Google Warns Over Spammy Links in "Large Scale Article Campaigns"

[engine]

Google has seen an up-tick of spammy links in articles, which it describes as "contributor posts, guest posts, partner posts, or syndicated posts."

Google points to its Guidelines on link schemes [support.google.com...] where the "main intent is to build links in any large scale way back to the authors site."

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)

According to Google's latest post on this, if it detects such tactics "it'll change Google's perception of the quality of the site and could affect its ranking."

In other words, if we catch you creating links for link sake, don't be surprised if you get a slap in the SERPs.

[tangor]

Until the slap is actually delivered, the bad actors will keep doing what they are doing. Time will tell if this becomes effective at modifying this behavior.

[glitterball]

Using or hiring article writers that aren’t knowledgeable about the topics they’re writing on

Lol, i nearly fell onto the floor laughing at that one. If that's the case mainstream newspapers will be gone from the SERPS in the near future.

[Cyclops888]

I think I may have been hit by this new update? I have a lot of high quality links from articles like Entrepreneur, businessdaily, Americanexpress, Manta etc... but a lot of these articles were re-posted by other low quality sites with do-follow links. I did not build those looks they were earned by contributing to the article. I am assuming this is the reason why I was hit so severely this past two weeks.

[tangor]

This is one g will have to tread carefully, or just use the shotgun approach (which I suspect will be used).

You write an article. To be bad in the above you'd also keyword stuff it beyond reasonable.

You write an article and share it with other sites, also keyword stuffed, but also linked back to your site beyond reasonable.

You article has been scraped by bad actors who also do follow your links/site, and they will always be beyond reasonable.

There will be no winners in this as regards the g hammer wrath which appears to be yet another attempt at addressing PBN, duplicate content on steroids, keyword stuffing (breaking ordinary metrics) and other minor maladies tainting an honest serp.

As the web matures, and bad actors escalate, even the good guys playing by the rules might get caught in this update as collateral damage.

Meanwhile, keyword stuffing is so 1990s no one should be doing it EVER. Clean up your site (if you are anally obsessive regrading keywords in content and links/urls) to avoid some of the fallout.

I can't give a metric of "how many" is "too many", but I can say your gut will generally provide a clue.

OR IT IS QUITE POSSIBLE....

That I didn't get it. :)

[keyplyr]

Even more important to police that your articles/content is not being duplicated at some remote location. Often times your pages are scraped with insite linking all included.

[tangor]

The lazy bums! Then again most thieves are lazy .... it's all about the quick bucks and moving on when that site gets burned. After all, there's a billion other sites to scrape!

[jmccormac]

Laughable stuff from the folks in Animal Farm as usual. It seems that their algo is still heavily based on links and no matter how far they wander down the yellow brick road of AI, they can't even solve simple link problems because they've drunk the AI Koolaid. Google used to be a good search engine once. Now it is hard to find decent results.

Regards...jmcc

[waynne]

Sounds like the war on spammy links will also hit press releases. It's a shame because there are legitimate reasons for issuing a press release and not all give a nofollow option, these are then replicated very widely across news outlets.

So to destroy your competition just send out some press releases on their behalf with dofollow links containing the keyword we want them to lose a position for!