Hey guys I know a lot of bloggers are upset about the FTC saying you have to disclose whether or not you were paid for a post.I can see why many are mad, because we all know how Google looks at this. I have come up with a solution for this. Check it out HERE Tell me what you think.
Bad news... Google has been indexing Flash for quite some time now... years actually. And about a year ago Adobe gave the big 3 specifications of how to read their SWF binaries... so they can likely index them even better now. So Flash "ain't" gonna keep Google from indexing the text in your disclaimer. And putting an image on your site with the disclaimer might keep Google from detecting it in an automated fashion... But it won't keep others from reporting your for violating their webmaster guidelines. Actually the whole FTC vs Google things are unrelated. The FTC doesn't want bloggers misleading the public by trying to pass off paid advertising as real, freely given endorsements. Google doesn't want you to manipulate their SERPs by passing off paid links as freely given links. Why look for trickery and "Tom Foolery" to beat the system? Why not show the disclaimer to keep the FTC happy and add rel="nofollow" attributes to all links pointing back to the site you're blogging about? That way you can't be accused by Google of selling links via paid blog posts... You still get paid. Your post still gets indexed and can rank in the SERPs. The company you're blogging about still get some good press and traffic from people clicking through from your blog to their site. The ONLY thing the company you're blogging for does NOT get is credit from a ranking perspective for the links from your blog to their site. Google doesn't care that the content of your blog post was a paid advertisement... They simply don't want you passing page rank/link juice to the site you're blogging about and giving them credit for another inbound link with targeted link text thus helping them manipulate the SERPs... as a result of being paid... as it becomes a paid link at that point in Google's eyes.
"Why look for trickery and "Tom Foolery" to beat the system?" I am not looking to trick Google nor anyone else. Personally I do not write paid reviews and I probably wont ever write them but I wouldn't consider this trickery. You are allowed to post content anyway you see fit on YOUR website. If I wanna post something as a pic then so be it. And what you said here: "Actually the whole FTC vs Google things are unrelated. The FTC doesn't want bloggers misleading the public by trying to pass off paid advertising as real, freely given endorsements. Google doesn't want you to manipulate their SERPs by passing off paid links as freely given links." I never said that the 2 were related. But in anyones eyes the 2 are definitely a conflict in interest. Also you mentioned why don't bloggers just ad the rel=nofollow to their links. Well one of the main reasons advertisers pay for posts is because they gain a link from this. If you take that factor out of the picture then you bring the cost to advertise down tremendously. While I don't personally don't have a problem with this, there are a lot of bloggers that do. Some of them bloggers don't have any other means of income off of their blog and use that money to pay for their hosting. I also believe that Google is not as good as they say when it comes to indexing flash. A good example of this would be 2advancedstudios.com. They are a pr7 site that has been around since the late 90's. Guess how many pages of their site Google has crawled? 2 pages. Now while I know that 2advanced doesn't have a ton of pages. I also know that they have about 300 ACTUAL pages. You will also notice that all of sites that 2 advanced links to, they are not counted as linking to them in googles index. Now I no that one can say that google doesn't report ALL inbound links. Well if it was just 1 or 2 sites that they were not counted for then that would be a coincidence. But we have checked almost every site that they have linked to from their site and have not found 1 outbound link. You see back in july one of our employees decided to run a test on whether or not they were actually crawling flash and he worked on his off time for about 2 months on this project. the result (in a can) was that Google isn't as good as they say they are at indexing flash. But anyway I am starting to get long winded and I dont want to be sitting here all day typing. Thanks for your comment..
Oh yeah and also Google also says in there webmaster guidelines to build sites for humans not spiders, so it's not Tom Foolery just because Googlebot cannot see it. Like I said they say to build it for humans. LOL (This is just a joke so don't take it serious I am only fooling around)
Over the weekend I have been thinking and searching the internet. The best way to do this would be to put it in an image