Matt Cutts recently tweeted that Google had penalized MyBlogGuest.com. In this post, we take a look at the situation.
What is MyBlogGuest
MyBlogGuest is a WordPress plugin that allows you to add a guest blog for distribution. Once the blog is uploaded, other websites who also have the plugin can select the guest blog and post it to their blog. The main purpose of the platform is to make guest blogging easier.
What Did Matt Cutts Tweet
Matt Cutts said this specifically, “Today we took action on a large guest blog network. A reminder about the spam risks of guest blogging: http://goo.gl/cnkoFA.”
Matt Cutts Tweet MyBlogGuest
It turns out, that guest blogging network was MyBlogGuest. This was confirmed by the owner Ann Smarty.
[Official] Even though #myblogguest has been against paying for links (unlike other platforms), @mattcutts team decided to penalize us…
I don’t think our publishers will be penalized, but let’s ask @mattcutts 🙂
Ann Smarty My Blog Guest
Why This Doesn’t Make Sense
MyBlogGuest is a free platform that allows for the facilitation of guest blogs. There is no payment mechanism built into the system. Instead, it is simply a tool to help guest blog writers find publishers. Sure, there could be some back-channeling going on, but does that warrant Google penalizing a white hat guest blogging tool?
Guest Blogs Moving Forward
Google has gone on record saying that you can guest blog, but it needs to be done through manual outreach and cannot be on large scale. They do not want people abusing the system and manipulating their algorithm. Guest blogging moving forward needs to be done purely from a PR standpoint. It should be done to get brand exposure, and not hyperlinks.
Ignite Visibility personally helps businesses establish guest blogging relationships, writes the blogs and helps get them posted. Our process is 100% white hat and within Google’s guidelines. If there is a grey area, we will not get the blog posted. Moving forward, we can expect other SEO companies to adopt the same principals.
You could not be more wrong. MBG is absolutely a tool used for spamming Google and publishing was is generally crappy useless content. Today there is entirely too much junk content being posted. This penalty was totally predictable just like the penalization of reciprocal linking and all other link buying tactics. Any SEO that does not see this as a predictable and correct penalty is simply longing for the easy times that are long past.
You missed the whole reason your site was penalized. it is not for paid links but growing a network of blogs (sites) whose sole purpose was to gain rankings in Google.
Google has been against network sites for a while now.
It’s a shame people simply do not learn how to grow a business without Google. It can be done, it has been for centuries prior.
Kirk is mostly correct. It seems the main reason people were on MBG was to get the dofollow backlinks from their articles to boost their search engine rankings. There was (and still is) a lot of link marketing going on, which Google wants to squash as it affects their rankings. In terms of offsite SEO best practices to avoid the risk of a Google penalty, I think it’s pretty clear you want to focus on getting citations/links to your website as if Google organic search didn’t exist.