During the conference, CEO Ted Murphy gave the audience a sneak preview of Izea’s new product, SocialSpark; set to launch to the general public sometime in January. SocialSpark follows an eBay like model; that is, they have built a dynamic marketplace that connects buyers and sellers. 

So, who are the buyers and sellers?

In this case, SocialSpark is not necessarily selling a tangible product. Rather, they are providing a marketing and communications platform that connects advertisers to their target consumer groups.  While it could be positioned as a social network for bloggers, I believe it’s more than that because bloggers are not just bloggers. They are real people with real passions, needs and desires. They are moms, dads, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, etc. In other words, they are consumers and they do have circles of influence, both online in the form of their readership; and offline with family, friends, etc. SocialSpark levels the playing field so that brands can have real time, authentic conversations with their customers and/or potential customers.

Conversational marketing at it’s best

Consumers are tired of being bombarded with banner ads about Online Degrees and Online Dating; and nine times out of ten, they don’t even see it anyway. They are tired of being marketed to via pop ups and road blocks; and would rather be communicated with through online conversations. This is one reason blogging is growing exponentially everyday.  Consumers now have a channel to express their thoughts, opinions, recommendations and complaints about the products and services they use.  And, they expect for their side of the story to be heard.  The question is whether marketers are interested in listening. 

SocialSpark addresses this issue straight forward. Marketers can create profiles and interact with the community, as much or as little as they choose; complete with robust analytics that make Google’s product look web 1.0.  And yes, they can also pay bloggers to review their products and/or services (a concept I fully agree with as long as there is disclosure). Marketers will now have a unique opportunity to engage in conversations that are already happening in the market place.

In addition to sponsored content, SocialSpark marks IZEA’s first foray into display advertising by introducing a unique ad unit they call a Blog Welcome. This unit will be attractive to those advertisers who want to engage bloggers, but prefer to have control over the marketing message.

Most likely, SocialSpark won’t have a problem building momentum in the social media space; since IZEA can leverage their current user base of over 90,000 bloggers and 11,000 advertisers. They also promise to launch SocialSpark as an open API for developers and will also be compatible with Google’s OpenSocial.

Summary

The launch of SocialSpark will completely revolutionize the way marketers communicate with their consumers. With the platform being totally open to anyone and everyone, marketers can now participate with honest, open and transparent voices.  OF course, this can be risky with brands being open to mass criticism about their products/services; but there is really no way to avoid it since it will happen anyway with or without their participation.

Tag:

Andrew Ooi has compiled a short list of Malaysian sites, many were as much as a PR5 previously, and currently show a PageRank of zero (a white bar)

Examples include:-

Colleen’s Simple Kind of Life and 5xmom

The numbers seem to be stable across multiple data centers

There doesn’t seen to be any change in prominent Search Marketing sites such as Search Engine Round Table and Search Engine Journal, and other popular bloggers such as Emom and Yaro still seem to have their degraded but still "head above water" rankings.

Meanwhile Matt Cutts is playing around with $200 PCs and the negative views of the blogosphere regarding Google.

Meaning Of PageRank Unchanged

Google have had more than a month to change the description of PageRank on their website.

I haven’t seen any change to Search Engine Rankings and there is still no way to request reconsideration without admitting guilt.

The Webmaster Help Center also doesn’t give an option to report that you think Google is making a mistake in their manual evaluation.

How do I request reconsideration of my site?

If your site has previously violated our webmaster guidelines, and you’ve made changes to it so that it now meets our guidelines, you can ask Google to reconsider your site for inclusion in the index.

In addition, if you recently purchased a domain that you think may have violated our guidelines before you owned it, you can use the reconsideration request form to let us know that you recently acquired the site and that it now adheres to the guidelines.

To request reconsideration of your site:

1. Sign in to Google webmaster tools. The webmaster tools Dashboard opens.
2. Under Tools, click Request reconsideration and follow the steps.

Google do now call this reconsideration, not just reinclusion, and Matt notes that you can still be in the index even though you have a penalty, which he updated November 4th 2007

I did find something cool though which I hadn’t seen before, maybe I missed it being reported, or didn’t pay much notice.

I am still being crawled frequently and there are some interesting spikes. It is a pity that the graph doesn’t line up with the scale.

From January people using PayPerPost will be able to use SocialSpark.

SocialSpark Alpha screenshots do still have PageRank listed, and that will likely be removed totally unless Google change their stance.

I still don’t sell PageRank, but traffic hasn’t changed, if anything it has increased as I write more content that people want to read and link to, and it even brings in some search traffic.

Google is making huge mistakes with these updates. I know many people receiving penalties sell links, and I am not trying to defend them.

When you get someone like regular reader Rob, a real expert in SEO, who based on the links he receives should be a comfortable PR4, or possibly a PR5, currently a PR0, because he wrote one paid review using nofollow on the links.

Then you get affiliate marketers like Vlad who may have written a couple of high quality reviews, and sold some advertising.
At the same time he also is an affiliate with some affiliate services which offer SEO friendly "clean links" for their merchants.
For a website owner they are still links from which they will be making money, though the money from affiliate marketing is variable – the links still affect search engines, as do many other affiliate links which feature 301 redirects.

Now whilst Aaron’s issues might be appeased as a result of the recent interchange with Matt, that is really just the tip of the iceberg. Aaron hasn’t been lynched.

To finish I am just going to steal the words of Michael VanDeMar which he posted as a comment on Matt’s Reporting On Paid Links post.

Honestly, Matt… and if your legal team won’t let you answer this, then I understand, but if you are allowed to answer then I (and I’m sure others) would really, really like to know… as the G algo stands now, exactly how much off balance would you say it is due to the insidious act of buying and selling text link ads? How many man hours have you spent combating this crime against humanity, and at what cost? And is it seriously skewing the results that much, that all the efforts spent on it were, and continue to be, justified? Is the algo that fragile?

The other main reason that I disagree with this idea is that you think (or appear to be implying, anyways) that Paid Link === No Human Review. This not the case 9 times out of 10. You should know that.

Update – Official Statement From Izea (PayPerPost)

An official statement finally from Izea (PayPerPost) on their blog regarding Google PageRank Updates.

We now know from some of our friends inside of Google (thanks "bob") that they are now looking for phrases such as PPP, PayPerPost,ReviewMe, Payu2blog, etc. in the text of your post. For that reason I would suggest refraining from using any type of this text in the body of your posts, sponsored or not. When you disclose thank the sponsor, not PPP.

I would like to thank Ted (CEO of Izea) for having the courage to say something about this in public, something it seems Google so far have not managed to do, and rarely do so on an official company blog.

Lisa Stewart of Bigfoot Web Marketing also has an excellent writeup of the decision process on the PayPerPost boards that ultimately led to Ted Murphy making a statement.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

Tag:

As I wrote in my initial preview of SocialSpark, there will be new metrics for gauging the authority and influence of a blog, to help determine advertising spend, not only based upon traffic and demographics, but also on past performance with CPM and CPC data also being made available.

With SocialSpark, any required links will be nofollow, though there is an option for editorial links without a nofollow.

All the negotiation about a particular campaign will be 100% transparent, thus there will be an audit trail to prove that an advertiser didn’t require specific linking, and that audit trail will be open for public, or search engine approval.

There will be full disclosure within each post, with a link though to that 100% transparent audit trail, far exceeding any stipulations or recommendation from either the FTC or WOMMA.

Advertisers will no longer be able to require a positive tone, everything will be neutral, bloggers can write what they want, but that may affect click-through rates and return on investment.

Based upon this, everything seems at least on the surface to be everything a search engine would want to see and encourage.

This Isn’t Going To Work

At least not without some cooperation from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.

Other than the 100% transparency, a lot of this has really been available using the PayPerPost Direct system introduced by Izea 6 months ago.

Whilst on the surface the form for PayPerPost Direct suggests that advertisers were able to make specific requests for the tone, and specify linking, PayPerPost direct also provided a negotiation interface.

In many ways you can look on the initial order process as being purely suggestions, and the real final negotiated terms were often vastly different to any initial enquiry.

That was certainly the case for every review I wrote, yet I still received a PageRank penalty

In some cases I even finished the negotiation process, but just didn’t have time for a full review, so declined or gave a quick link for free.

But I have still received a penalty to my Google Toolbar PageRank, either -1 or possibly -2

A totally open system, with absolute disclosure and a full audit trail is the ideal scenario for internet users, and the search engines really have to make a choice, embrace the openness, or everything IS GOING TO GO UNDERGROUND.

PageRank Is STILL In The Equation

You will notice on the following exclusive screenshots that PageRank is still being displayed on the new interface, and Ted tells me that a final decision as to whether Alexa and PageRank will remain is still to be made.

If it does remain, I would hope they are looked at as the least important statistic, those used to find new publishers who haven’t been using the SocialRank code on their site for long enough to generate reliable statistics.

Difficult Choices

Both search engines and bloggers have difficult choices to make in the coming months.

The PayPerPost MarketPlace represents 11,000+ Advertisers and 85,000+ Bloggers, and I am sure that is set to increase.

It is noticeable that only a fraction of even PayPerPost bloggers have actually received some kind of penalty, and those are typically ones who were prominent in the PayPerPost Direct marketplace.

The funny or sad thing is that there has been a lot of collateral damage. As an example take Rob’s situation. To my knowledge he has never written a review for PayPerPost, yet is listed in the marketplace, mainly just to check out the system.
As far as I can see, and I have been reading his blog since he had just 3 subscribers, he also doesn’t sell links, hell he doesn’t even link to his own niche sites from his blog.

Rob’s PageRank took a -2 penalty purely from association

Thousands Of Sites Remain Unpunished

There are plenty of sites that are selling PageRank pasing 125×125 advertising spots that have slipped under the radar, yet sites such as SERoundTable and Search Engine Journal have been quite obviously targeted.

I know sites where Matt Cutts is a frequent visitor, and has even read paid reviews which have not had a penalty to their Google Toolbar PageRank applied.
The reviews were not "under the radar" but written by an authority in the topic being discussed.

There are many very prominent sites who every week, or every month blatantly thank their sponsors in what amounts to a post just full of PageRank passing links with no other content.
At one time these pages contained at least an introductory paragraph for each one, but often you will just see 8 or 10 links with no other content.

Time For An Olive Branch

Isn’t it easier for search engines to encourage good practice that is accountable, than to punish sites indiscriminately or based on some level of personal bias.
Without doubt there is bias and double standards in penalties that so far have been applied, and this is not a purely automatic process.

To finish here are a couple more exclusive screenshots to wet your appetite, featuring some of the statistics available in the new interface, and what appears to be a search result.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu