I have known for months now about the FTC’s push to have bloggers, celebrities and everyone else for that matter disclose whether a blog post was paid for. The biggest hurt during this whole ordeal is the fact that everyone knows Google’s stance on paid blogging. Every big blogger seems to do it but no one actually comes out and talks about it. Why? Fear of being banned from Google. There are a select few elitists who can make due without traffic from Google so they don’t really care, such as John Chow. When Google banned him he pretty much laughed at them and stated that this barely made a small dent in his traffic.

But where does this leave the rest of us? Do we ignore the FTC and risk an $11,000 fine? That’s a little to rich for my blood. Do we risk posting the disclosure and getting banned from Google? That would suck. So what are we to do?

Well lets brainstorm for a second. How do we please the FTC and not alert Google? Well there are 2 options. The first one is to not post paid reviews, at least not until you already have 70,000+ subscribers like John Chow. But there is another thing that I have been thinking about. What if you took an image or better yet a clip done in Flash and wrote within this clip or image “sponsored review”. You could even take this a step farther and make the flash clip animated so you can ensure google will not be able to crawl this.

I mean the FTC never said we had to post it as text, they just said we had to post it!

Another Idea would be to have a blog disclosure page and add in the disclosure that a certain symbol such as an image of money at the bottom of the post represents a paid review. Now this might be pushing the boundaries a little but nonetheless you are still informing HUMANS that this is a sponsored review. We are not responsible for having to inform Google’s spiders right

Tell me what your opinion of this is. Do you think that this would be a good idea? If so start spreading the word. This would be a good solution not to see a bunch of people get banned, because that would really suck.

Have a good weekend everyone. I will see you all on Monday.

If You Enjoyed This Post Subscribe to Our RSS Feed!!!

Other Posts

• List Of Free SEO Tools
• Huge List of Over 250 Social Media Websites
• List of Ways to Build Links & Promote Your Website
• Advertising Tips For Small Bloggers
• Tests Are Complete No-follow Links Are Followed By Google!
• 5 Must Have SEO Tools
• List of Social Bookmarking Sites
• List of 550 Article Submission Sites
• This has To Be The Best Web Hosting Ever
• Top SEO Myths That I Hate