As for paid reviews, I only accept paid reviews where the reviewee is looking for promotion, not page rank. Besides, those looking for PR won’t accept OpTempo because it’s too new to have any PR. As such I’ve only taken one paid review through Sponsored Reviews (the Spock People Search Engine) and I got paid for that no problem. I don’t apply for or accept reviews that require PR, ‘do follow’ or non-disclosure. I would not apply to be a member of any review brokerage where ‘do follow’ is a requirement, such as Smorty.

I noticed that you mentioned losing PR on your Squidoo lens in your most recent post. These have been heavily gamed by spammers and have faced PR reduction since the summer.

I doubt that Google will apply PR reductions to sites that are growing through natural means, including things like ‘do follow’ or ‘top commentators’, unless these links lead to bad neighborhoods. To do so would hurt the relevance of their search results. Of course, if you run these plugins it is up to you to make sure these followed links don’t go to anything that might hurt your site’s reputation.

Slight problem you may have overlooked. If the paid review sites catch you using rel=”nofollow”, they can kick you out of their program and not pay you for reviews you’ve completed and are awaiting payment of.

And Googlenoia is very much Googlereal I’m afraid. I lost PR on my sites too.

Terry

The problem is that the people who tell you that are usually trying to sell you something, usually an opportunity to buy into whatever they’re trying to do to you. It’s a real popular line with managers just before they lay you off.

What I’ve found is that blogging and a few other rapidly changing web site types require to you stay on top of the latest trends. While Google likes frequently updated content they also judge it a lot more strictly since it can also be used to game their algorithms.

Improving their transparency would go a long way in curing most cases of Googlenoia.