MyBlogGuest, a popular guest blogging network, has been penalized by Google. In at Tweet posted by Matt Cutts of Google last night at one o’clock in the morning, Matt posted:
Today we took action on a large guest blog network. A reminder about the spam risks of guest blogging: http://goo.gl/cnkoFA
Today we took action on a large guest blog network. A reminder about the spam risks of guest blogging: http://t.co/rc9O82fjfn
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 19, 2014
Now, when you search for MyBlogGuest on Google, you don’t get any search results that include the MyBlogGuest.com domain, it’s just now showing up for their company name or site name. There are other pages, such as Ann Smarty’s Twitter account, that show up instead.
I spoke with Ann Smarty yesterday, and she was somewhat concerned over the fact that her blog network might be targeted by Google. Apparently there have been comments made in the past (by Matt Cutts at SMX last week) that they would be targeting a large blog network very shortly.
Ann told me yesterday:
I really hope that they don’t target MyBlogGuest. There are other guest blogging networks that should targeted, such as the guest blogging networks that are paid. MyBlogGuest is not a paid network.
It looks to me like Google targeted MyBlogGuest primarily because the network is so large and so many site owners use it. It may have been done as a Public Relations move, in order to show that Google doesn’t like guest blogging. At this point, there are no reports that sites that have participated in this particular guest blogging network have been penalized…but it’s too early to tell. Google really is targeting what they see are guest blog posts, as I am seeing those types of links being targeted in Google with their manual actions.
I spoke this afternoon with Ann Smarty, the founder of MyBlogGuest, and I asked her if there has been any official contact from Google regarding the site’s penalty. She said, “No, there has not been any contact from Google”. She went on to say that in Google Webmaster Tools the site has gotten an “unnatural link warning” from Google. The site is penalized because of unnatural links pointing TO the MyBlogGuest.com site, not because of what the site is necessarily DOING (providing a resource for site owners to get guest blog posts placed on sites and allowing blog owners to accept guest blog posts.
Technically speaking, it’s not the business model that has gotten penalized: it’s the unnatural links pointing TO MyBlogGuest.com. This is an important distinction here. I have not analyzed the links pointing to the site yet, so I cannot say which links or which type(s) of links Google potentially has a problem with, which would result in a penalty for the site.