Many SEO’s are surprised that Google decided to crack down on guest blogging. Here are some events that occurred in early 2014.
Matt Cutts Announced that Spammy Guest Blogging Networks Will Be Penalized
In January of 2014, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, mentioned that Google was going to penalize guest blogging. This post caused a lot of buzz and some confusion in the online marketing community.
Some people thought that he meant that all guest blogging was bad. He later clarified that Google only wants to penalized low quality guest posting from webmasters that are just trying to get a link back to their site for SEO purposes.
Google Penalizes My Blog Guest
In March of 2014, Google penalized My Blog Guest, which is a community where publishers and bloggers can network with each other and exchange guest posts.
This penalty has incurred a mixed reaction among online marketing experts. Ann Smarty, the owner of My Blog Guest, is actually against guest posting for links as well as people paying for links. My Blog Guest has also kicked out some people in the past for violating these rules.
However, since it is a community where people can interact freely for the most part, some members have said that a good number of low quality guest post exchanges have occurred. It’s an open forum where people can network, so there’s no way that the moderators can police all activities and prevent these exchanges from occurring.
Asides from penalizing My Blog Guest, a good number of sites that were using My Blog Guest to get guest posts were also penalized. Not all sites using My Blog Guest were low quality and there’s a big gray line when it comes to defining exactly what “low quality” means.
In fact, many sites did have quality standards for their guest posts. But perhaps they were not up to Google’s standards? Some of these website owners that were using My Blog Guest confirmed that they received penalties. Ann Smarty and the My Blog Guest team worked with these sites to get their penalties lifted.
White Hat SEO Firm Portent Penalized
Google also penalized Portent, a popular white hat SEO firm. Chairman Ian Lurie blogged about the experience and how they got the penalty lifted in about 24 hours. They suspected that a recent redesign might have triggered an audit and that keyword rich anchor text in guest posts might have been the reason for the penalty. You can read about it here.
Doc Sheldon’s Blog Penalized for One Link to a Hispanic Site
Doc Sheldon, another known SEO, also got penalized. Apparently, the sitewide penalty was for a single guest post link with keyword rich anchor text to a Hispanic network site. This action caused quite a bit of debate within the SEO community. Here’s a good discussion with links to Matt Cutt’s tweet:
The fact that Google has penalized these sites that were trying to do the right things has left a lot of people confused. Should people continue to use guest blogging to promote their website? Or is guest blogging finished?
About Brian Liang
Hey Brian, good article. What do you think about this? I think it’s possible that Google made a decision to manually penalize MBG due to being a “paid link scheme”. Why do I say that? Because contributors have to be paid members and if that revenue is viewed as fungible, than it murks up the water. I bet if it was free to be able to contribute, the penalty wouldn’t have been so harsh. It’s all just speculation but think about it. What are your thoughts? (I support Ann and I’m not saying anything was done on purpose. I’m just trying to figure out what Google’s justification must have been, just like everyone else. I think it’s important that we know precisely why Google did it.)
Hi Brian. I don’t think that was the reason because MBG allows people to sign up and use it for free. The paid version provides additional benefits, but is not required. A lot of people have speculated that the reason that MBG specifically was targeted first was because it is the most well known guest blogging community and that Google is trying to scare people into not doing spammy guest posting.
That theory makes sense because there’s no way a search engine can distinguish between a regular post and a guest post… or more importantly a guest post link from a natural link. Google ideally needs to be able to count natural links more than guest post links that were created in volume (think of these as “fake” votes for a website that might be less relevant or lower quality). So by discouraging by penalty, they are trying to send the message that producing low quality content in bulk just to get links is not going to pay off.
Guest blogging communities and networks make it easier for spammers to scale this activity. So is Google attacking the guest blog community business model? If it allows for free unmoderated exchange, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was Google’s intention… as you can imagine it makes Google web spam team’s job more difficult. I support Ann as well – she’s definitely one of the good guys and represents what’s good about SEO. But since MBG is basically a forum where people can network, I don’t think it’s possible for her team to monitor everything. So I think it’s unfortunate that things worked out like this.
Thank you for your response Brian. You make some excellent points that definitely agree with. And it’s exactly what Matt Cutts and his band of anti spammers are looking out for.
A reply to your first explanation. Let me try to explain it a little more detailed. MBG is a community that is free to initially register. Included with your free membership is the ability to add your website / blog and social profiles. You have the option to review blog posts and publish them to your blog. Now, what if I want to write a blog post and submit it to the community for webmaster to publish on their blogs. I have to pay for that ability. All non paid members cannot offer blog posts for publication.
So my question to you now is. Who is supplying the links? The people offering the blog posts. Did they pay for that benefit? Yes. Does everyone have to pay for that benefit? Yes. Who doesn’t have to pay? The webmasters that are publishing the blog post.
If you look at the funds being paid as fungible, then it would seem that the people proving the articles (with links) are paying for links. Matt and his team needed some serious justification to enact such a harsh penalty to so many webmasters. Not justification to the webmasters or to the public but to the company. I’m pretty sure that Matt and his team have to be accountable when they implement these types of penalties.
I’m saying that it was the business model that made it look like writers were paying for links to be placed on websites, because when you look at the facts, they were. But it wasn’t intentional on MBG part and everything else just helped them with their case. Because anyone pay to submit an article and if it’s low quality someone can still pick it up and publish it on their site.
Lol, and that’s how my brain works.
OK, thanks for clarifying that. I see where you are coming from and I suppose it is possible that Google could have seen it that way also. I guess we’ll see what happens in the coming months to some of the other free guest blogging networks and communities.