They have a problem and they are trying to make a solution to that problem from a "fish bowl mentality".   In other words they are only looking at "their individual problem" rather then the problem for the entire market.

You see Google's published PR number has been an unreliable method of link value setting for several years.  All sites are not treated equally under Google's system.  Some are hand adjusted and many times the current displayed PR is over 6 months or more old.  Additionally Google has said on many occasions that there is a page value that really drives their rankings that is never publicly displayed and it may or may not be relative to any one sites published PR. 

So let's define the problem for EVERYONE not just PayPerPost, do that and a solution should tumble out like free can of coke from a faulty vending machine, that makes it a GIFT!

The problem for everyone is simple.  Links drive ranking and a site with a lot of links to it has more value to then with a few, additionally the quality of the sites linking to it and to them increases or decreases the value based on that same said quality.  Hence there is a value to buying links and up until very recently Google PR was a pretty decent way to determine that value and has become the industry standard for link value.

Now Google created this mess!  No one asked for PR but they put it out, they are the big dog so it got accepted.  Of course Google hates it when you sell a link on your site and don't apply the "nofollow" attribute on it.  Now no one wants a link that way because it doesn't serve the purpose of helping your site rank better.  So since people won't use nofollow just because Google commands it they punish site owners but making a FALSE PUBLIC STATEMENT about their site, that statement is the flawed and fictitious system of today's Google Page Rank.  

This is what PayPerPost missed because they were only the LATEST VICTIM of this Google Nazi attack.  This is not a PayPerPost problem, this is a industry wide problem that effects every site owner that wants to do better in the search engines, know the link value of any site or wishes to sell advertising and links on their site.  The problem is there is no accurate measure of the relative link value on any given site or page any longer available to the public.  

To fix this you solve that problem for everyone, you don't try to drive a round peg into the square hole that is the PayPerPost fish bowl.   

The solution when you see it that way is remarkably simple.  You get a few programmers in one room for few weeks who are decent with SOAP APIs and you data mine the one solid and honest source of back links available to the public.  That would be Yahoo Site Explorer.  Many such back link tools already exist they are not hard to build.  You mine perhaps 3-4 levels deep into back links, you check for reciprocal links and devalue them because we know Google does.  

You hand down power from pages to sub pages on any given site.  You value links from sites with known "Rank Value" higher then unknowns.  Now you don't need huge resources for this like Google does because one problem that PayPerPost has can become a solution.  You absolutely do require any site that wants "Real Rank" displayed to have some type of tracking code on it.

Well now I can hear you yelling at me, Jack you blew it won't that make Google able to track who is doing PayPerPost?  Now now you are not listening remember this is a solution for all not just for PPPs bloggers.  You make this "service" available for free to any and all.  Each person has an account just like Crazy Egg, Technorati, Google Analytics, MyBlogLog or any service that provides data to users about their sites.  

You make it a solution for everyone so that hundreds of thousands of people use it on sites about any and everything.  You make it rock solid and useful so that anyone paying attention to their site wants it.  Google can't penalize all these sites and who cares if they do it replaces PR anyway.  It becomes reliable, very up to date and useful right away and fixes the problem.  Not to mention that PayPerPost/Izea would become privy to some of the most valuable demographic and trend data on the planet. 

Yahoo could an should have done a PR type product long ago but they have list a mile long of thing they should have and never have done and that is why Google has kicked them down to being about as used as Live.com is today.  Izea has the advantage of having the resources to develop this, the creditability of being a "third party" and a good base to use to tell everyone about it.  The value of data in such a system would soon be worth more then the rest of IZEA itself if it were well adopted and there has never been a better time then now to release such a product.

So there you go long but hell I wanted to get this out.  If you like my idea why not tell Izea about it?  Cruise over to their contact page or visit their blog and let them know.  Send them a link to this post and say you like the idea and it is worth looking at. I am sure my plan needs some work but it is a hell of a lot better then what they are doing now.

This is an opportunity I do hope the folks at PayPerPost/Izea grasp that and make the most of it.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Thanks to the new PayPerPost back hand attack that Google has handed out Comtech News has gone from a previous high Page Rank of 5 down to a zero.  Why?  Mostly because I have participated in PayPerPost and offered links on my blog with out using the nofollow condom that Google says I have to use.

Now may be I got it harder, may be Google gave me a hand job because my first bump was down to a 2 now I am a 0.  Perhaps these posts are why I got bitch slapped so hard?

• Policing the Net with Hate Crime Legislation
• Are You A Google link narc - Do You Know One
• Why Everyone - Including Google Should Ignore Buying Links

Yet if they did go harder on me for my opinion what does that say about Google?  Does it not make everything I said in those posts even more true?

So now what?  Now I am going dark!  Now I am going to push this thing heavy and hard to the limit.  Izea (the new name of the company that owns PayPerPost) is coming out with something called "real rank", that will work on traffic and total clicks. 

Well, LISTEN UP, traffic and clicks can be purchased.  Not only that I have plenty of traffic and clicks that I can control and manipulate and move around as I see fit.  I am an SEO right?  What I find interesting is my search engine rankings did not fall on this blog, I still get a lot of traffic.  Further the ranks of sites I linked to did not go down either, some went up!  It is clear that Google did this for one reason and one reason only, to try to ruin the link buying market.

So what do I mean that I am "going dark", well that means I am going to take every Black Hat, Gray Hat and legitimate White Hat technique I know and I am going to create a new blog.  I will push lots of traffic to it and have a huge Izea "real rank" but I am not done there. 

No, no, no my friends Google has made this personal!

I won't post the domain of the new blog here and I am going to buy a lot of links to it, HIGH GOOGLE PR LINKS and just like I do for clients I will buy them "covert", this means contacting site owners directly for injected paid links that simply can not be tracked. This blog was never supposed to be a real money maker for me, just a place to talk technology, seo and vent a bit.  I actually have not even posted anything for PayPerPost since August 21st.  I have been busy building a new company and working hard to build up my staff.

Yet my darkness gets worse!  Much worse, what I am about to do can be done by anyone and I am going to teach anyone who wants to learn how to game this new system and make Google love you at the same time exactly how to do it.  You read that right I will show you exactly how to have a High Google PR, a smoking Izea Real Rank and do it so Google does not have a clue what you are doing.  It will take a while to put together but you can get on a list to be notified when the information is available.

I will have package this information in a way that prevents anyone from knowing what blogs I am doing these techniques on because that will risk another hand job by Google.  Trust me this isn't that hard anyone can use these techniques and I am going to make them available in a step by step process that ANYONE can use. 

"You choose this path, paid blogging was above board, everything was disclosed and done in the open.  People certainly used this to build links but the blogger still had to believe that the content was worth publishing and be willing to write about it.   Bloggers also had to write un-sponsored posts between each sponsored post and keep their blog from being nothing but sponsorships and paid links.  Those days are gone too!  Bloggers will indeed "Go Dark" now, not dark from the reader but dark from you, dark from your hole filled algorithms.

Personally I don't care about your ding on my blog!  Again this blog was just designed to share my knowledge and opinions about SEO, Internet Marketing and some other stuff.  This new tactic sucks because it is a direct attack on lots of people that were finally making a little bit of money in their efforts to contribute to the Internet.   I am talking about single mothers, work at home mothers and disabled individuals all who were working a little bit each day from home to put a bit more food on the table or help cover things like health insurance and housing.  Nice going jerks, protect your bottom line at the expense of the poor and middle class!" 

• Where is the Google that supports Ron Paul? 
• Where is the Google that is a champion of Save the Internet and Net Neutrality? 
• Where is the Google that claims to be socially responsible?

I don't know where that Google went to but what I do know is exactly how to play the game.  Exactly how to maintain your integrity as a blogger with your readers and still game Google and maximize the new Izea "real rank" at the same time.  If you want to know how to do this once the material is available, then just visit this page and fill out the form.  Don't worry I will never spam you and I will only email you about this exact project.  Google asked for it, so let's give it to them.  You want a PR5 - PR6 blog?  I will show you how to get one and I will show you how to hide your participation in PPP or other blog for money programs from Google.

Again to be notified of when this is available just fill out the form on this page.

~ Jack Spirko 

Popularity: 9% [?]

We talk a lot here at Comtech News about online marketing, SEO and other Internet Marketing techniques.  We have never really spent much time discussing gold old fashioned branding.  To be fair about it, this blog is about technical stuff and we come at most subjects from that vantage point.  Yet recently I was reviewing a free report on branding your business, in a project we are doing for Trump University.

This got me thinking about how many pure "click and mortar" businesses really don't give much thought to branding and doing so effectively.  Most purely internet firms certainly make sure their site has a "professional" image but…

• Do they think about how they want the market to precieve them?
• Do they make an attempt to be "known" for anything?
• Do they measure the impact of their branding efforts?
• Do they attempt to have a single clear message come through on every page of their site?

Reading the Trump Report got me thinking a great deal about these things and how we can beter brand web presenses both for our own sites and for our clients sites.  I recommend if you run or opperate a business of any kind, online, offline or both that you take a bit of time and give it a read.  It will be time well spent, to get the report just go to the Trump University Free Brand Development Repot.

~ Jack Spirko

Popularity: 8% [?]