The blogosphere is all atwitter about PayPerPost.com and its plan to pay bloggers to run pre-approved advertorial posts. So here's my question - wouldn't this endanger the Google listings of sites that participate? It's very clear that PayPerPost.com's clients are paying for the link from the blogger. PayPerPost isn't insisting on a "nofollow" tag on all those links to their paying clients. Instead, their pitch to advertisers notes that they "have the ability to require a dynamic tracking link for determining traffic or a regular link that will help you build search engine ranking. " The advertisers will benefit as much from the links as the traffic. It seems to me the bloggers are selling the link and their PageRank as well as any traffic that may click through to the advertiser. Only Google has final wisdom on this, but Google's Matt Cutts has clearly indicated that sites that sell links are likely to be penalized in the latest round of updates.
The sites that participate may be taking a big chance with their PageRank and Google listings. That's one more reason not to like PayPerPost, apart from the many objections outlined by others.