What Google Penguin Means for Guest Post Writers
One of the best link building strategies is being challenged by the latest update from Google, called Penguin.
The Penguin update was designed to filter out pages ranking due to a heavy focus on manipulative link spam. You probably haven’t seen this online if you read content from reputable publishers, because it involves creating a block of text related to any particular topic and including an irrelevant link to a 3rd party. This type of spam is meant to manipulate the spider into giving the spammy page more rank, and thus increase its exposure in the search engine index.
While this update is designed to filter out spammy links, it makes me wonder about its effects on guest post writers.
Since taking over as editor here at Fuel Your Blogging, I’ve met a lot of talented bloggers from all over the world … many of them blog on behalf of companies.
When blogging for a company, it’s common to reach out to established publications that have the potential to pass page rank to you through the links you create int he content. Again, this is common practice for a lot of marketing professionals … there’s nothing black hat about this approach, because unlike spam, guest posts provide value to the community of readers.
I’ve had to hold off on accepting content written by bloggers on behalf of a company due to this update, as there’s a chance the new Google algorithm will view such links in the same category as spammers. It’s unfortunate for everyone, as the guest writers provided a lot of great content and we were able to help them achieve their goals in exchange.
We’ll see what others think about this in the coming months, but for now we’re holding off on accepting posts submitted from companies that include irrelevant links in the content and believe others are as well, so it isn’t getting any easier for companies to articulate some link juice organically .. but perhaps it will spark some innovation in the area.
Overall, the job of the blogger blogging professionally for a company is getting harder.
What are your thoughts here?
So, you don’t actually know what Google Penguin means for guest post writers, right? Why don’t you go find out, you know, do a little research, then write something about the topic. Sound reasonable?
Not sure I understand where you’re coming from, Jeff. The article is clearly about the impact Google Penguin might have on guest post writers … care to elaborate?
As a blogger, I just focus on making sure the anchor text in my bylines aren’t duplicated too much, just to be safe. Lack of anchor text diversity on-site and off-site are what’s being targeted.
As a webmaster, Guest posts aren’t what Google is targeting. They’re targeting followed links that only exist to manipulate Pagerank. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google are going out of their way to NOT discredit author bios because they very often contain natural editorial links. These guys are very smart. If webmasters needed to be afraid to accept guest posts, problogger.net would have probably tanked by now.
My only real concern about guest posting is that it may become significantly more difficult due to webmasters already being in a bad mood when they get a pitch due to all the poor content they are receiving. :)
Yeah — it does get frustrating, but it’s all part of the fun too.
The problem isn’t the byline … sometimes, the contributor doesn’t even publish links in the byline. The problem occurs when contributors include links to irrelevant content within the body of their content using irrelevant keywords. Some writers do it blatantly hoping the publisher doesn’t even read the material, and others include stuff like “when searching for your topic, consider typing your keyword, such as ‘instant seo rankings’, in order to find results. I’ve seen this shit used in just about ever niche … electrolysis to psychic services.
If I were Google, I’d definitely target guest posts, because as an editor, I know just how bad some of the content is that comes in … you have to imagine a lot of editors just let it all through so they don’t have to write, know what I mean?
I guess in the end, we can only speculate, right?
Google IS targeting that stuff. Not because they’re guest posts but, because they’re spammy guest posts. lol. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about with proper guest posts. Time will tell.