PayPerPost Prepares to Black List Blogs Utilizing Industry Trust
August 20th, 2007 by admin
PayPerPost is taking a strange and disturbing action to stop bloggers from using known weaknesses inherent in ranking systems such as Google’s Pagerank and Alexa.
There are multiple obvious issues with PayPerPost’s reaction.
- PayPerPost is in the business of advertising websites, which includes providing links to those websites, which drives up Pagerank. ~ This is Google’s primary complaint against PPP, that PPP games pagerank themselves.
- PayPerPost started using metrics including Alexa a little less than a year ago. Alexa is a well known and documented metric program that has been severely flawed for over a decade.
- Shortly after PPP started using Alexa many hundreds of bloggers asked PPP about the well known and documented ways to game Alexa and if it would be OK to use them. PayPerPost Did not Respond then.
- Several bloggers also utilized an Alexa redirect scheme to demonstrate to PPP that the Alexa Metrics were bogus in the hopes that PPP would drop the Alexa Metric all together.
- PayPerPost took at least 8 months to respond and responded with the threat of an Industry powered black list.
- PayPerPost seems to be insinuating that they conspiring with the other major blog marketing companies (un-named). PayPerPost is the likely market leader with a rumored 40,000 and growing blogger base. It would not be surprising if they have a market share in excess of 50-70%. But when combined with other blog marketing companies, they could easily create an oligopoly at worst, a conspiracy or possibly engage in anti-competitive pricing or blacklisting procedures (the last of which is insinuated in their first August 13th article, which is later identified as being authored by their President Ted.)
Our competitors share the same issues we are dealing with and we are all sick of it. In the future expect to see a shared database and detection that allows us to collectively blacklist blogs. So not only will you be booted from PPP, you can expect to be booted from the other platforms as well. You can cutoff all your sponsored blogging income with one swoop! Think of it like the casinos sharing information about cheats in Vegas. We won’t be sharing any personal information, just a blog url.
Regarding that last sentence about sharing the blog url with PayPerPost competitors in the industry. As of August 20th, seven days after the post, the PayPerPost PrivacyPolicy did not indicate that PayPerPost would share blog urls with PayPerPost competitors. It does reference “trusted partners.”
PayPerPost could claim that their competitors are ‘trusted partners’ for purposes of sharing the blog url information, which for most bloggers is almost the same as sharing their name or identity. Calling their competitors trusted partners (if PPP were to do that) would significantly increase the potential for an anti-competitive claim to be made against both PayPerPost and any cooperating company.
Sharing of Your Information
PayPerPost only shares personal information with our parent, subsidiary, affiliated companies, or other trusted companies when you provide opt-in consent or if we have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information will not violate applicable law, regulations or rules.
We may share with third parties certain pieces of aggregated, non-personal information, such as the number of users who searched for a particular term, for example, or how many users clicked on a particular advertisement. Such information does not identify you individually.
The PayPerPost Response
- Gaming PR and Alexa Scores
- Update - Exploits, spoofs and other annoyances explained
- Note. This one spells out how these exploits work and in doing so spell out what PPP will look for.
- They also point out that from PPP’s perspective, its OK to use the Alexa Redirect in links or blogrolls, but not in an image.
- That means that the old fashioned way to crank an Alexa number might still be allowed by PayPerPost
- It works like this:
- Person includes the Alexa redirect code preceding their URL on a web page with say, 98 other links to cohorts that have their urls with the redirect preceding it
- Each person gets the Linky firefox add in
- They run Linky, which opens up every single link on a given web page (with a max of 99 links) in different firefox tabs
- the redirect code sends a quick note to Alexa to track the fact that the page has been viewed, and there’s a vote for the day (max one vote per day)
- Each member of the 99 person cabal, runs the program every day
- Generates 99 votes per day per cabal or approximately 3000 votes/hits in Alexa per month
- Multiply that times multiple Blog cabals and you can get lots of hits
- I don’t recommend it and as you can see from my own Alexa numbers, I don’t use it either!
Key PPP Discussion forum Threads on this topic
- The thread that kicked off the PPP response and this controversy titled Alexa Experiment locked on August 13th by Froogle aka Pete or Peter.
- Karen’s Response (Karen PPP Customer Love)
- Pete’s Response (IT head / Ruby on Rails Guru - don’t know his official title, my apologies)
- Something better than Alexa?
- More Useless Alexa Whining
- Note there are over 552 discussion forum threads talking about ‘alexa’ on the PPP forums
Hi Folks,
Test or not - if we find signs of anyone cheating, falsifying, or otherwise circumventing the natural course of rankings we pull, they run the risk of suspension or really more likely permanent banning from PayPerPost. I’ll be checking in on rankings this coming week.
Karen
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Karen Allen
Director of Customer Love
PayPerPost.com
The key word in all of this is, of course, ‘exploit’.
We’ll be extending the scripts we already use to spot Google Page Rank spoofers to include this one and I’m sure Customer Love will take appropriate action against anyone doing it.
The thing is, we use ranks to handle segmentation. If you do something like this you are falsely representing your blog to advertisers in order to make a quick buck. That’s just plain wrong, aside from the fact that as someone pointed out, it damages the entire network for everyone.
Other Sub Controversies Exposed
There are several other lesser controversies stemming from this issue that we will cover separately.
Related News: Pot calls Kettle Black
lucia Says
Interesting post. I have to admit I’m following the reaction on this.
Aug 20th, 2007 at 5:40 pm