Legit Guest Blog Post Leads To Google Manual Action

Over the previous few days the web optimization trade has been chattering it up about how a web site acquired a Google Search guide motion for unnatural hyperlinks for a “legit visitor weblog” publish. However once you look, this guide motion solely affected “some pages,” not the entire web site.

Area of interest Website Woman posted on X, “Google hit me with a guide motion for ‘unnatural hyperlinks’. I by no means purchased a hyperlink. The instance they gave was a legit visitor publish from years in the past (I’ve solely ever carried out about 5 of those).” She shared this screenshot of this guide motion:

I discovered it fascinating that somebody acquired a guide motion for hyperlinks, as a result of I not often see individuals posting about these guide actions anymore on social.

However most individuals discovered it fascinating {that a} “legit visitor weblog publish” resulted on this guide motion. Fact is, she did say she solely did like 5 of those within the historical past of her web site. You’d assume 5 wouldn’t end in a guide motion.

In any occasion, Marie Haynes, who did a ton of guide motion restoration tasks again within the day, dug into this:

She wrote, and I am going to quote:

I have not reviewed this guide motion case however it’s actually fascinating to me.

Here is why.

NSL acquired a guide motion for unnatural hyperlinks. She says she has no paid hyperlinks, only a small handful of visitor posts.

From 2013 to 2017 or so, all I did was take away guide actions. A whole bunch of them.

At one level I employed 20 of my buddies and all of us sat in my eating room manually auditing hyperlinks one after the other nonstop. Our aim was to categorise them in order that we might make methods and determine what it’s that Google needed eliminated.

In 2013 the hyperlinks that have been inflicting guide actions have been the kind Google is nice at ignoring at the moment… Key phrase anchored hyperlinks in directories like ‘BestLinkDirectory’, and Ezine Article sort websites. Keep in mind ArticlesBase?

Then ultimately we noticed no extra guide actions with hyperlinks like that as a result of Google’s programs discovered neutralize them.

Subsequent, we noticed a wave of websites being penalized seemingly due to widget hyperlinks. Like, here is a device you possibly can embed, and by the way in which, it hyperlinks again to our web site.

Once more, you do not see individuals constructing widget hyperlinks like we used to a decade in the past as a result of the algorithms discovered cease valuing them.

By 2020, the vast majority of websites we helped had in article hyperlinks that in the first place look look utterly pure. Whenever you see the patterns, it grew to become apparent that there was a sample of getting hyperlinks inserted in articles to govern rankings.

For the previous couple of years I’ve seen little or no speak of guide actions. Google nonetheless gave them out and infrequently individuals reached out to me however it wasn’t like earlier than.

This week I’ve heard of some instances of latest guide actions. If this one actually is for visitor publish hyperlinks (would not matter in the event that they have been paid, they have been made to govern rankings), then my guess is that we’re quickly going to see declines in rankings for a lot of websites which have thrived on visitor publish linking as Google programs get even higher at studying which hyperlinks actually symbolize suggestions.

Each time I write one thing about visitor publish hyperlinks, there are a ton of questions. For those who Google my title plus “visitor publish hyperlinks” I’ve written hundreds on this over time.

The arguments are often:

-They don’t seem to be unnatural if not paid. Actually, would you could have made these hyperlinks if not for the web optimization worth?

-I might simply level hyperlinks at my competitor then and get them penalized. The factor is, it is not the hyperlinks themselves that get websites penalized. It is the patterns which are according to constructing hyperlinks to govern rankings. Google has a few years of expertise in figuring out patterns of Hyperlink manipulation.

-Is not all hyperlink constructing unnatural then? It is not unnatural to inform individuals about your web site and invite them to hyperlink. The truth is, Google recommends it. The place it turns into an issue is when the motivation to hyperlink again is extra for web optimization functions than since you actually thought your viewers would discover this useful.

This caught the attention of Google’s John Mueller who responded on LinkedIn saying, “It has been a decade,” and linked to Matt Cutts, former Google search spam man, publish named The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO. John added, “the humorous factor is that alot of what Matt has stated a decade in the past nonetheless applies at the moment in terms of Google Search, would you agree with that?”

Principally, John is saying this was a part of some form of visitor weblog community, which isn’t what the blogger was saying about. I imply, that’s what Cutts spoke about in that weblog publish, how Google penalzied these guest blog networks. In 2014, Cutts additionally stated guest blogging is dead, stick a fork in it.

In any occasion, have you ever seen legit content material get hit by guide actions from Google?

Discussion board dialogue at X and LinkedIn.