So, what are paid reviews?

Paid reviews are those, written by blogger about a product or company for which he gets paid. The payment may range from $10 – 250, depending on the Blogger’s market value. Initially Paid reviews looks very lucrative and easy money. You feel that since I am already writing a blog, why not write about one where you can get paid instantly and further money will keep coming through Adsense or any other AD network.

But after a lot of research on this subject I came to the conclusion that Paid reviews don’t pay you in the long run. Simply ask yourself, will you read a review about a product written by person, who you know is going to get paid for it. The obvious answer is no, since his opinion will be biased towards the product. It has been reported by many Bloggers that they have lost a lot of subscribers by doing Paid reviews.

Moreover Google penalizes those sites who are writing paid reviews, see below the words of Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team:

“Google wants to do a good job of detecting paid links. Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.”
The outgoing links from your website / blog is a factor while Google calculates the relative importance of your site. If at all you are doing paid review make it a point to keep the link Nofollow, or otherwise risk yourself getting banned by Google.

So, in my personal opinion its better not to take risk for such short term income but rather focus on those points which will give you money in the long run.

Tags: paid reviews, google policy, paid links, sponsored links