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PageRank zero became the big number for blogs participating in Izea's PayPerPost program; Google's move to drop the rankings of those blogs drew a harsh rebuke from Izea's CEO.

PayPerPost Bloggers Unranked By Google

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.

He suggested services like PPP and similar competitors offering revenue to bloggers all have a common denominator: they aren't Google AdSense. Google's content network of AdSense participants extends the reach of its AdWords ad platform.

Despite the ominous drop in PageRank, it has been suggested that the blogs victimized by the change have not suffered a loss in traffic, according to Tony Hung. "My take on things is that Google wants to make an example out of Izea," he wrote.

Traffic may not be impacted today, but the effects of the dramatic lowering of PageRank may be evident in the months to follow. As the dominant search engine, Google drives traffic to websites, and the higher they place in search results, the better the chance a site will receive a visit.

If the PageRank drop knocks blogs out of places where they had been ranking well in search, we expect that traffic will fall as well, and we will hear about this again.

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