In case you missed many big time bloggers getting slapped for selling text links here is the article.

However this post isn’t to talk about text links, rather to talk about paid posts.

I was thinking it must be difficult for google to detect paid links but they are still doing it, even if they are doing it manually.

(aside: I wonder how many slaps came from people reporting people? Ouch ;p
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/)

At the same time I was working on programming a spider to grab a large number of feeds and pull info from the posts. And you know what I noticed?

It is extremely easy, even for me, to DETERMINE WHO IS SELLING PAID POSTS.

Seriously, from today forward if you place the text “this is a sponsored post” or “post sponsored by” or any other variation it’s like putting an idiot stamp on your blog.

It says, I know google doesn’t like paid links, but I’m going to do them anyway, PLUS, I’m going to put this very specific text here to tell the googlebots I’m doing it.

I’m not perfect, I’ve done one paid post. And I’m not debating whether you should do paid posts or not, that is your business.

But moving forward, KNOWING google is slapping people selling links (and all a paid post is is selling text and links), and you still put those idiot stamps on your blog? That is just asking to be google slapped. And you’d deserve to be.

So the moral of the story is if you are going to keep doing paid posts moving forward:

1. Do them on a domain you don’t care about losing Pagerank and Google rankings

2. Label them with an image or some form of label that can’t be detected by a search engine bot.