[Build Backlinks Online] How Guest Bloggers are Sleepwalking Their Way into Penalties

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'How Guest Bloggers are
Sleepwalking Their Way into Penalties'


Posted by James Finlayson
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

How do you get links in a post-penguin world? For far too many the answer seems
to be, exclusively, guest posting. Today Im going to give you four reasons why I
think this tactic is as dangerous as those it replaced.

Note: Im not about to say that all guest posting is bad in the same way not
all directories are automatically spammy. Im also not about to say all guest
bloggers will be penalised. What I will do is point out the dangers of guest
posting as Google becomes increasingly intelligent; and what you can do to avoid
them.

Link Quality

Penguin really hurt sites that relied on low-quality links. Many have responded
by setting a minimum domain authority threshold when prospecting. To keep the
process efficient they then remove sites with a DA over a certain level seeing
these as less likely to accept content.

No new site owner ever sat down and thought hmm, well I best not link to
buybluewidgets.com today, my domain authoritys only 28 Ill wait a few months.
Equally, the reason Mashable's not linking to you isn't because your DA has yet
to hit a magical level. If you offer something of value links naturally come
from a huge variety of high, medium and low quality sites. High quality links
are rare naturally, thats part of what makes them so valuable, but they do
occur. As a result, a completely natural link portfolio looks something like
this:



Ive now started to see new sites, fresh out of a successful outreach campaign
whose link portfolio looks like this:



Theres little way that this could have occurred un-engineered and, if its
obvious to us then itll be obvious to Google too.

"Mass guest posting is dangerous because it creates an unnatural looking link
quality graph." [tweet]

Link Type

Conventional wisdom tells us that directories are bad, blogs are good and
academic links are amazing. Tools like Link Research Tools and Linkdex allow you
to break up your competitors links by type - if SEO tools can do this then so
can Google. I took a vertical at random and wasnt surprised to see this:




Its not unusual to find sites with a huge percentage of their links coming from
directories and these are sites we currently think of as having engaged in
low-quality link building. So your site proudly strides in to the market and
builds this profile:



Im not saying that you need to replicate the industry standard thats not going
to put you ahead of your competitors. I am saying A link profile made up of only
one type of link looks unnatural whatever those links are. [tweet]

Link Location

Google devalued footer links because theyre too easy to game. Google devalued
sidebar links because they were being purchased en masse. Are links in author
boxes next? When youre consistently relying on links in guest-post author boxes
youre building a very obvious footprint. Due to the author boxs proximity to the
author markup, relatively standard layout and positioning on the page it would
be incredibly easy for Google to algorithmically target them in the same way it
did sidebars and footers.

When a links in the middle of a post theres an assumption that its there
because its relevant. When a links in the author box its rarely there for the
benefit of the user its the writers payment for the post. Its a box in which
the author advertises themselves. So it could be argued the author box is a form
of paid advertisement. How long until Matt Cutts does a video saying those links
should be no-followed?

Thats all before you consider that the links in a box that gets skipped over by
readers. That means you can expect virtually no traffic from it. Wouldn't it be
better to be building links that drive traffic as well as rankings?

Anchor-text-heavy links in author boxes look fishy, even to non-marketers; lets
stop building them. [tweet]

Authorship

Googles really started to push authorship as an important signal. So, many
guest bloggers have used their own name (or repeatedly the same name) in each of
their guest posts to build up their authority. This has led to a great new form
of competitor link-building. If youre an agency, this creates a competitive
issue:



Whoever you are, this creates two other problems:


Your competitors can Google your name and easily find your link-building
efforts no SEO tool necessary.

Whichever domain youre building links to has a large number of their links
coming from a single author.


Every SEO knows how important domain diversity is; having a large number of
your links coming from a single author is the authorship version of putting them
all on the same domain. Assuming all other factors are equal (including average
link quality), which of these do you think Google would be likely to rank more
highly:



In real life its natural to assume a company that has lots of people talking
about it is more important than one nobody's heard of - that has very few people
mentioning it; shouldnt Google follow the same principal with linking authors?

Lets assume Google gets smarter still. On your Google profile theres a nice box
for you to enter your employment history. What if Google used that data to make
a graph similar to this?



Search engines see links as an indicator of quality because theyre essentially
recommendations. If most of a companys recommendations are coming from its own
employees would you trust them? Youd probably just ignore those recommendations.
What if Google decided to discount all links created by a companys own
employees? Simpler still, what if Google decided to ignore all links created by
SEOs where those links are in articles that arent talking about SEO? Googles
collecting all this data now, why wouldnt it use it?

One person authoring the majority of your links looks like link building
because it is. [tweet]

Fundamentally, this all comes back to Dr Petes Top 1 SEO Tips For 2013
diversify. Each of the issues is a problem of oversimplifying the link building
process. Im convinced that taking a holistic view to inbound marketing not only
provides the highest ROI, but will increasingly become the only safe way to
aggressively grow a companys reach online.

Takeaways:


Dont rely on any one type of site for a majority of your links; build links of
all types into your plans.

Be aware of the quality of links you're building, but make sure to keep the
overall portfolio looking natural.

Don't use a single author for all your content - vary it between different,
real, people. When using external writers, use their authorship to help further
vary the mix.

Split up different parts of a clients campaign between different team members;
that way there should naturally be a slightly different approach applied across
the clients links.

Oversimplifying a link building process may make it faster, but the footprint
it generates also makes it riskier.


Have you begun to scale back, or even phase-out, guest posting? Let me know in
the comments below.
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