Two days ago, Thursday, May 25, 2017, Google published a blog post reminding webmasters about the dangers of using large-scale article campaigns as a link building strategy.

In short, doing article publishing or guest blogging for the sole purpose of link building and attempting to manipulate Google’s search results can result in a Google penalty. These penalties can negatively affect your website’s overall ranking; while in other cases Google will simply ignore the links.

Google outlined the following factors that could indicate a violation of their guidelines:

● Stuffing keyword-rich links to your site in your articles
● Having the articles published across many different sites; alternatively, having a large number of articles on a few large, different sites
● Using or hiring article writers that aren’t knowledgeable about the topics they’re writing on
● Using the same or similar content across these articles; alternatively, duplicating the full content of articles found on your own site (in which case use of rel=”canonical”, in addition to rel=”nofollow”, is advised)

We should point out that this kind of comment from Google is not new. The search giant has been warning of this kind of low-quality article marketing since the beginning of the decade.

But many are now expecting mass manual actions to follow the blog post. This would involve Google disavowing links from low quality articles by hand and could potentially impact thousands of websites.

From our SEO department

First, the focus as we see it is on those using content marketing on a “large Scale”. That said, we also see this as an area of SEO abused by many and do consider this a warning worth a strong consideration by webmasters and SEO’s. Based upon the direction that we see Google taking, we do see this to provide a need for added caution, and a real consideration for posting quality content and most important, “geared toward providing real value to your readers”.

Best advice, “Don’t post just to post”.

You can read the official post made by “Google Webspam Team here:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/05/a-reminder-about-links-in-large-scale.html