Why you should be very careful in allowing guest post to your Blog?

HOW A GUEST POST CAN MAKE YOUR BLOG DISAPPEAR FROM SEARCH ENGINES?

Once I was searching for some ideas to make backlinks. I found many articles who were advising to use guest posting as a tool to make backlinks. And I was very passionate about this. But recently I found an article on Searchengineland which told a story of Mr. Doc Sheldon’s blog. According to Searchengineland Mr. Doc Sheldon’s Blog was punished for just a single guest post which was really a shocking discovery for me.

I was more shocked when I heard that Mr. Sheldon is a SEO expert himself. But he was still penalized by Google because he was found guilty for making unnatural links as you can see below:

Google doesn’t appear to have shown what any of these unnatural links are, in order to give Sheldon a clue about what the exact problem was that hurt his entire site. So, Mr. Sheldon made a news letter which he tweeted to Matt Cutts (Head of Google Anti Spam Department). In reply Matt Cutts made a tweet.

@DocSheldon what “Best Practices For Hispanic Social Networking” has to do with an SEO copywriting blog? Manual webspam notice was on point.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 24, 2014

According to Searchengineland; Matt was referring to a guest post that was published on March 2013.

Mr. Doc Sheldon after Matt’s tweet replied again and again. He kept asking Matt that do a single post can cost a penalty for a whole Blog.

@mattcutts So we can take this to mean that just that one link was the justification for a sitewide penalty? THAT sure sends a message! 😉

— DocSheldon (@DocSheldon) March 25, 2014

Unfortunately, Matt didn’t respond to Mr. Doc Sheldon’s replies. According to some SEO gurus the problem was the anchor text in the guest post. The anchor text is shown below in the image.

But what mistake Mr. Sheldon did was that he allowed a highly keyword rich anchor text in the post which makes Google convinced that the post was just made for SEO purpose instead of educating people.

If we examine Matt’s tweet we can easily find that Mr. Sheldon’s Blog was penalized Manually, I repeat Manually not automatically by a system or those algorithms. It was a manual penalty by Google. You can find it on the image too which I have shared just before.

According to Searchengineland Mr. Doc Sheldon was penalized because he himself runs a SEO advising website on whom Google puts some extra attention. So when they break rules they pay more than any other webmaster.

But for websites who aren’t related to the SEO niche, Manual penalties will not be a big threat because Google engineers don’t give as much attention as they give to SEO copyrighting websites. But it doesn’t mean that making those highly keyword rich anchor texts are safe. So make sure that in any guest post you do not allow the author to post such highly keyword rich anchor texts in articles. The main reason is that Google spiders follow anchor texts as a referral link and it becomes more worst if they are do-follow links. So Google spiders might follow those links and if they find the domain, article, keywords and metas the exact match of the anchor text, then the may penalize the Blog which was referring to the Website. In Mr. Sheldon’s case Hispanic Data Social Networking.

P.S: Thanks for reading “Why you should be very careful in allowing guest post to your Blog?”. You can read more about Mr. Meldon penalty on “Searchengineland”