How Traditional Guest Blogging Practices Will Change After Next Major Penguin Update

The most popular way of building back links right now is guest blogging. Why is it so popular? Simple, it’s so effective at driving up keyword rankings – when it’s done consistently and when those guest posts are published on authoritative domains that are relevant.

It’s been in the back of my mind for some time now, actually since the first iteration of the Google Penguin update, that guest blogging may become a target of Google. I believe that guest blogging will still continue to be effective after the next major Penguin update, however the way in which you build links through guest blogging will change.

This is how I think guest bloggers will be impacted:

Devaluation of Websites
Sites that have the majority of their outbound links pointing at a single website will eventually be tagged with a penalty. Google likes it best when you link to lots of different websites that are authoritative. When you write, find ways to naturally work those types of links into your content.
Websites that do not create pages that have substantial content or that create non-relevant content are going to be tagged with a penalty. If they aren’t tagged with a penalty then at the very least the links within their content won’t pass much authority or weight.

Bloggers who make a habit of regularly publishing non-relevant links and content together will have their blogs significantly devalued.

When you research your list of potential candidate websites to guest blog for, you want to short list those that do not link to low quality websites and that are very relevant to the site you intend to have linked to within the post you will write for them. Don’t be afraid to link out within your guest blog post to other sites which you have no vested interest in but that offer value to the reader or contribute significantly to the content of your post.

Devaluation of Back Links
Using a keyword rich text link in the first paragraph of your guest blog post? Those links will likely carry less weight soon.

Rehashing older previously published content and re-publishing it with embedded links? Those types of links will also not carry as much weight in future. They’ve already lost some value over the past year. This trend will continue.

The links that you acquire within the author bio section of your guest blog posts no longer carry the same weight as they did previously. In future it is possible and likely that those links will offer even less weight and value than they currently do. Google will be a lot more selective about whose links receive more or less weight.

Don’t waste your time with techniques that allow you to easily and quickly acquire links in bunches. Put more emphasis on building value into the content you create. Creating fantastic content will garner links from people that naturally want to link to your content. If that sounds like deja vu to you, that’s because you’ve probably been told this numerous times before.

The Rise of Co-occurrence As a Ranking Factor
Traditional signals that influence rankings: keyword placement, anchor text, links and authority – have long been a staple practice when trying to get a website to rank high. Over the past several years there’s been a trend of citations emerging to improve local rankings and to date I think that we’re witnessing more co-occurrence of words, phrases and links within search queries and textual content having more of an influence in rankings. Anchor text will likely still play an important role and provide signals but soon Google will be looking at links and anchor text in a totally different way.

You can see examples of co-occurrence in play anytime you look through a Google results page for a query and find sites ranking high without the presence of authoritative links, relevant anchor text back links, the search query in the HTML title and a sprinkling of query occurrences in the document body.

In a very brief way it can be explained that co-occurrence is about the presence and frequency of terms that tend to co-occur on the same pages without being hyperlinked. The concept of co-occurrence and the theory behind how it works and how Google may be using it is extensive. More extensive than what we are covering here in this post. Here’s a better and more in-depth explanation of what co-occurrence is.
Your take away from this: Don’t think it always necessary to link back to your website from inside of your guest blog post. Create useful and engaging content that educates readers. You can make a mention of your company without hyperlinking to your company, if it’s appropriate to do so. Rarely is it appropriate to mention your company in a guest blog post outside of the author bio section, unless you’re linking to content that substantially adds knowledge and support to your guest post.

Author Rank
Author rank is Google’s way of seeing where on the web you publish your content. If you stick to a regular schedule of publishing fantastic content then Google will soon begin placing more authority and weight on your content.

Conversely, if you continuously publish low quality fluff and filler content Google will be tracking that too and you’ll find many of the links in those types of content devalued in time, regardless if your content is published on a high authority domain or not. In short, Google won’t just be devaluing websites and links, but also devaluing authors too.

Going forward you need to be very choosy with the content that you publish. If you want to learn how to write good quality content read this post. Personally, when I write a piece of content I’ll often hammer out my thoughts into a document, save it and then come back to it in 24 hours and refine my message. I edit with two criteria in mind:
Does this content make sense from start to finish or does it sound confusing?Am I providing significant value to the reader or am I about to publish a piece of rubbish?Social Media Signals

Most of you will know that the more often your content is shared, voted on and liked socially the better that content may perform in Google. While this has been the case for some time now, some content creators, publishers and website owners have been gaming the system by paying people and organizations to create social shares, votes and likes in mass quantities for their content.

What’s likely to happen after the next major Penguin update rolls out is that Google will probably pay less attention to the volume of social shares and pay more attention to who is sharing that content. If your content is shared socially by a person with a network of 300 or 400 influencers following their social media accounts, that will likely have more weight in Google than if your content were shared by a person with 50,000 to 100,000 bot created social media accounts. If this isn’t the case presently you can bet it will be soon.
It’s also probable that Google will look at your own social media accounts to determine if you are sharing your own guest posts on your own social accounts.

Write content that you wouldn’t mind having your name associated with, content that you’d have no problem sharing on your own social profiles.
Start building relationships with influencers who have a large following on their social profiles. If your content is worth sharing then those relationships you’ve built will come in handy and they may decide to share your content with their followers when you write a great post and ask them to share it.

In Summary
Some of the things that I predicted above may not in fact take place when the next major Penguin update rolls out, however they will likely be a part of Google’s algorithm in the near future.
How many other ways do you think traditional guest blogging practices will need to change after the next major Penguin update rolls out?

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Google’s Disavow Tool: Is This the Answer to the Penguin Update?

Finally, it has arrived…on October 17, Google released their long awaited disavow tool. If you have been affected by the Penguin updates you may have been waiting with anticipation for this to arrive. But is it the answer to our dreams – will it really get our sites back and ranking again? Let’s find out.

What is the Google Disavow Links Tool?
For those that don’t know, the Google Penguin updates targeted websites with poor quality links or those that overused the same keyword in their anchor text. Both of these, we suspect, were what happened with our sites. We had used blogging networks in the past and they only generate poor quality links and in the early days we did tend to overuse the same anchor text a little too much when backlinking.
Okay, so fair enough, we did a few no-no’s in the eyes of Google and we got slapped on the wrist for it. However, the problem with those Penguin updates is that:

1. It made it very difficult for anyone who was affected to fix their websites. Just try emailing hundreds or even thousands of website owners to ask them to remove your links from their website.

2. It made it too easy for a competitor to get someone elses sites penalized by simply generating hundreds of poor quality links to their site. This got everyone riled up because although Google denied it we all knew that it was possible, and it was happening. Many webmasters were even testing it on their own sites to see if they could get them penalized and yes they could.

So, because of the number of complaints they received from irate webmasters, Google listened and they have now provided a disavow tool that allows us to ignore specific backlinks to our websites.

The Official Google Word
Here is a video from Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) explaining how the disavow tool works.

So what Matt is saying in the video above is that you only need to load up a text file with a list of the websites you want removed and low and behold (after a few weeks) those sites will be ignored. Simple right?  Well if it is so simple, why does Matt Cutts reiterate a number of times that not many people should need to use this tool? It’s almost like he wants to scare us away from using it. Why?
Just take a look at what Google has to say about it on their Webmaster Tools blog:

“This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.”

I love the last sentence, “In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust with additional guidance..”. If that’s the case, why do we even need such a tool?…more on that later.
How Does the Disavow Tool Work?
These are the steps for using the disavow tool:
Step 1: Assess the Links
The first thing you need to do is find the sites that are linking to you so you can determine which ones you want to disavow. You can do this using your own keyword tool or you can use Google Webmaster Tools (instructions below)
1. Login to Webmaster Tools.
2. Click on the site you want to assess.
3. Click on Traffic
from the right menu.
4. Click on Links to Your Site
.
5. Click the More
link under section titled ‘Who links the most’
6. Click Download this table
.
Step 2: Create a Text File
This step involves creating a text file that will list all of the domain urls that you want to disavow.
1. Open up Notepad or other text based editor and add one link per line in the following formats:
To ignore an entire domain use: To ignore a page from a domain use: http://spammerswebsite.com/page-1.htm
So your text page might look like this:
domain: thespammywebsite.com
http://spammerswebsite.com/page-1.htm
2. Save the file to your computer.
Step 3: Upload List of Links
1. Go to the Disavow Links Tool page.
2. Login to Webmaster Tools if you haven’t already done so.
3. You will now see the Disavow Links box.

4. Select the website from the drop-down box and click the Disavow Links button.
5. You will see a big warning message from Google. Just click the Disavow Links button.Again you will see another warning message from Google…hmm, why do they need to keep warning us??
6. Click Choose File and find the text file you just created and click Submit. And your done!

Why Do We Need This Tool in the First Place?
Although I appreciate this tool being made available I am left wondering why we even need it. The tool lets us tell Google to ignore spammy or poor quality links but why can’t Google just ignore them to begin with? Google can pick a spammy site can’t it? I mean, if they don’t know the difference between a poor quality site and a high quality site by now, then they really need to reassess the system.
So what it essentially means is that you, the web owner, needs to determine what you consider to be poor quality links or not. But how do you do that? Do you look at the page rank of the page? Is that really an indication of the quality of the site.

Take a look at the pagerank of the site you are looking at right now. Do you see the pagerank – it’s a big fat zero. Why?…because in Google’s infinite wisdom they decided that the site doesn’t meet their quality guidelines. I have no idea what that means because we have never bothered to actively backlink to the site and we can’t see any other reason for the penalty.  (At one point, we started to backlink but we stopped pretty quickly and didn’t bother after that)

We have asked them what the exact problem is but we keep getting back the same old email in Google Webmaster Tools which tells us absolutely nothing:

We’ve reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines.
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google’s search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines.
If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines.

Funnily enough, the sites that we have backlinked to aggressively in the past, received no such message in Google Webmaster Tools.

We have given up trying and just continue to add content. It’s a bit hard to change something when you have no idea what the problem actually is.

So figuring out what site is considered  poor quality, a spammers site, or one that doesn’t meet Google’s guidelines is really a subjective thing. Who knows if a site we tell Google to disavow is actually okay or not?

Have We Used the Disavow Tool?
Not yet, but we will. Whenever something new is released by Google, we always like to let the dust settle before taking action. The other problem we have is finding the time but that’s another story.
We want to get our sites ranking like they used to so it will be interesting to see if the disavow tool actually works.

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