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Not that I’ve asked review requests to queue up for consideration, but wondering what effect can sponsored reviews have for your blog in long term for a noble blog which might not even be thinking about its consequences.
SEO-wise sponsored reviews aren’t good for your site, that’s for sure. Google’s spam control team should raise a big red flag on blogs that has a lot of sponsored reviews with them. Its quite understandable right ? With so many sponsored reviews, its obvious that you would be linking to so many related/unrelated sites from your niche and that following the links from your site may give wrong signals to the bots.
Revenue-wise, sponsored reviews are great for your blog. I mean if you have the readership then they just keep coming in automatically and there will be offers you’ll find hard to resist.
Its obvious that sponsored reviews if not done properly, can mar your blog. Especially if your monetization model heavily relies on it.
- Accept only offers from products and services in the related niche.
- Selectively nofollow links that you think aren’t trustworthy.
- Don’t piss off readers by blogging about a product that’s completely unrelated.
- Label sponsored reviews so that readers know that it is one.
- Don’t offer anchor text links anywhere else on the blog as an additional package, rather stick to contextual links within the article.
Essentially, we have to admit that sponsored reviews are a good source of income but if you don’t do it in a controlled manner, it could prove costly to you. So balance it well with money as well as your reputation.
Hope it all made sense.
I still dont understand how Google can differentiate between a Sponsored Review and a normal review.
I was debating over this over a sponsor and had to agree to this - “If I dont categorise it as a Sponsored post, Google wont know”. Any truth in that..?
I think, Google is more worried about the paid links that people buy to boost their rankings. And the webmasters forum gives instructions to no-follow paid links.
In short, If I write a Sponsored review, without saying its a sponsored one, and linking contextually, I am safe and the sponsor is also safe.. ( r8 ? )
Combine that with One review a month, and choice of genuine, niche related products, its good on the readers too.. what say..?
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But mani, all the review sites do not accept that we are adding sponsored tag. So what to do in that case?
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