Bribing Bloggers to Shut Down

Perhaps you may recall Cash4Gold, the online pawn shop that wants to buy your jewelry and help you survive the new recession? The company raised not a few eyebrows when it ran a commercial during the Super Bowl, breaking the pattern of cars and dot-coms and signaling that a new era of austerity was upon us:

Now, it seems, the company is breaking new ground in advertising and promotion, by being the first firm we've heard of that is actually paying bloggers to pull their critical blog posts, or at least de-optimize them so they don't show up so high in Google's search rankings. A few months ago, the blogger Cockeyed.com wrote a post claiming that Cash4Gold offers just a third of what any local pawn shop will give you, which doesn't exactly make them the best deal out there.

Consumerist.com picked up the piece and gave it a lot of play, which made Cockeyed's post the third thing you see when you search for Cash4Gold on Google. A week later, Cash4Gold's marketing consultant Joe Laratro sent Cockeyed a letter, offering a "financial arrangement" for him or her to either kill the post or de-optimize it. In a follow-up letter, Laratro was even more explicit: "Is it worth a few thousand to take it down? If not, maybe a donation to your favorite charity is more to your liking?"

Cockeyed admits he was tempted. "Finally, I'll have an appropriately fashionable tracksuit to wear while puttering around on my Segway," he wrote. But in the end, he decided to embarrass the company with a follow-up post instead.