Spamming or Advertising? Depends who does it of course...
Black Hat Bloggers
If you're an SEO, and you go out and comment on a load of blogs, you're a filthy spammer. If you're a blogger, or large company, it's "advertising" right? Shit on a stick, this stuff just cracks me up. Graywolf posts about black hat bloggers, commenting on a boston.com article that has the following astonishing quote...
The more companies can get bloggers to link to their websites, the higher their sites will appear on Google's search list. Google ranks its listings, in part, on how many Web pages link to a website. So paying $5 to a few thousand bloggers is a small price for companies such as Dot Flowers to move up closer to the first page of results in a Google search.
For that reason, some advertisers joke that blog actually is an acronym for ''better listing on Google."
Two weeks after Marqui launched its program to pay bloggers in November, the company's Google results skyrocketed to 278,000 from 2,040, said spokeswoman Tara Smith.
Remember Steve Rubel's "Tagvertising"?, same fucking thing in my book...
In a bizarre twist to the tale though, Graywolf got the tip from a Blog Herald story that Gurtie noticed this morning and slammed hard..
Yes we do understand the difference between ads, unpaid links and cash for comment but c'mon, some of those Blog Herald links are pretty ambigious, so if we're going to get picky about undisclosed advertising revenue.......
Meooow!
Shit, I've got to read my comments!
There has got to be something ironic about me reading about a catfight on my own blog, got to read Threadwatch less and start reading my own comments section: just a note though: I didn't moralise about inline cash for comment even though I despise it, and I've NEVER TAKEN A CENT for paid comment, although I once rather unexcitedly gave mixed reviews to a book I was sent. The Blog Herald's advertising in the the left nav bar and NEVER WITHIN THE POST CONTENT! fuck, I mean seriously if I was sucking up to advertisers I must be doing a really shitty job at it too, given how much I tend to piss people off from time to time, particuarly the Six Apart crowd.
peace :)
it was just that clicking through to that story about bloggers making money from advertorials when there were so many outbound links that weren't obviously ads made me laugh :)
Seriously though - yes undisclosed paid inclusion is bad, but this recent spate (by no means limited to this report) of 'shock horror lookee at what the nasty advertisers are doing' reports, mostly in blogs, are OTT.
Most of what's reported is just normal business stuff, perhaps not something to be proud of but not illegal or especially underhand; worthy of a couple of lines somewhere. Suddenly someone naive finds out about it, it gets picked up like chinese whispers and in 4 blogs time they're killing pet rabbits and eating them for breakfast.
Whatever you read, wherever you read it, you should be aware of the likely bias. That doesn't necessarily excuse people not declaring they've been paid but specifically did you read the JeffCutler stuff?
Firstly - hardly subtle - I mean if you didn't think that was placed then you do need to develop a suspicious mind
Secondly "without having used them"? What hasn't he used? car insurance? credit cards? funeral flowers? Since when is it a requirement to have used something to link to it anyway? I blogged about the international air guitar championships and Virgin airlines making flying jackets for ferrets the other day. I should disclose what? I haven't air guitarred for over 10 years and I don't own a ferret?
I usually agree with
I usually agree with TheGurtster, but I think the issue is the following branded terms:
SEO = scum
blogger = savior of the universe, protecting people from scum like SEOs
so long as the terms above are branded as such, each large scale deviation from those brands needs to be beat into the skulls of the bloggers until the brands change.
Better Listings On Google
Now that I stopped laughing I have to say that was a great acronynm....