Backlinks From Guest Blogs: Nobody is safe, not even Moz!

[Eric Rohrback]

Letter to Google... From Rand Fishkin

Check out this post from Rand which calls out Google for calling Moz links unnatural. I know it's not 100% about Local, but it's going to be great to watch how this plays out. Rand mentioned starting to push Google more and more about some of their practices while at MozCon and this looks like the first step... hopefully in the right direction to benefit the masses.

 

[HurricaneK8]

I was shocked to read this article this morning: Dear Google, Links from YouMoz Don't Violate Your Quality Guidelines - Moz

Apparently Google has decided that links from bloggers on Moz (a highly authoritative source on Internet Marketing) are unnatural. Through talks with Google, the blogger whose website got dinged with a penalty found out that Google wants to see guest blog links nofollowed.

Interestingly enough, I had read the article that linked to his website. It was a great article, ironically titled Build Relationships, Not Links.

I fear that the SEO community is going to become closed off due to this, as there's little reward for sharing information and writing thoughtful blog posts, researching, analyzing data, etc. if Google is going to give you a penalty for it. I really hope this was a mistake on Googles part, and not a plan to get communities to stop sharing information. They've come under fire alot recently, seeing as the outrage from removing authorship photos & claiming it wont effect CTR is just starting to sizzle down.

So now I have these thoughts:
Are we on the edge of a revolution? Is the SEO community a big enough to force to push Google to change their opaque guidelines and start paying attention? Or are they just so big that we have to play by their rules, no matter how ridiculous they are?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Re: Letter to Google... From Rand Fishkin

Thanks Eric, I think it's a great fit since anything SEO these days also affects Local.

Thanks Kate, Eric had already posted so merged these 2 threads together.

Rand makes so many good points.

Thanks for sharing you two!

Although Kate, I'm questioning that link to the article with the anchor text "article".

 

[HurricaneK8]

The comment from Marie Haynes is a great tidbit of insight!

...the webspam team didn't go through each link and say, "Ah, this is a link from Moz. This is bad." Instead, they picked out the patterns that they could see and chose some examples from there. Perhaps guest posting on a large scale for links was a pattern. Perhaps excessive link exchanges were a pattern.

What we do in cases like this is keep the ones that we know for certain were natural mentions but we are sure to remove or disavow the self made ones. In every case we have been able to get our penalty lifted despite keeping these example links.

Sometimes I get more from the comments than the article itself!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Kate, didn't have time to read comments on this one but I agree.
Oftentimes the best tidbits are found there.

Marie is the 1st person I ever trained in Local and now specializes in organic penalty recovery.
She really knows her stuff!

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Re: Letter to Google... From Rand Fishkin

I just read the post and all the comments. Unbelievably insightful. I won't even pretend that I have more to add. Go read that post AND the comments.