Speaker 1: 0:52

Hi, ed Dawson here, and, as I'm a bit busy at the moment and need a break, welcome to another one of my best of SEO is not that hard podcasts. These are the episodes from the back catalogue that I think have the greatest hits and ones that are still relevant and provide great value for you. So, without further ado, let's get into the episode. Hello and welcome to episode 66 of SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. I'm an affiliate marketer, seo, and I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years. I've built sites from the ground up, bought sites and sold sites in large exits. 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.

Speaker 1: 1:40

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 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 for all parties 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. 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 who are 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 now follow that link and that's the rule that they work to.

Speaker 1: 3:23

Now the reason I bring up the guest posting and how it can go wrong is because there's a person called niche site lady who's at niche site lady 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 seventy thousand dollars a month, um currently, and she's just been hit with a manual link penalty um for unnatural links and um. She says like I'll put a link to the threads on twitter and in the um in the show notes so you can see what's been said. She says 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 posts 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 with 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 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 that can come and hit anybody.

Speaker 1: 4:52

Now I've I know niche site lady. I've met her in real life at a meetup and I've had shared several conversations with her online and I actually believe her when she says she hasn't paid for this um, the link on these guest posts that she's done, um, I think you know it's just legitimate here. She's put this guest post on and the site that's given that she's done it on has given her a followed link, um. But obviously google has no way of knowing what the arrangement was at the start, was to start with, and I think they've just decided and they're probably it might be that it's going to start cracking, and I think they've just decided and 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 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 manual action penalties or algorithmic penalties from Google and getting those penalties removed for them, so it's quite an interesting voice to have in on this one.

Speaker 1: 6:05

Now. Marie sparked quite an interesting conversation on this example that Niche Site Lady gave, and also examples of manipulative link building in particular, and I actually got involved in a few 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 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.

Speaker 1: 7:01

Now if you had a different kind of arrangement where hit 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 you know I'm breaking terms of service? This is manipulative. And the answer is if you just put out a press release to like through the press release channels, and you're not approaching sites individually and you're not approaching sites individually and you're 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're going to include, whether they're going to include the links, whether they're going to follow the links, whether they're just going to include the links, whether they're going to follow the links, whether they're just going to list the links or whether they're going to ignore those links completely and not cover them. If you're 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.

Speaker 1: 7:56

So you can see a situation where it might be really powerful to actually pay for some guest posts on real high profile sites that 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, the page that you want linked to, for example. But then it's up to other people if they write about, if they write about their own back with 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.

Speaker 1: 9:01

I should add, like I always do when I talk about links, link building and and paying for links, is that you know I've got nothing against people that choose to do link manipulation or buy links, pay links, that kind of thing. It's you know it's not against the law. It's only google that you're going to annoy. Um, if you get caught, and I think it's a risk reward thing and plenty of people do it. Um, I don't do it myself. I used to and I've talked about in other podcasts and got really badly hit by google penguin, um, over about 12 years ago now, um, and you know, I made a conscious decision back then that I was going to do link building differently and which is to work on creating fantastic content and tools that people will actually link to, naturally.

Speaker 1: 9:47

So why do we think that new site ladies 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. That's the difference with a manual, manual penalty, an algorithmic penalty I was in. Penalties are ones that they 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 going to give you a manual penalty. And clicked a button on one of their systems.

Speaker 1: 10:23

Now Nisight Lady 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 has 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 they know, if they hit is going to probably talk about it and raise the issue amongst the rest of the Deneese site community. So I think there's an element here where she's been picked on because of her profile which shows the risks of sometimes, if you overshare, there can be risks because you putting your head above the parapet, you make you make yourself a target. I think that's what's happened in this case potentially um, hard to prove, um, but it is a bit weird that they have picked on it. And you know, as I say, I I don't see 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 you know, time will tell. It'll be interesting to 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.

Speaker 1: 12:07

Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUsecom, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. See where thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is Not that Hard.