Google's John Mueller was asked if it is against Google's webmaster guidelines to create a blog and build content that is unrelated to your business, with the sole intent of building links. John said no, it is not against Google's guidelines but that the whole thing is a "wasted opportunity."
In short, the example give by Rich Howard (I think it was a made up example) on Twitter was that a lawn care company created a blog and posted content about "2021 Best Cities for New Moms" and "2021's Best Cities to Get Stoned" and so on. All these pieces of content on this blog were unrelated to lawn care. The company did this "purely to build links," Rich Howard said. Rich added "they aren't trying to rank for it, they are doing it purely to build links. They are building a ton of links like this to game the system."
John Mueller replied on Twitter saying "We wouldn't see this as being against the webmaster guidelines." Specifically, that there is no link scheme in the Google guidelines mentioned around this specifically, i.e. where you build out unique content on topics unrelated to your business.
But John said doing all of this "seems like a wasted opportunity." He said that Google's "systems do use things like context & anchor text into account for links, so it feels like they're mostly building a reputation for non-lawn care content." Essentially, those link building efforts will earn them a reputation for topics that site does not want to rank for and instead, why not put the effort into writing content that attract links that help the site overall build a reputation for the keywords and content that business really cares about.
I guess stones & lawn care are kinda related (or the right kind of plants & stoners), but in general, what use is it to rank for content that you don't want to convert visitors from? From a business POV: ranking, impressions, & clicks are nothing without conversion.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 17, 2021
John's stone cold humor 🥶🥶🥶
It seems like a wasted opportunity. We wouldn't see this as being against the webmaster guidelines. Our systems do use things like context & anchor text into account for links, so it feels like they're mostly building a reputation for non-lawn care content.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 17, 2021
Hat tip to Greg Finn who mentioned this tweet on the Marketing O'Clock podcast. I did indeed miss it, as I was offline that day and I missed it in my catch up work. Greg had more of an issue with this not being against Google's guidelines, since the intent of the blog was to manipulate Google's rankings. He has a point but if the content attracts links naturally, it would not be against Google's webmaster guidelines. Although, I doubt a lawn care company can write content on topics it does not know much about to earn a lot of links but what do I know.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
