The opposite day, I coated a ballot that confirmed about half of SEOs nonetheless use visitor posting for website positioning functions. Then a couple of days later, an website positioning requested John Mueller about one thing and John instructed him that the visitor put up hyperlinks needs to be nofollowed, and the website positioning was shocked.
It simply appears to me, that many SEOs, possibly greater than half, don’t know that hyperlinks in visitor posts needs to be nofollowed in line with Google.
The thread was on Mastodon the place the website positioning wrote “As a result of I do visitor posting, and generally random websites hyperlink to me, which I don’t like. So there isn’t a such factor as ‘too many’ dofollow backlinks?”
John replied “TBH (to be trustworthy) the guest-posting half is the half that I might fear about extra — in the event you’re doing that, you need to take care that the guest-post hyperlinks are nofollow.”
To which the website positioning was shocked, he stated “Oh actually? Why is that? As a result of I’ve loads of visitor posts, have put loads of effort into that. And all are dofollow. I didn’t know that… Yesterday noticed an enormous drop in positions, so possibly Google doesn’t worth my web site anymore due to too many dofollow backlinks visitor posts?”
John then replied “Sure, we point out visitor posts for hyperlinks in our spam insurance policies.” John added “From my viewpoint, they’re basically hyperlinks that you simply’re putting on different websites your self, so that they shouldn’t be seen as pure hyperlinks. Utilizing nofollow there to drive visitors & visibility of your web site is ok, but it surely’s extra like an advert than a pure hyperlink. Our techniques work to detect & neutralize these, or if they seem to be a massive drawback, we could take stronger motion.”
After posting that ballot final week, the feedback I noticed from SEOs saying these visitor posts can have dofollows however these can’t or saying Google doesn’t suggest what they stated, was rampant. In fact, you all the time have the SEOs who say, “properly it really works, so I’m doing it” and so they know it’s towards the rules, they suppose it really works, and do it anyway.
Anyway, I feel the problem is that almost all SEOs simply suppose this can be a legit website positioning tactic when Google has stated numerous occasions it’s not. Perhaps the spam insurance policies doc must be extra clear about it? Not that folks will learn them anyway?
Discussion board dialogue at Mastodon.
