OK – so that’s a misleading title, but new rules published by the Federal Trade Commission mean that anyone blogging on a product or service in the US must disclose any commercial relationship with the provider from December 1st this year. Rules about this have existed in the UK and Europe for some time – failure to declare that editorial content has been paid for is punishable by up two years in prison. Well fuck me silly.
The tension between the wild-frontier informality of the blogosphere and the regulations under which the traditional media operate always meant that eventually lawyers and lawmakers would come sharking around the pond. Big Media has always resented the upstart content providers of the blogging world and they’ve got big interests to protect.
But it is also true that a lot of what passes for content out there is thin-content shills for money. You can barely throw a stone in the blogosphere without it hitting some guy who’ll sell you editorial content at some kind of price.
So what might this mean for SEO if it ever started being enforced? Well, buying bloggers with either hard cash or free product has been a common activity, like, forever and stuff. There are whole companies out there whose raison d’etre is basically to act as a link between linkbuyers and those who’ll sell links on that basis. Google have been trying to weed it out by encouraging people to report bought links for donkeys.
Enforcing the rules won’t actually be that difficult. While the kind of audit trail that exists when B&Q cut a deal with The Sun is a bit more tenuous out there on the web, most linkbuying is done by agencies rather than companies themselves. If you buy a link then it goes in the books, and is invoiced and declared for tax purposes. Very probably an informed auditor could track your activity and establish commercial links between a company, their agency and a blogger pretty easily if they wanted. Where they’d start looking is, of course, anyone’s guess – the number of blogs far, far outweighing the number of newspapers and magazines.
The way round it, of course, would be to declare these relationships on the blog post itself – kind of like the ‘this is an advertorial’ stuff you get in the newspapers. How long would it take Google to spot and penalise sites if that had to be done? Not fucking long – you can be sure of it. It’s likely that this will carry on under the radar until eventually someone gets called out and actually fined. When and if they do, it could be a game-changer for the SEO industry and bloggers alike.
[I know this has been discussed before, but it goes live on December 1st]
So what are the rules in the UK Carps?
And would the UK rules apply affiliate links aswell, or just paid posts?
You can get the full UK regs here (if you can be arsed reading them!)
Basically, the rules don’t specifically mention bloggers, but advertisers in general – and they’ve got to be upfront anywhere where editorial content is actually advertising content where they’ve been paid. So if I give you £50 to blog about my album then I guess that counts as an advertisement and you’re supposed to identify it as such or face time in chokey or a big-ass fine.
As for affiliates… well… who knows? Technically, you don’t get paid by the company to blog – because you only get paid for sales/sign-ups. So probably (and I ain’t no lawyer!) I’d say that such relationships don’t fall under the auspices of this law.
I’ve got a theory that building a hosted affiliate system that tracks incoming traffic through referring URLs rather than bouncing through a 3rd party site would be a shit-hot way to build clean links, and that would neatly sidestep all of this shit. But what do I know?