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Google’s Rules on Reviews: Are you up to date?
Many bloggers review products or write (paid for) posts for companies and brands.
And why not? Reviewing and paid posts are a great source of income, and can even provide the basis of a full-time career for very successful bloggers.
Certainly, that’s true if bloggers are providing links to brand websites within sponsored posts, which tend to attract higher fees.
But do you know the rules about such posts?
As a pro blogger, it’s important that you’re aware of both the law and Google’s terms and conditions if you’re writing paid-for content of any sort. And it’s important to note that “paid for” doesn’t just mean being paid in cash – it can just as easily apply to being paid with a free product to review or give away on your blog.
Last week, Google provided an update on their guidelines, making it very clear for bloggers that they consider reviews and giveaways based on free products to be paid-for content, subject to exactly the same rules as other paid-for content.
If you Only Remember One Thing…
- If a company provides you with a free sample (to review or give away) then you must not provide a follow link back to their website, a retail site offering their product, a social network, app store or a review page reviewing that company’s product.
- In all cases like this, links must carry a no-follow tag, meaning the link will not pass Page Rank to the site being linked to.
A Quick Primer
If you’re new to blogging, you might wonder why Google cares so much who you link to, and why.
Simply put, Google cares because it uses the links on the websites it indexes to help decide which Internet pages should rank highest in search results. There are lots of factors in search results, but one of the most important is links – sites with lots of links pointing to them tend to rank higher in search. Which is very important, if you run a business.
Being a top-ranked site in Google is worth a lot of money – so lots of brands are happy to invest money in buying links, on blogs like yours. Sometimes the brand or PR will ask specifically for a link. Other times they might invite you to review a product or write a sponsored post, and have that contain a link.
To combat this strategy, Google asks publishers to put a special piece of code into tags that are paid for, so they won’t be counted when it calculates search results and rankings. This code is called a ‘no follow tag’ and adding them is as simple as adding rel=nofollow into your link code (there are lots of plug-ins that can do it for you, too).
Do I need to Worry?
To an extent, you don’t need to worry about this stuff. Google isn’t the law, and it isn’t illegal to accept money in exchange for a link on your site. Nobody’s going to prison for this stuff.
But, Google is clamping down on these paid links, and if it realises you haven’t been playing by the rules, you can be penalised by having your site demoted in Google’s search results (and potentially removed entirely). This could impact on your traffic, and ability to work with other brands.
What you absolutely DO need to worry about is the law. In the UK, you are legally required to disclose when you have been paid to write content by a brand, where you do not have complete editorial control. That means you need to let readers know, clearly and unambiguously, if they are reading sponsored content on your site.
What if I get Caught?
If you get penalised by Google, the first you’ll know about it is probably an email message in your Google Webmaster account (you can sign up for one if you’re using Google Analytics)
Google will tell you why they have penalised you, and you’ll need to invest some time cleaning up your site, before submitting it again. This process can take 90 days (although it might be more) but once your site is free of offending content, Google typically restores your search.
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