PayPerPost Bloggers Get Slammed By Google
If participating in PayPerPost wasn't questionable enough morally before, today it's now a poisoned chalice as Google has commenced punishing PayPerPost bloggers by completely removing their page rank. — IZEA (the new holding company for PayPerPost) …
Context & Ripple Effects
PayPerPost has spent 2007 scaling a business built on selling blog posts with embedded links — by May it let bloggers set their own price for sponsored posts, and the company has now folded into a new holding company, IZEA. The move lands just weeks after Google's October campaign against blog link farms, which framed paid links as pollution in its ranking signal.
The response is blunt: rather than discounting paid links, Google is zeroing out the PageRank of bloggers in the PayPerPost network entirely, and IZEA's own blog is framing it as an attack on the everyday blogger. The fight is over whether Google's core ranking metric can be gamed for cash.
First-order effects
- Bloggers in the PayPerPost network lose their PageRank outright, cutting the search traffic that makes their inventory valuable to advertisers and undermining the very asset they were monetizing.
- IZEA's rebrand from PayPerPost arrives at the worst possible moment — its flagship product is now visibly penalized by the company that controls most search distribution.
Second-order effects
- Sponsored-post networks face pressure to adopt nofollow tagging or disclosure standards that preserve rankings, shifting the cost of compliance onto their blogger base.
- Advertisers buying paid links get a clearer price signal: placements on blogs that keep PageRank command a premium, pushing the gray market toward sites that can absorb or evade penalties.
Third-order effects
- If Google keeps enforcing against paid links at the individual-publisher level, the economics of pay-to-blog platforms depend on Google's tolerance — a structural dependency where one company's ranking policy functions as de facto regulation of the sponsored-content industry.
The trend: Google is moving from algorithmic discounting to direct punishment of paid-link schemes, forcing disclosure-based advertising models to choose between search visibility and monetization.