And I’m not talking from a blogger’s point of view.

Part of PayPerPost’s appeal with advertisers is the ability to request rather specific linkbacks to your site. For example, if Gary decided to purchase a few paid posts in the PPP marketplace for BlueFur, he could say that he wanted linkbacks to the main BlueFur site using the anchor text “Canada web hosting” or perhaps a link to the business page using “business hosting packages“. Whatever he wants, he can put in the request.

Of course, it’s still up to the individual publishers whether they want to snatch up the paid post opportunity or not, so if they believe that the content or linkback requirements are too stringent, they’ll pass. That has been part of the attractiveness of PayPerPost both for bloggers and for advertisers. With Google’s recent attack on PayPerPost, these linkbacks may not be nearly as valuable. You may have heard that just about every blog that has ever taken a PPP opportunity is now rocking a Google PageRank of zero. My blog is one such target.

I don’t take advantage of PPP opportunities on my blog anymore, but because I have a few in my archives, Google has decided to drop my blog to a PR0. From an advertiser’s point of view, the paid links are no longer on a PR5 site and as such, they don’t hold as much value in terms of improving their search engine ranking for the chosen keyword or keyword phrase. In this way, blog contests that involve linking back with a specific anchor text may not work anymore either.

So, what does this mean for advertisers? If they want to hit the first page of results for a chosen keyword phrase, they’ll either need to get it through “legitimate” and unsponsored links from other websites or — and this is why I suspect Google has decided to attack PPP — they could opt to buy a sponsored link from Google. You’ll notice that every SERP (search engine results page) has sponsored links and Google obviously wants more money (as we all do).

Will the PayPerPost marketplace suffer from these recent changes? I have every reason to believe so.