Google has issued a warning about building links in a spammy way using guest posts.
The “reminder”, which was posted to its Webmasters blog, warns against violating Google’s link guidelines by building links in a “large-scale” way back to the author’s site.
The warning comes because Google has noticed an increase in spammy links in articles referred to as contributor posts, guest posts, partner posts, or syndicated posts.
While the company does not advise against publishing these types of guest posts, it has warned against taking a few factors to the “extreme”.
These include stuffing keyword-rich links to your site in your articles, having the articles published across many different sites, or having a large number of articles on a few large, different sites.
It also warns against hiring writers who aren’t knowledgable about the topics they are writing on, and using the same or similar type of content across these articles.
Google also advises against duplicating the full content of articles found on your own site, and says that in this case, users should “use of rel=”canonical”, in addition to rel=”nofollow”“.
If a website is found to be publishing articles with spammy links, it could affect its ranking and Google’s perception of the quality of the site.
The Google Webspam Team explains this stance: “When link building comes first, the quality of the articles can suffer and create a bad experience for users.
“Also, webmasters generally prefer not to receive aggressive or repeated “Post my article!” requests, and we encourage such cases to be reported to our spam report form.
“And lastly, if a link is a form of endorsement, and you’re the one creating most of the endorsements for your own site, is this putting forth the best impression of your site?”
Read more here.