Google released a new Webmaster Help video today featuring Matt Cutts discussing Google’s policies on advertorials and native advertising.
“Well, it’s advertising, but it’s often the sort of advertising that looks a little closer to editorial, but it basically means that someone gave you some money, rather than you writing about this naturally because you thought it was interesting or because you wanted to,” says Cutts. “So why do I care about this? Why are we making a video about this at all? Well, the reason is, certainly within the webspam team, we’ve seen a little bit of problems where there’s been advertorial or native advertising content or paid content, that hasn’t really been disclosed adequately, so that people realize that what they’re looking at was paid. So that’s a problem. We’ve had longstanding guidance since at least 2005 I think that says, ‘Look, if you pay for links, those links should not pass PageRank,’ and the reason is that Google, for a very long time, in fact, everywhere on the web, people have mostly treated links as editorial votes.”
The video links to this.
“Well, there’s two-fold things that you should think about,” says Cutts. “The first is on the search engine side of things, and search engine wise, you should make sure that if links are paid – that is if money changed hands in order for a link to be placed on a website – that it should not flow PageRank. In essence, it shouldn’t affect search engines’ rankings. That’s no different than the guidance we’ve had for years, and years, and years.”
The video suggests using rel=”nofollow”.
“Likewise, if you are doing disclosure, you need to make sure that it’s clear to people,” adds Cutts. “A good rule of thumb is that there should be clear and conspicuous disclosure. It shouldn’t be the case that people have to dig around, buried in small print or have to click and look around a long time to find out, ‘Oh, this content that I’m reading was actually paid.’”
The video suggests using text like “Advertisement” or “Sponsored”.
“So why are we talking about this now?” Cutts continues. “This isn’t a change in our search engine policy. Certainly not in the webspam team. Well, the reason is that we’ve seen some people who have not been doing it correctly. So we’ve seen, for example, in the United Kingdom, a few sites that have been taking money, and writing articles that were paid, and including keyword-rich anchor text in those articles that flowed PageRank, and then not telling anybody that those were paid articles. And that’s the sort of thing where if a regular user happened to be reading your website, and didn’t know that it was paid, they’d really be pretty frustrated and pretty angry when they found out that it was paid.”
“So, we’ve taken action on this sort of thing for years and years, and we’re going to keep taking strong action,” says Cutts. “We do think it’s important to be able to figure out whether something is paid or not on the web, and it’s not just the webspam team. It’s not just search quality and web search results. The Google News team recently published on their blog, and said that if you don’t provide adequate disclosure of paid content – whether it be native advertising, advertorials – whenever there’s money changing hand, if users don’t realize that sufficiently because there’s not adequate disclosure, the Google News team mentioned that they might not only remove the paid content, but we’re willing to go up to and including removing the publication from Google News.”
We covered what the Google News team had to say about it here.
In that big video Cutts put out a while back talking about all of the changes coming over the next several months (which included the most recent Penguin update), he also said Google would be “looking at some efforts to be a little bit stronger on our enforcement” on advertorials.
A couple weeks ago, Cutts tweeted that Google had just took action on thousands of linksellers.
Back in April Amazon released 14 original TV shows, exclusive to Prime customers. The company, through its video production studio, 
