I was thinking of using Pay Per Post as a way to build up backlinks to my site, has anyone used this service before and if so what were the results? Khalid.
Hello Khalid, They changed their name to izea.com ... Anyway, in january 2007 I tried them, and they were not very responsive. Good Luck
I have been using it as an advertiser for a month. So far working nicely. The traffic on the site i do it for has doubled in the last 30 days, and i give some of the credit to PPP although i do lots of various LB methods.
I haven't used PayPerPost as an advertiser (or Izea or whatever) but I did try them once as a publisher. Google is really harsh on PayPerPost. Within a day of the post going live my site lost it's PR and it dived in the SERPs. I took the post down shortly after that and things have been recovering. I don't know what effect this might have on advertisers but if the idea is to build quality backlinks, Google doesn't see it that way. And since publishers have to post special tracking links with their posts (unless things have changed) it is really easy for Google to find sites using PayPerPost. If all you are looking for is traffic, it may be worth it, I don't know. But I don't think it will help you to build backlinks, really, since Google will bury any site in their network that they find.
If you request tracking it is through tinyurl.com and I've never heard of Google penalising tinyurl's?
Khalid, Google's got wood on for paid posting. A couple of months ago they went deep into the pay per post blog network and dropped a ton of the blogger's page rank to 0. You'd be sitting there with a nice PR4 blog selling links, and boom! one day you've got pr0. Rough. However - it's important to note that to date those blogs still seem to be passing linkjuice. People who've bought a bunch of PPP blogs to get rankings are still ranking. My concern would be that Google's just fired a shot across the bow - I fully expect them at some point to make this visual page rank decrease effectively prevent the blogs from passing link juice. Then there goes your rankings. Google's shown they can identify PPP paid blog posts, I'm not sure why they haven't gone the next step. Notice that they don't have to penalize the advertisers, just make the blog posts worth 0 when it comes to SEO. I believe (speculation only) that part of the way Google discovered the PPP blogs was via the backlinks to PPP bloggers were required to put on their sites - the 'badges'. That to me identifies a network and for SEO purposes I stay far away from that stuff. You might look at blogsvertise.com . Same idea as PPP, but from what I've seen their bloggers didn't get nailed with the PR decrease.
We've been managing PPP for ourselves and our clients for quite some time now. I can attest to the fact that it definitely still provides linking benefits in Google. In fact, I just published a report on some testing we ran on this (see our blog for details). Please be aware that with PPP (and any social media marketing, in fact), you're going to get out of it what you put it. If your site is horrible and there's nothing worth discussing, I wouldn't expect much in the way of results.
I have a friend who's used it on her blog and it has been working. I've been seeing her subscriber count climb steadily (albeit SLOWLY). At least she's getting some results, right?
As a side note, PPP does not require the tracking image. I do all my advertising NOT wanting this. Why would I want to clue Google in? Stupid to do so. Secondly - I get lots of PR0 links through many methods and they provide plenty of link juice. Thirdly PPP now has a "RealRank". No clue how good it is and I am in fact changing my PPP opportunities to be more traffic centric instead of PageRank centric. I can safely assume blogs with higher proven traffic are of higher value to all parties (search engines, link buyers, and the readers themselves). I'd much rather have bought a link on a blog with 1,000 visitors a day and PR 0,1,2 then a 50 visitor per day blog that is PR3,4,5. Once we get to PR6 I then have to re-evaulate, but below PR6, who cares.
Since Google is killing all the PR on blogs that use PPP they invented this RealRank system to measure a blog based on it's traffic instead of it's PR. They essentially rank the sites in their network according to traffic and this makes up the RealRank.
Here's an Izea blogpost about it: http://community.izea.com/blog/2007/11/what-is-izea-re.html Essentially, 70% traffic, 20% backlinks, 10% pageviews.
And what about using not PPP community but just search yourself for blogs where they offer sponsored reviews. I mean. search for related blog with good PR and alexa rank, give money for post about you/your product/company... You will get links and traffic (readers of that blog) It's like submitting a press release... any thoughts?