Yes, you are reading the headline correctly. I just got an email from Pay Per Post that they flat out rejected a blog I submitted to their system. The blog that I submitted about a week ago has been rejected due to the fact that there is no way for them to see exactly what I posted on a certain date.
Now, you need to realize that many blog templates (in WordPress it’s called a ‘theme’) include links or some way for someone to see all of the posts on a particular date. For example, you can click on a link on the template and navigate back to see what I was talking about on December 26, 2006. Let me be the first to ask this silly question:
Why would you possibly want to see what I posted on December 26, 2006?
I cannot think of any logical situation where someone would possibly want to know what some blogger posted on a certain date in the past. It’s in the past, man, get over it! And tell me this: have you ever gone to someone’s blog and navigated by date in the sidebar of their blog in order to see what that blogger posted on a particular date? Absolutely not.
I wholeheartedly understand why someone like Pay Per Post would want to see some navigation on your blog that tells them what you posted on a particular date: they want to verify that the blog meets their artificial requirements of having been around for a certain period of time. I think I recall that it’s about 90 days or something and you’re supposed to have a certain number of posts. OK, fine. That rule is supposed to keep out the spammers. I agree that you have to have some sort of “rulebook” in order for Pay Per Post to keep the lower quality blogs out of the system. Fine.
But, let’s look at this particular situation: a blog that I own was rejected because the blog can’t be navigated by date:
This is a notification to let you know that your blog, ((name of blog removed)), has been rejected for the following reason(s):
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Thank you for your blog submission!I was unable to find a link to your chronological archives. Please make sure that it is in plain site and that your archives list chronologically, not categorically. Also, the archives cannot be just ‘previous pages.’ For example, it should be set up to where I could find a post on Sept. 30th very quickly. Please re-submit when this requirement has been met.
Thank you!
If you’ll take a look at this blog that you’re reading right now, the archives are listed categorically and not any other way. This is done on purpose. It keeps the posts categorized by topic only. On-topic internal links are good. It doesn’t create unncessary pages on the site by adding “previous” and “next” links which will then include useless duplicate pages and the site’s template doesn’t have a way to view posts by date which really tends to add a whole bunch of additional duplicate content. The blog of mine that was rejected by Pay Per Post uses the same WordPress theme as this site–but is a little different and has been customized somewhat.
Let’s look at the blog of mine that was rejected and it’s particular properties that should actually matter to Pay Per Post but obviously doesn’t:
– The domain has been around since September 7, 2002. This, for you non-SEO types is a good thing because the domain is aged.
– The blog itself is currently a PageRank 5 and was a PR6 during the last PR update. I’m not sure exactly why the PR went down, perhaps it lost a few links or Google did something, who knows and who cares? I don’t have PageRank turned on but figured that I’d report what they PR currently is just in case you care about PR.
– The blog currently has 345 pages indexed. I don’t recall exactly how many posts I’ve made on the blog but I really don’t care at this point. It must have been at least 300+/- posts.
– The blog has several posts that have “made it” to the home page of Digg.com, Netscape.com, and Yahoo! My Web among other things. Not just one post, mind you, but at least 5 or more posts that have been on the home page of some of the largest social bookmarking communities.
– Yahoo! is currently showing +/- 42,000 backlinks to the blog. These are real backlinks from other sites and other blogs.
This blog that has been rejected by Pay Per Post is a popular blog with a lot of great content that ranks well in the search engines and it frequently quoted on other blogs by other bloggers. So, it sounds like this is a case where the people reviewing blogs are going strictly by the rules; rules that have been established to identify blogs that are spammy blogs and not of the highest quality. But, it turns out that the “rules” established by Pay Per Post promote search engine “unfriendly” blogs that are theoretically full of duplicate content.
Why am I not surprised? Many people have complained about Pay Per Post.
There are a lot of good looking weblogs out there that are full of duplicate content (duplicate content as defined by the search engines). For those of you who want to make sure that your blog is search engine friendly and not hanging out in supplemental la la land, Aaron Wall has a great blog post about taking care of some of these issues.
I have played around with a lot of different blog “themes” and templates over the past several years. And I’ve had good experiences and bad experiences when it comes to getting my blog sites and my clients’ blogs optimized. I have finally realized, partly because of Aaron’s great blog post and other search engine ranking issues I’ve run up against.
Well, let me tell you this: Pay Per Post needs to “update” their requirements and the “tests” that they use to determine a good blog versus a bad blog. I know that you need to keep out spammers, but give me a break. By the way, I don’t plan on “resubmitting” my blog after I’ve “changed it for you”. I won’t be downgrading the blog’s SEO web design just to satisfy Pay Per Post.
