When Guest Posting Goes Wrong

I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years . Today I'm going to talk about when guest posting goes wrong . Guest posting is when an author on a website often the website owner posts content on another website . So guest posts on that other site and includes a link or link back , links back to their site .

It's supposed to promote their own site to the audience of another website . The third party website they post on benefits from additional content and the perspective of the guest author . So it sounds great . The fourth party is involved , right ? Well , there's an issue , and that is that Google has a very specific view on guest posting .

It believes that guest posting for the purposes of link building is an attempt to manipulate their algorithms and they consider it spam . This means that , google , if you're going to do guest posting , it should be purely for the promotional side of getting yourself in front of another audience and maybe getting people to follow the link .

Click the link through to follow and come to your site . They don't think it should be done just purely to get a backlink from a third party website to yours with the intent of passing page rank . So what they want people to do for a guest posting is to no follow the link . There's two reasons here .

Because if the link is no followed , it means that it's not manipulative to the Google's algorithm . So you're demonstrating that you're purely doing this for the promotional purpose . It also demonstrates to Google that you haven't actually paid someone to guest post , because I mean , it does happen .

People do pay other sites to be able to put a guest post on and have a followed link on there , and the real reason they're doing that is to get that backlink and to pass that page rank . So they say that if you're going to do guest posting , you must not follow that link , and that's the rule that they work to .

Now the reason I bring up the guest posting and how it can go wrong is because there's a person called NicheSiteLady who's at NicheSiteLady on Twitter , who's very prominent Niche site website builder and she's very open about the amount of money she's been making from her websites and she's making over $70,000 a month currently and she's just been hit with a manual

link penalty for unnatural links . And she says , like I'll put a link to the threads on Twitter in the show notes so you can see what's been said . You know . She says you know she's never bought a link and the example that they gave was a legitimate guest post from years ago and that she's only ever done five of these and the actual message .

She posted a screenshot of the message and it says unnatural links to your site . Google has detected a pattern of unnatural , artificial , deceptive or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site . These may be the result of buying links that pass page rank or participating in link schemes . And the example they had when this message was from a guest post .

So you can see here how a guest post has actually come back and can actually bite you hard and she's got a manual link penalty from this , which could be quite disastrous for a site . You know it's early days yet , so she's not noticed any changes yet , but this is the kind of thing that can come and hit anybody . Now I've I know Niche site lady .

I've met her in real life at Meetup and I've had shared several conversations with her online and I actually believe , when she says she hasn't paid for this , the link on these guest posts that she's done , I think you know it's just legitimate here . She's put this guest post on and the site that she's given she's done it on has given her a followed link .

But obviously Google has no way of knowing what the arrangement was at the start to start with , and I think they've just decided and they probably it might be that it's going to start cracking down on guest post links that are followed , that they're going to mark all these kind of links as manipulative .

So obviously the way around it is to put them as no follow links . If you do it as no follow links , then Google's not going to see you as being manipulative . But Marie Haynes actually came onto this thread in Twitter . She actually reposted it and gave some comments .

Now Marie's very well known in the SEO industry for doing lots of work with people who have had money like from penalties or algorithmic penalties from Google and getting them getting those penalties removed for them . So it's quite an interesting voice to have in on this one .

Now , marie sparked quite an interesting conversation on this example that Niche site lady gave , and also sort of examples of manipulative link building in particular , and actually got involved in a few of a bits of it as well and give my own point of view .

Now , the key thing really is that if you have an arrangement with a third party site to do something content wise that involves including links back to your website and that's part of the deal , then those are going to be considered manipulative unless you know follow them .

So a guest post where I am going to provide content in return for a link , then that's clearly whether the money changes hands or not . You are , between the two sites , working out an arrangement that is effectively link manipulation .

Now if you had a different kind of arrangement where one person asked oh so if I put out a press release and it has links in the press release and then people post them , does that mean that I am breaking terms of service ? This is manipulative .

And the answer is if you just put out a press release through the press release channels and you are not approaching sites individually and you are not having conversations with them individually and asking them or telling them what they must and must not include when they cover that .

If and when they cover that press release , then that isn't manipulative , because it's up to that site whether they want to include which bits of the content they are going to include , whether they are going to include the links , whether they are going to follow the links , whether they are just going to list the links or whether they are going to ignore those

links completely and not cover them . If you are doing something like that , where people off their own back are deciding what to do with it , what to post and what to link to , that's completely fine . That's not manipulative .

You can see a situation where it might be really powerful to actually pay for some guest posts on real high profile sites to have a lot of traffic and make sure that any links that come from them are no followed .

You do that to get the eyeballs on the story that you're trying to promote or the feature that you've got or whatever it is you want to get people to look at .

You can use those guest posts in the way that Google likes , with a no follow link , and then you're hoping to get them in front of lots of eyeballs and you can find that plenty of people will find that content and then they may write about it themselves and in those cases they might also include a link . But they might follow it , but it's up to them .

They've made that decision . So you've promoted the content , you've promoted the page that you want link to , for example , but then it's up to other people if they write about it . If they write about it , they're on back with no coercion or payment or anything on your side . They can link or not link . That is natural . So that's when it can be done .

Right Now I should add like I always do when I talk about links , link building and paying for links is that I've got nothing against people that choose to do link manipulation or buy links , pay links , that kind of thing . It's not against the law .

It's only Google that you're gonna annoy if you get caught , and I think it's a risk reward thing and plenty of people do it . I don't do it myself .

I used to , and I've talked about it in other podcasts , and got really badly hit by Google Penguin over about 12 years ago now , and I made a conscious decision back then that I was gonna do link building differently , which is to work on creating fantastic content and tools that people will actually link to , naturally .

So why do we think that Neesotlady's been hit with this manual penalty ? Now , obviously , a manual penalty means someone's , but Google's actually gone and looked at this and marked it manually . That's the difference between a manual penalty and an algorithm penalty .

I always think penalties are ones that they've got code and the crawlers and when they're doing the ranking , they pick up patterns and automatically apply a penalty . That's an algorithmic one . A manual one is where someone's actually come and looked at your site , looked at your backlink profile and , physically , someone's gone . We don't like this .

We're gonna give you a manual penalty and click the button on one of their systems . Now Neesotlady has got a lot of followers . She's got 66,000 followers on Twitter . She's got a mailing list of 17,000 plus people and the tweet where she announced that she'd been hit with this penalty At the time of me recording this , it's got over 100,000 views .

Part of me is thinking is this a case of head above the parapet ?

Because she's known in the community , because she's open with the amount of money she makes and things like that and some of the tactics she uses , then Google are trying to send a message to the community and have picked on someone who's got a profile , who that they know if they hit is going to probably talk about it and raise the issue amongst the rest of

the Neesotlady community . So I think there's an element here where she's been picked on because of her profile . So it shows the risks of sometimes , if you overshare , there can be risks because you're putting head above the parapet , you make yourself a target . I think that's what's happened in this case .

Potentially Hard to prove , but it is a bit weird that they have picked on it and , as I say , I don't see it having ever done much wrong and I believe her when she says there's only five guest posts like this and she did them for what she thought were the right reasons and not for manipulative reasons .

But time will tell , be interested and see what actually happens with the traffic and whether she'll share more on this . But I think it is a good time to , if you're thinking about doing guest posting , consider what the risks are and what you're trying to achieve and the way that you want to go about doing it . Thanks for being a listener .

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