The other day, I covered a poll that showed about half of SEOs still use guest posting for SEO purposes. Then a few days later, an SEO asked John Mueller about something and John told him that the guest post links should be nofollowed, and the SEO was shocked.
It just seems to me, that many SEOs, maybe more than half, have no idea that links in guest posts should be nofollowed according to Google.
The thread was on Mastodon where the SEO wrote “Because I do guest posting, and sometimes random sites link to me, which I don’t like. So there is no such thing as ‘too many’ dofollow backlinks?”
John replied “TBH (to be honest) the guest-posting part is the part that I’d worry about more — if you’re doing that, you should take care that the guest-post links are nofollow.”
To which the SEO was shocked, he said “Oh really? Why is that? Because I have a lot of guest posts, have put a lot of effort into that. And all are dofollow. I didn’t know that… Yesterday saw a huge drop in positions, so maybe Google doesn’t value my website anymore because of too many dofollow backlinks guest posts?”
John then replied “Yes, we mention guest posts for links in our spam policies.” John added “From my point of view, they’re essentially links that you’re placing on other sites yourself, so they should not be seen as natural links. Using nofollow there to drive traffic & visibility of your site is fine, but it’s more like an ad than a natural link. Our systems work to detect & neutralize these, or if they’re a big problem, we may take stronger action.”
After posting that poll last week, the comments I saw from SEOs saying these guest posts can have dofollows but those cannot or saying Google doesn’t mean what they said, was rampant. Of course, you always have the SEOs who say, “well it works, so I am doing it” and they know it is against the guidelines, they think it works, and do it anyway.
Anyway, I think the issue is that most SEOs just think this is a legit SEO tactic when Google has said countless times it is not. Maybe the spam policies document needs to be more clear about it? Not that people will read them anyway?
Forum discussion at Mastodon.
