Google's New Warning about Link Building from Article Syndication & Guest Posts

Google's NO to misuse of Content Marketing

Google has issued a fresh warning which comes as a reminder for spammy links being built in articles referred to as guest posts, partner posts, syndicated posts or contributor posts.

Lately Google has observed an increase in such spammy links which are built by or in the name of one website and published on a different website. Google doesn't discourage article syndication where users are benefitted by some good content and awareness about a topic or a company. But if the intent is purely to build links in a large scale, that is where the issue is.

Warning Signals:

As mentioned in the Google announcement, below mentioned are some factors that can trigger a violation of Google guidelines:

• Stuffing keyword-rich links to your site in your articles

• Having the articles published across many different sites; alternatively, having a large number of articles on a few large, different sites

• Using or hiring article writers that aren’t knowledgeable about the topics they’re writing on

• Using the same or similar content across these articles; alternatively, duplicating the full content of articles found on your own site (in which case use of rel=”canonical”, in addition to rel=”nofollow”, is advised)

Sites need to be very careful of publishing any articles that contain spammy links. This may result in sub-optimal performance from the organic perspective. The publishing sites should check whether the content is useful for the readers and does the context match with the site. Also if the content contains links that have questionable intent, do they have rel="nofollow" tag applied?

Google clarifies that if link building is a priority, the quality of content would be compromised. To keep the web clean, Google encourages webmasters to report spam if they receive requests related to 'Post my articles' which are intented to build links. Here is the form - spam report form.

Publishers need to keep an eye on the context of the article they are posting for other sites and also keep a check on the links included. Here is what Google has to say to the distributors of articles:

"And lastly, if a link is a form of endorsement, and you’re the one creating most of the endorsements for your own site, is this putting forth the best impression of your site? Our best advice in relation to link building is to focus on improving your site’s content and everything--including links--will follow (no pun intended)."

Can we assume we would soon see an algorithm update related to links? You never know. Stay safe! Build quality content on your own site. Avoid spammy techniques to build links.

Here is an important link of Google's Quality Guidelines for your reference:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

- Tejas Thakkar