Ted Murphy has been a lightning rod
for criticism ever since the unveiling
of PayPerPost, an ad system where bloggers
are paid to write about an advertiser.
Murphy's company, now called Izea, fought
back against early complaints about
non-disclosure by instituting a disclosure
policy.
Compared to what happened recently,
that brouhaha looks like a minnow compared
to what the big fish in the search industry
did to PPP bloggers. Murphy blogged
that Google had tweaked the PageRank
of a number of those bloggers, dropping
them to PR 0.
When it comes to finding blogs on Google,
PageRank is one of a number of factors
used to qualify the authoritativeness,
and therefore the placement, of a site
or blog in Google's search results.
Higher PR sites tend to rank well, which
means people are more likely to find
them and visit.
"Once again Google has proved
that PR has little to do with blog traffic,
influence or relevance and everything
to defending their monopolistic stranglehold
on search and online advertising,"
Murphy said in his post.
Click to Read More
