I got all angry about Google’s Matt Cutts waxing poetic about Amazon Mechanical Turk as a form of sweatshop labor for linkbait. I shouldn’t be surprised that they’re not just interested in getting the written word on the cheap… they actual want professional artists to work for free! (Because Google really has to worry about their budget these days – they only reported a profit of nearly $1.5 billion in the first quarter of this year.)

The New York Times reported that Google has been courting professional artists to create skins for their Chrome browser. Sounds pretty cool, right? The problem is that the sole compensation they were offering is exposure. I’m hoping that exposure means more than a single mention of the artist’s name on the browser skin download page, but who knows?

Because, you know, they’re just artists. They just sit around and be creative all day. This is Google we’re talking about! Everyone should bow and scrape before them because everyone and their grandma uses Google to search the Web! Why should they have to pay artists money for their little doodles?

The sad part is that they did get some artists to work for them for free. Because, you know, they’ll get so much exposure to all of those people who use Google Chrome for their browser. Because those 500 people are totally going to hire  a professional artist based on the funky browser skins they may or may not download.

I wanted to equate this to freelance writers who accept ridiculously low wages for creating content. But then I realized that was a poor analogy. It’s far worse than that. It’s like every single one of us who has ever created any form of content online. Because we’re totally working for Google (and, to be fair, the other search engines) for free – because they all profit from scraping our content and putting so much of it on the SERPs that users don’t even have to click through to our sites anymore to get some of the information they want.

Google Wants Artists to Work for FREE is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

According to Matt Cutts of Google, Internet marketers should avoid the unethical practice of buying links by paying a few pennies to the folks who complete tasks via Amazon Mechanical Turk and scoring free links from their efforts. Let me rephrase that: Google says it’s wrong to pay for other people to link to your Web site, but it’s totally cool to score hundreds or thousands of links – not by paying a professional copywriter to create an awesome resource for you – but by spending about 20 bucks for a handful of people to perform cheap labor for you with Amazon Mechanical Turk. Don’t believe me? Watch this video.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Amazon Mechanical Turk, it’s a place where companies pay unwitting individuals a few cents to complete tasks that can’t be automated. Looking to work from home? As I write this blog post, you can earn a whole penny for taking 10 minutes to answer some questions about a news article. If you do six of these tasks in an hour, you’re making an hourly wage of 6 whole cents! I tried doing these tasks when I was unemployed last year, and even with my efficiency, I wasn’t even making minimum wage.

But according to Google, this is a perfectly acceptable way to outsource crowdsource your linkbait. Matt Cutts talks about someone who paid a total of $25 to get a whole bunch of people to compile a list of adjectives about top Twitter users. This is quality content. And not just any quality content, it’s pure linkbait gold. This is what  Google wants to index. It’s completely within their guidelines for ethical SEO.

As a damn good copywriter, I take offense to this. This isn’t quality content. This is crap. This is pandering to the lowest common denominator for a quick chuckle, and paying slave wages to make it happen. Where is the quality in that? Tell me, Matt Cutts of Google’s Webspam team, why would you promote the proliferation of crap like this online instead of encouraging people to invest in something of value?

Dude, I was a Quality Rater. I know what your quality guidelines are – or at least what they were a year and a half ago. Have you really fallen so far? Do you really want to tell the world that what the Internet needs is another insipid fluff piece about Twitter? I’m sorry, sir, but you’ve just discredited everything you’ve ever said about quality content online.

And what is “white hat” about paying crap wages for something inane that could potentially make your business thousands of dollars? That may not break anything in your Webmaster guidelines, but it certainly doesn’t seem ethical to me. Just because you can get away with paying someone a nickel for 45 minutes of work doesn’t mean that you should. In fact, it would be against U.S. employment laws if there was an employee relationship involved. But that’s a whole different rant about the abuse of independent contractors.

All content is paid for in one form or another. I happen to make a living writing quality content because, during my stint as a Quality Rater, I actually wanted to try and make the Internet a better place. What’s the difference in paying writers (say, bloggers perhaps?) to review and link to your product than paying someone to produce content for you in order to attract links? On one hand, the money goes to the writer to manipulate people into linking, on the other hand, the money goes to the writer who was “manipulated” into publishing the link.

Oh wait, that’s right… bloggers should work for free and shouldn’t be paid for linking to companies in the first place. That’s essentially what it’s come down to when Google instituted this “no paid links” policy. The companies don’t suffer. They’re getting free freaking publicity by not paying bloggers to link to them. Yeah, I’m a blogger, too. It’s ridiculous how many moms I know are working for free so that they can have the “honor” of reviewing a $5 product and not get slammed for writing a paid review. It’s crap.

But Google doesn’t respect content creators. That much is clear. It just wasn’t obvious to me just how badly the search giant wanted to screw content producers until now. Google doesn’t really care about quality content. They just want everyone to jump through their hoops so they can keep making money hand over fist for other people’s hard work.

Google Says Quality is Dirt Cheap, Don’t Hire Copywriters is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

I’ve been thinking. All this writing is very time consuming. I’m good at it – pretty awesome, actually – and it pays well, but I don’t have time for much of anything else. I tried to think about different ways to lessen my workload while still paying the bills, and it came to me that a lot of SEOs would pay big bucks to know exactly what I did as a quality rater for Google.

My NDA with Google was over 30 pages long, but I think I’ve found some wiggle room. I’m accepting private bids for a one-day session with me to go over the quality rater guidelines, the types of projects I did, and how I find it so funny that everyone is chuckling over the news about longer snippets for long-tail queries, since I’ve been calling them snippets in my head for three years now.

Am I having a crisis of ethics? Nah. Just a spur-of-the-moment, late-to-the-game, hopefully obvious April Fools prank.

Former Google Quality Rater Spills Google Secrets to Highest Bidder is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

Before my introduction to the world of Internet Marketing, I had never even heard of a no-follow link. I’ve been blogging for a few years, so it’s not like I’m a complete Web noob.  But as a blogger who just wanted a place to write about her son and her obsession with LOST, I didn’t even know the Google Webmaster Guidelines existed.

I’m not unique in this.

Which is why I’m concerned about Matt Cutts and his recent call to action about paid links. Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal has wrapped up a lot of his concerns quite nicely in a blog post.  I think that all of my fellow mommy bloggers – and bloggers in general – should read his post. Let me pull out a few takeaway messages:

• Google does not approve of paid links in any form, including sponsored conversations like product reviews and giveaways.
• If you publish a product review or giveaway and you don’t no-follow your links, Google will penalize both you and the company that sponsored your blog post.
• A Google penalization is generally understood to mean a demotion in ranking, which means it will be harder for searchers to find you on the Google SERPs.

I’d like a show of hands from bloggers who do not consider themselves a part of the SEO/Internet Marketing industry… Do you no-follow all of your links to your blog post sponsors? Do you know how to no-follow your links? Or maybe I should’ve started with a more basic question – do you know what no-follow means?

I did a preliminary poll on my personal Twitter account, and the results were split. Half of the responses indicated that they didn’t no-follow their links, and the other half didn’t even know what no-follow meant.  From those in the know, they had determined that passing link juice to their sponsors was only fair, considering they’d offered some form of compensation.  Unfortunately, that decision has the opposite effect.  By passing link juice to the sponsor’s Web site, both the blog publisher and the sponsoring company have violated Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, which can result in losing rankings and, by extension, visitors. Incurring a Google penalty doesn’t help your blog or the sponsor!

For all of the bloggers out there who are reading this and had no idea they were doing anything wrong, you’re in good company. (As a matter of fact, I would appreciate it if you would leave a comment, and maybe I can nudge Matt Cutts to come and take a look at how many experienced bloggers are completely clueless about this whole “paid link” notion.) Here’s a little help for no-following your links:

• Don’t use your visual blog editor to create no-follow links; use the HTML editor.
• Add this to your anchor tag: rel=”nofollow”

You must do this for any links in sponsored posts, whether you’re publishing a product review, running a giveaway, or have been otherwise compensated for placing a link.  You are not doing your sponsors any favors by leaving the no-follow off.

Now that you know, you can start doing right by Google. I don’t think it’s fair that Google penalizes bloggers for breaking rules they aren’t even aware of, but I don’t make the rules. I hope that I can reach out and spread the word so that my favorite blogs don’t get whacked by the Google hammer the next time they run one of their awesome giveaways. (By the way, consider this a shout out to all of the awesome bloggers who have hooked me up with some fantastic prizes. You rock! Blog giveaways FTW!)

If you’ve got the time, it would be worth it  to go back and edit old blog posts to no-follow your links retroactively. Matt Cutts has put the call out for people to report sites that buy and sell links, so you want to protect yourself! Google doesn’t allow you to plead ignorance, and they don’t even need proof that you published a paid link. If they think you’re guilty, then you will suffer the consequences. Don’t give them any reason to suspect you. No-follow links to all of your sponsors, and you’ll be fine.

Do Bloggers Even Know They’re Breaking Google’s Rules? is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC