Sponsored reviews are a great way to make money blogging, but they can also hurt your blog's search rankings.
For example, Google's indexing algorithm penalizes blogs that publish links which have been paid for in some way believing that paid links artificially boost a website's search rankings (Google weighs links higher than non-linked text in its search ranking algorithm). There is also an ethical argument against publishing sponsored reviews without disclosing that the review was paid for.
Follow the tips below to publish sponsored reviews and make money without instantly hurting your search rankings.
1. Use the NoFollow HTML Tag
The NoFollow tag is vital to perserve your Google rankings if you publish a sponsored review on your blog. In simplest terms, the NoFollow tag is an HTML tag that tells search engines like Google to bypass the link during the indexing process making it virtually invisible. The thought process is that search engines won't downgrade your blog's ranking if the paid links are not valued in the ranking process.
2. Provide Full Disclosure
Be certain to include language at the beginning of your sponsored review post that identifies it as such. The thought process is that a sponsored review is ethically acceptable if readers understand your review might not be completely unbiased.
3. Write Sponsored Reviews that are Relevant to Your Blog's Topic and Audience
Make sure you only publish sponsored reviews that are meaningful and useful to your audience and applicable to your blog's topic. The thought process is that Google's goal is to provide links to people that are truly relevant and useful to them. Sending a person to a site that includes one post about a product, service, company, etc., which is not even remotely related to the rest of the content on the site, is not helping that person as much as sending them to a different site that is devoted enitrely to that topic would be.
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