Technorati Hates PayPerPost?

During my review of the Root of All Evil I mentioned how his evilness got banned from Technorati. His stunt to ping Technorati with over 17,000 links backfired and got him locked down, never to advance in ranking again. This stunt also got me banned because evil takes on collateral damage. At first, I thought it was just evils fault that I got taken to the curb, but after a little investigation, it appears that it’s something else that got me flagged on the play. Nope, it didn’t have anything to do with the fact that Evil and me share a rack of servers.

They Blamed PayPerPost!


I was Banned by Technorati!

For a few weeks, I kept getting the same dreaded “HUH?” message as I tried to scrape for some hope that my blog would once again be pinged by Technorati. I tried their help forums and their admin there suggested that I submit a trouble ticket. Of course, I did that, but I found it funny that they closed off the thread that I started and that others commented on, before I could get a resolution from their technical department. A few days later, I got an email from tech support apologizing for the late reply. They cited that the delay was due to a backlog in support. I wonder if this is some other collateral damage that was inflicted by Evil Boy?

Their response was not what I expected. I was fully expecting them to question me on the huge list of pings that swept through the blogosphere, originating from a server that houses both mine and that evil blog. Instead, I got this:

It seems that your blog has been flagged for review. I am suspecting that it is due to the Ad and Payperpost links placed in every post. Because of this, your blog will continually be flagged with each indexed post. Please try including the links in your sidebar.

Wait a sec… You mean it’s PayPerPost’s fault? I’ve always had a not so sanitary feeling about them, but I never thought that I would hear that they would be cause of my troubles. I don’t really blame Technorati for flagging sites with PayPerPost especially since it seems that a plague of garbage blogs have reared their ugly heads where every post is an affiliate link or paid and the author goes as far as deleting or editing comments when they don’t like to be called on their bullshit. Examples like this really aren’t giving PayPerPost the legitimacy they want, and I sincerely hope that they do audits to eradicate crap like this if they want to survive.

Since PayPerPost isn’t that big of a deal to me, I gladly removed what PayPerPost links that I had on the front page and on my sidebar. I did have a few ReviewMyPost buttons posted at the bottom of some posts and an Affiliate URL in the sidebar so those were nuked right away. I then replied to the email asking them about the PayPerPost rationale for my banning, and they had this to say:

Technorati currently doesn’t have a policy regarding PayPerPost, but large amounts of linking to the same URL does flag a blog for review. Thus, if you have a link to PayPerPost in every single post, it may throw a flag.

So they don’t currently have a policy, but does that mean they are thinking about it? PayPerPost was not linked in all of my blog entries. I only sprinkled the button in a few posts and had the link in my sidebar and Technorati asked me to replace the link into my sidebar. Nonetheless, after removing PayPerPost from the sidebar and from most of my posts where I placed a button, it seems that I am BACK!


Technorati Unbans Me!

To my surprise, I jumped from the tens of thousands, to under 10,000, to under 2,000 in the course of a week since the unbanning. I am now sitting at 1,777. That’s absolutely insane! On a sidenote, my ReviewMe went up to $100 per review. You can see my new rate listed at the bottom of my latest ReviewMe Review.

Although it would SEEM that Technorati has something against blogs that have sold themselves out to PayPerPost, the facts are still a bit unclear. If PayPerPost was not an issue, why would Technorati point them out as the potential problem? Is there an unofficial policy against them? I don’t know, but I’ll take my new ranking and smile. Just to be on the safe side, PayPerPost is on hiatus for the time being and it doesn’t seem that the Root of All Evil is totally to blame for this one, but his evil ping scheme did expose what looks like to be an alleged Technorati bias towards PayPerPost.