Google Guidelines now say no-no to large scale blog posts, press releases, Advertorials, and article marketing

whiterabbit on Fri, 2013-07-26 20:01.

Search marketing

9 comments

from search search engine land, google updated 'link schemes' in their google webmaster in google webmaster guidelines to include the following:

Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links

Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank

Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites.

These are lines that that they removed from the guidelines:

Linking to web spammers or unrelated sites with the intent to manipulate PageRank
Links that are inserted into articles with little coherence

oooooh my goodnessss....

here is the link schemes part page from google webmaster guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

Comments

I wonder how someone would

SteveGerencser on Sat, 2013-07-27 08:35.

I wonder how someone would define large scale? 10s, 100s, 1000s? Other than that it looks like most of the guidelines, asking webmasters to plug the holes in their algorithm.

I'm not sure if it is exactly numbers

whiterabbit on Sun, 2013-07-28 14:12.

My guess is that it is more about patterns than specific numbers and what % a given percentage represents for an overall backlink profile. I also think there is a factor with at what velocity you get the links. In the past, getting 1,000's of link in one day means that you were agressively link building. Now, I think it could be that or it could be a competitor or otherwise spam attack on your site....

Also, I think that this change is really coming late in the game. They should have really released this update to the guidelines before the release of Penguin, I think...

"Linking to web spammers or

jonwade on Sat, 2013-07-27 13:02.

"Linking to web spammers or unrelated sites with the intent to manipulate PageRank"

Where from the Google.com page is this? I could not see?

I ask because recently I raised the question on another site of linking to "bad neighbourhoods" and if that is a problem. A concern of mine is that I may have many links in comments to other sites which could now be causing a problem. They are all "nofollow" so I guess not a problem?

small correction

whiterabbit on Sun, 2013-07-28 14:19.

I could not find a way to edit my post here...

Linking to web spammers or unrelated sites with the intent to manipulate PageRank
Links that are inserted into articles with little coherence

those are lines that that they removed from the guidelines

Regarding your bad neighborhood question...I think that if you have the comment links nofollowed, that should be fine...

ah, just seen the list of

jonwade on Sat, 2013-07-27 13:03.

ah, just seen the list of active editors - several familiar names. Hello!

overdue

onreact on Mon, 2013-07-29 03:42.

I think that was overdue. Google has cracked down on anchor texts already, press relaeses officially yield no SEO value and guest blogging solely for links has been discouraged by Matt Cutts for more than a year by now.

The rest of the article

laurenm on Mon, 2013-07-29 12:29.

The article sounds a little aggressive about all links on a website. Even this was mentioned:

Links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites, for example:Visitors to this page: 1,472car insurance
Widely distributed links in the footers of various sites

So, there should be 0 outbound links on any website?...Seems a tad too strict.

"So, there should be 0

StandardAaron on Tue, 2013-07-30 03:00.

"So, there should be 0 outbound links on any website?"

Sure, I know that is probably said with a bit of sarcasm, but the article talks about spammy outlinks, not normal links to a site with more information or a good opinion piece.

Using widgets with links to the creator, with an anchor text that is not relevant to the widget, or stuffing a footer with outbound links should be punished, in my opinion. That is just spamming. :)