14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s war on poor quality content has been raging on for a while now, and the company has been taxing sites that are guilty of this by making them vanish from search results or downranking them.
For the past few months, Google has been sure to make it clear that it doesn’t really appreciate guest blogging, a practice that has turned into an SEO technique rather than a way to bring people new content from new writers.
Now, the company has updated its webmaster guidelines, as spotted by SEO consultant Brian Ussery. Google’s list of examples of things that will make it downrank a site used to include “autogenerated content,” “doorway pages,” “scraped content” and “thin affiliate sites.”
Now, the “scraped content” part has been extended to include a mention to “low-quality guest blog posts.”
There’s no explanation as to what Google is referring to, but it doesn’t really need to, especially after all the discussion on the topic in recent months and the clear stance adopted by the company towards such practices, especially when done for the sake of SEO.
Back in January, Matt Cutts, the chief of the webspam team, wrote a blog and told everyone to “stick a fork in it” because guest blogging was done due to too much spam.
“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company,” Cutts said at the time.
The whole thing happened after Cutts himself received a spam email offering money to get links that passed PageRank, which is a clear violation of Google’s quality guidelines.
While he admits the trend was nice in the beginning, it has ended up as a practice with only the barest trace of legitimacy and there’s only a downward spiral from here on out. While not all guest blogging is bad, nowadays it seems that a good part of it is.
Not long after this, Google took down a platform handling such content, saying that the measure was a reminder about the spam risks of guest blogging. Publishers were penalized in the process, but it is quite likely that the threats didn’t stick, which pushed Google to make things official and edit the webmaster guidelines.
