Warnings about paid posts

Google are evidently clamping down on sites that do paid posts and are effectively offering paid links within those posts. Advice circulating around the paid post community suggests removing references to paid posts and sponsored posts from your blog. I have heard suggestions that titles such as 'sponsored links' are being hunted down and investigated by Google, the result being a drop in PR for those blogs that are deemed guilty of this practice.

The whole practice of paid posts will have to become far more subtle and posts will have to be made to look more like part of the blog. So much for those who have been upfront about doing paid posts, the practice will effectively be driven underground.

On the one hand Google is advancing blogging via 'Blogger', on the other hand, it looks like it going to try and remove the funding of these blogs by restricting Pagerank on the blogs that have paid posts and paid linking (such as sidebar links).

It looks like PR on the two blogs that I am currently using for revenue generation have been ranked down again (pagerank has been a bit like a Yo Yo for me this year!). On this blog alone I was firstly awarded a PR of 3, dropped to 2, raised to 4 and now dropped to 0 from what I can see today.... I think this could cause some aggravation in the blogging community over the next few weeks.