Yesterday, Google published a blog post named a reminder about links in large-scale article campaigns. Truth is, there is absolutely nothing new about what is written there. If you do guest blogging or article publishing for the purpose of link building, with the intent of manipulating Google's search results - then that is something Google can and does penalize for. Sometimes those penalties can negatively impact your overall site's ranking and sometimes it means that Google ignores the links on a site or to a site. Either way, it can hurt.
Google wrote "what does violate Google's guidelines on link schemes is when the main intent is to build links in a large-scale way back to the author’s site. Below are factors that, when taken to an extreme, can indicate when an article is in violation of these guidelines:"
- 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)
Nothing new... This died in 2014 and has died several times since then.
But many folks are now expecting mass manual actions to follow this blog post from Google. Truth is, I am not sure. I did expect that last time Google did a reminder post and it did not happen, no mass manual actions hit after that.
So I asked Gary Illyes from Google if we will see new manual actions or penalties and I didn't really get a response, here is what he said:
@rustybrick You know why we published this...
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) May 26, 2017
I do, but I can't say. It was timed with a story from Danny Sullivan named Google warns against misusing links in syndication & large-scale article campaigns so read that. But again, I can't say much.
Pedro Dias, a former Googler thought manual actions will flow after this:
@rustybrick @methode Yes!
— Pedro Dias (@pedrodias) May 26, 2017
So did Kaspar, another former Googlers:
Typically after a post like this a round of manual actions are just around the corner. #Google on article campaignshttps://t.co/DTa9s96noB
— Kaspar Szymanski (@kas_tweets) May 26, 2017
But will it? I'll keep an eye out and keep you all posted.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
