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?
