Link ads get a beating from Google - review posts services on the rise?
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If you’ve been living under a particularly large rock on the internet the last few days there’s a chance you might not have noticed a lot of the big name blogs getting hit by a visible (toolbar) PageRank penalty. Problogger went from PR6 to PR4, SearchEngineJournal went from PR7 to PR4 and the list goes on an on. Most people are still trying to figure out if Google decided to beat text link selling to oblivion, punish bloggers for extensive linking inside blog networks or some kind of PR normalization for blogs (probably a combination of all three).
If this is indeed a Google issue with bloggers selling links then most of the text link selling services are about to be hit by a big wave of advertisers pulling their campaigns from the sites. Most of these advertisers will substitute their marketing efforts another way, and most will eventually move to paid reviews services, which come in context of relevant text and keywords and will keep Google from penalizing blogs. This might not mean bigger paychecks for bloggers (at least not unless some other big names in the post reviews business show up), but there will most likely be a surge in review offers after the smoke clears on the PR penalties front.
There’s still a lot of ground to cover on this, and there’s no real conclusion to make unless either Google comes clean on the reasons for manually changing PR, or at least a new full Pagerank update starts.