Hi, Sad Dawson here. Now link building has always been and continues to be a crucial part of the SEO jigsaw that you need to build authority and drive rankings in Google. And with the emergence of AI-based search like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, the importance of links in getting your site cited in responses means that link building becomes of even greater importance. So I've grouped together all the best episodes of the podcast that touch on link building into a series dedicated to all the many strategies and tactics you can use to get more links to your content. So let's get on to the podcast. Hello and welcome to episode 66 of It's Not That Hard. I'm your host, Ed Dawson, the founder of KiwisPeopleuse.com, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. I'm an affiliate marketer, SEO, and I've been building and monetising 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. Guest posting is when an author on a website, often the website owner, posts content on another website, so guest posts on the other site, and includes a link or link backs 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. This means that Google, if you're going to do guest posting, it should be purely for the um promotional side of getting yourself in front of another audience and maybe getting people to follow the link, uh 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. Um 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 from the promotional purpose. Um, 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 the rule that they work to. Now, the reason I bring up the guest posting and how it can go wrong is because um there's a uh person called Niche Sight Lady who's at Niche Site Lady on Twitter, um, who's very prominent um niche site um website builder, and she's very open about the amount of money she's been making from her websites, and she's making over$70,000 a month currently, and she's just been hit with a manual link penalty for unnatural links. And um she says, like I'll put a link to the um threads on Twitter in the in the um in the show notes so you can see what see what's what's been said. You know, she says, you know, 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 the other gave when 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 disastrous 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. Now I've I know niche site lady, I've met her in real life at um 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 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 with to start with, and I think they've just decided, and they're probably it might be that they're gonna start cracking down on guest post links that are followed, that they're gonna mark all these kind of links as manipulative. Um, 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 gonna see you as being manipulative. Um, but Marie Haynes actually um came onto this thread in Twitter, she she reposted it and gave some comments. Now, Marie's very well known in the SU industry for doing lots of work with um people who have had um manual action penalties or uh algorithmic penalties from Google and getting them getting those penalties removed for them. Um so it's quite an interesting voice to have in on this one. Now, Marie spot quite an interesting conversation on this um example that Nish site lady gave and also sort of um examples of manipulative link building uh in in particular. Uh, and I actually got involved in a few a few sort of 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 provide content in return for a link, then that's clearly whether whether the money changes hands or not, you are between the two sites working out an arrangement that is effectively link manipulation. Now, if you had um 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 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 having conversations with them individually and asking them or telling them what they must or 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 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. So you can see a situation where it might be really powerful to actually pay for some guest posts on real high-profile sites to have a lot of traffic and make sure that the 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 the feature that you've got or whatever the 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 the 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 made that decision. So you've promoted the content, you've promoted the page that you want linked to, for example, but then it's up to other people if they write about it. If they write about it off their own back with um no um 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 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 gonna annoy 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 back by Google Penguin um over about 12 years ago now. Um, and you know, I made a conscious decision back then that I was gonna do link building differently, um, which is to work on creating fantastic content and tools that people will actually link to naturally. So, why do we think that Nishite Lady's been hit with this manual um penalty? Now, obviously, a manual penalty means someone's at Google's actually gone and looked at this and marked it manually. That's the that's the difference between a manual manual penalty and an algorithmic penalty. Algorithmic penalties are ones that they they've got code and the crawlers, and you know, when they're doing the the ranking, they 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 battling 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 uh you know one of their systems. Now, Nissite Lady has got a lot of followers. She's got uh 66,000 followers on Twitter, she's got a mailing list of 17,000 plus people, and this the the um tweet where she announced that she'd been hit with this penalty. I don't at the time of me recording this, has got over a hundred thousand 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 that they know if they hit is going to probably talk about it and raise the issue amongst the rest of the Danish side community. So I think there's an element here where she's been picked on because of her profile. Um, so which shows the risks of sometimes if you overshare that there can be risks because you putting your head above the parapet, you make you make yourself a target, and I think that's what's happened in this case potentially. Um hard to prove, um, but it is a bit weird that they've they have picked on it, and you know, as I say, I I don't see her having ever done much wrong, and I 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 um whether she'll share more on this. Um, 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. Thanks for being a listener, I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share, it really helps. SGO is not that hard, it's bought by keywordspeopleuse.com. The solution to finding the questions people ask online. See where thousands of people use us every day, try it today for free at keywordspeopleuse.com. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at Channel5 on Twitter, or you can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleuse.com. Bye for now, and see you in the next episode of SGO Is Not That Hard.