Naughty, naughty!

Some bloggers participating in PayPerPost's program have found their site PageRanks lowered to virtual obsolescence by Google in the past week.

The news came from a report via TechCrunch, which was recently called out by CEO Ted Murphy of IZEA, PayPerPost's parent company.

Murphy asserted PayPerPost suffers because it is "a very attractive alternative" to Adsense. He added that sites like TechCrunch should also be punished for posts that, for example, thank and link sponsors.

PayPerPost connects advertisers that are willing to pay for blog mentions to bloggers willing to make company mentions for money.

The company has oft suffered critique for polluting the blogosphere with inorganic content since its launch.

A lower PageRank means affected sites will no longer appear anywhere near the top of relevant search results. Indeed, many harmed bloggers have been relegated to the hinterlands of last results, where no searcher goes.

Last month Google began penalizing sites that appeared to be selling links or which linked heavily within their own networks as part of efforts to make search results more relevant to the end user.