Google Warns Against Link Building Via Articles & Guest Posts

Google has issued a new warning to site owners about utilizing spammy articles as a link building technique.  While this is a reminder, and not a new policy, it is targeting specific types of link building by site owners utilizing various article publishing tactics, such as guest blogging.

The blog post also calls out a few other types of article link spam, including hiring writers who “aren’t knowledgeable on the topics they’re writing on.”  This could also trigger a second manual action for thin or spammy content as well.  Here are the specific scenarios Google mentions:

• 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)

Now, it wouldn’t be expected that there would be a new manual action associated with this, since it is merely a reminder of Google’s current policy.  And Google does already have two link related manual actions which combat the scenarios Google describes in their posts – the “unnatural links to your site” and the “unnatural outbound links manual action.”

It wouldn’t be surprising to see an increase in manual actions specifically related to this scenario – Google has warned previously about spam techniques that they have had blog posts about before, and using a new updated blog post on the Google Webmaster Blog to alert site owners about it, who may not have been active when Google made the initial warning.  For example, they have given multiple widget warnings, related to an increase in those using widgets as a link building tool.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post

Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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