• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 4, 2009

Google's Matt Cutts restated the search engine's policy on paid blogs in a post earlier this week after Forrester Research issued a report suggesting that brand marketers should consider sponsored blog posts.

The Forrester report described a Kmart campaign that ran in December where bloggers received a free shopping spree in exchange for writing a post about the experience. Analyst Sean Corcoran spearheaded the report, detailing why companies should pay bloggers to talk about the brand--a marketing strategy he calls sponsored conversation.

Google wants bloggers to adhere to its "nofollow" tag policy when posting the blog if the post links to the sponsor's site paying to have the brand mentioned in the post. Nofollow is an HTML attribute used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the ranking, or PageRank, in the search engine's index.

Cutts, who is the head of Google's Webspam team, posted on his blog regarding Google's position on paid posts passing PageRank. A message in response to the post summarizing Google's policy states: "Clear disclosure of sponsorship is critical, and that includes disclosure for search engines. If (a) link in a paid post would affect search engines, that link should not pass PageRank (e.g., by using the nofollow attribute). Google--and other search engines--do take action which can include demoting sites that sell links that pass PageRank, for example."

The social media agency Izea launched the campaign for Kmart through its SocialSpark blogging site, which matches brands with bloggers. It has offered a sponsored conversation blogging service in one form or another for years.

SocialSpark bloggers typically receive cash compensation. This time, a few bloggers received Kmart gift cards for six of the 800 posts written for Kmart's campaign. Paying them with gift cards rather than cash made it impossible to initiate the posts through SocialSpark. Although Orlando, Fla.-based Izea provided nofollow links, the posts bypassed the checks and balances in the network's policies because the bloggers were paid with gift cards rather than cash, according to Ted Murphy, Izea's founder and CEO.

Microsoft and Yahoo do not require nofollow tags, Murphy said. While many adhere to Google's policy, others do not. Murphy said Google wants bloggers to change the way they post, and expects everyone to play by their rules by using the nofollow tag. In reality, the search engine just can't enforce the policy because they have no idea if the blogger had been compensated for the link. "Google needs to fix their algorithms," he said.

In an open letter to Cutts posted on Murphy's blog, he writes: "In retrospect we should have forced every single link to be nofollow, regardless of destination and we will do that in the future. We will do this not because I believe in the concept of nofollow. We will do this because bloggers fear Google."