Matt Cutts: Guest Blogging for SEO is Over

[jackxin]

Are you accepting or request guest blog posts ? Matt Cutts confirmed in a tweet "we’re taking action on hundreds of buyers, dozens of sites, & dozens of spammy writers," in reference to a blogs bribing investigation.

There is a new case going on with extensive investigation on customers, marketing agencies and bloggers taking money to manipulate search engine rankings.

[twitter.com...]
[mattcutts.com...]

Matt Cutt's announcement should make most of this bloggers think twice before accepting paid guest posting and marketing firms stop bribing them if they care about SERPs.

[edited by: brotherhood_of_LAN at 10:14 pm (utc) on Jan 20, 2014]
[edit reason] added MC article [/edit]

[zeus]

Bounce rate is not used in my opinion. I also had a site where the bounce rate was 85%, now 42% no change in rankings at all. I would also not say that the site is better now, changes was made be cause of google, you know these days we have to make a site for search engines.

[rish3]

Paid click percentages have increased by double digits in almost every quarterly report from G...clearly at the expense of organic referrals.

Even if that were true, it would be true only for search queries (such as "transactional" or e-commerce queries) that lend themselves to advertising.

"Even if that were true". It's not up for debate...it's in their quarterly reports. Or perhaps you mean "at the expense of organic"? In that case, I'm curious how the percentage of paid clicks goes up without affecting organic.

As for it affecting only commercial queries. Sure. They have other new widgets to push down the organic results for non-commercial queries. You know, the "Knowledge Graph", "One Box", etc.

[CaptainSalad2]

@Edguy

Return to search" is likely to be a more useful metric, because a high rate of going back to search and clicking on other results

I never did understand websites that used that annoying JS script that prevents the back button working, now I do.

I hope that isn't a signal they put much faith in as JS has prevented me using the back button MANY times and using the URI to get back becomes the only option (or disable JS).


It’s a bit easy to manipulate to put much weight into don’t you think?

[trakkerguy]

If they used "return to search" as a big factor in the algo, couldn't they just check if sites disable the back button to stop that method of manipulation?

[EditorialGuy]

If they used "return to search" as a big factor in the algo, couldn't they just check if sites disable the back button to stop that method of manipulation?

If I were Google, I'd regard such disabling of the back button as a signal of low quality, since:

1) It takes away from the user experience, and...

2) It suggests that the site owner believes that users won't stick around unless they're trapped on the site.

[CaptainSalad2]

If I were Google, I'd regard such disabling of the back button as a signal of low quality, since:

If you were Google hopefully you would know that it wouldn't be hard for a semi competent server side programmer to detect the G bot and deliver the same content with the "JS back button disable" script omitted, and therefore not apply any ranking weight to something easier to manipulate than a dofollow backlink is to gain these days.

[aristotle]

EditorialGuy wrote:
I sometimes see awful sites ranking high in the SERPs because they have a domain name like [cityname].nu.

People are always complaining about Google giving high rankings to "awful sites", but as far as I know, complaining here doesn't do any good. Is there any way to make Google aware of this problem?

[EditorialGuy]

People are always complaining about Google giving high rankings to "awful sites", but as far as I know, complaining here doesn't do any good.

I wasn't complaining. Read what I said in context.

Is there any way to make Google aware of this problem?

Look for the "Send feedback" link on the bottom of each Google SERP.

[aristotle]

I wasn't complaining

I read your whole paragraph about the matter, and somehow still got the impression that you were complaining. In any case, are you saying that it doesn't bother you when you see awful sites ranking high in the SERPs?

Look for the "Send feedback" link on the bottom of each Google SERP.

I used to use that feedback link occasionally to report hacked sites and parked pages that were ranking near the top of the SERPs, but gave up because my efforts never produced any results.

[EditorialGuy]

I read your whole paragraph about the matter, and somehow still got the impression that you were complaining.

Nope. I was making an observation.

I used to use that feedback link occasionally to report hacked sites and parked pages that were ranking near the top of the SERPs, but gave up because my efforts never produced any results.

Awareness and action are two different things. :-)

[aristotle]

Nope. I was making an observation.

So if you don't feel a need to complain about it, then I'll repeat my other question: Are you saying that it doesn't bother you when you see "awful sites" ranking high in the SERPs?

[EditorialGuy]

Aristotle, of course I don't like seeing awful sites ranking high in the SERPs. Does anyone, except the owners of the awful sites?

(Whatever happened to the topic of this thread, by the way? Does no one else have anything to contribute on the topic of "guest blogging for SEO"?)