Sponsored Posts
-
Hi
I'm a little curious as to what the lastest guidelines are for sponsored posts by Google?
The writer blurb at the bottom of an article is of course ok, but what about companies who pay money to another company to have a fantastic piece written "with a link" but with no evidence who the writer is?!
Thanks
Gary
-
Hey Gary,
The Google stance is that anything paid like what you outlined in #2 and #3 should have nofollowed links on it. It's the same story for giving free stuff to bloggers in exchange for reviews. The official stance can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en.
The reality is that there are still plenty of people getting away with this behind closed doors. The ones that are subtle about it can likely keep doing it for a long time with low risk. The ones that are blatantly doing it are much more at risk for being penalized or losing the value of those links, however I haven't seen many public stories of paid link penalties for awhile.
If you choose to do this, do so with the understanding that it carries some risk, and your competitors are going to be happy to report you to the webspam team if you make it obvious that you're doing it.
-
Thanks for your help guys.
I want to make sure our link building campaign is done within Google's guidelines. Here is currently what we are doing, or intending to do;
1. We're producing unique content on our site and sharing this with key influencers organically on Twitter, Facebook and G+ communities. This so far is working well for a new start up.
2. Writing guest posts on authoritative sites (with only our author bio at the bottom, branded link to our site with social links) sharing knowledge or interesting content which readers would want to read. Sites like HuffPost, The Guardian would be great although we're starting on authoritative well maintained blogger sites with the industry to begin.
3. Reaching out to industry influencers who may like to review our products. Many of them have got back to me stating that they "can" run commissioned posts (normally requires a large fee) which carries a followed link, branded or unbranded. Although we may have initially contacted them, and money could be exchanged, in the eyes of Google wouldn't this appear as a natural post?
Please let me know your thoughts on this? It would be great to gain more of an understanding exactly what I can or cannot do when it comes to developing high quality links for our business! I would like to be more pro-active.
Your feedback (sharing any examples if possible) would be truly appreciated.
Thanks
Gary
-
My answer might not go by the book but reality is if they didn’t get caught, its fine but they got caught, the game is over J
Hope this helps!
-
Hi Gary,
While I wouldn't advise dabbling in black hat (the things you mention are all against Google's guidelines), my experience from cleaning up other SEOs' messes has always been that doing things like this won't get you in trouble if you do it right.
2 factors to keep in mind:
-
Don't do it at scale. 1 Sponsored Post may help, but if you try to do 100 of them, you're creating a clear pattern that Google will pick up on sooner or later.
-
Don't do this on sites where they disclose that the post was sponsored (either on the post itself or on an "advertise with us" page. Google can crawl that text and thus knows right away to discount those links.
Again, this is ALL black hat, but if done right in the past, I wouldn't even disavow because the link may actually be providing value.
Let me know if you'd like to discuss further!
Mark
-
-
Hi Gary, what's up?
I found this video from Matt Cutts from a year ago: https://youtu.be/zupIbMyMfBI but I don't know if it will answer all your questions.
Regards,
Luis
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will our website traffic be adversely affected by Google by allowiing other sites to post our content on their sites?
Hi, We're a radio station posting original content each day. We belong to a sector of similar radio stations. It's been proposed that we all contribute content to this group
Link Building | | Hope-Media
so any radio station can grab this content and post it on their own websites. As the site with the most content and web traffic, could this potentially harm us?1 -
When leaving guest posts on blogs, are blog profiles such as Disqus relevant for SEO?
In other words, instead of the comment linking back to the money site it is being linked back to a blog profile which contains a link to the money site. Is this still as effective?
Link Building | | msmdz0 -
Posts and Page linking
Can I link from the post to page? I read on semoz that in order to avoid crazy linking I should not link from a post everywhere. Is it ok to link from some post which is in a category to a page?
Link Building | | VillasDiani0 -
Google Authorship and Guest Posts
I'm including my google author details at the bottom of guest posts with a link to my site. Is this not giving google a clear signal the that it is a guest post by me and although the site owner has found it worthy enough to include the post on their site it's not really an 'editorially given link' in the true sense of the term?
Link Building | | SamCUK0 -
Blog's Homepage isn't indexed even though posts are
My blog http://www.cleanedison.com/blog/ doesn't seem to be indexed by Google even though my posts seem to get indexed within a day or so. Is this not necessarily a bad thing? I feel like it would be nice to search "CleanEdison Blog" and get the homepage. The robots say: name="robots" content="noodp,noydir,noarchive" /> Is there anything I can do? P.S. My posts that get picked up by larger entities generally get ranked lower than the offshoot even though I have a rel="canonical" tag. Anything I can do there?
Link Building | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Guest Posts on Sites With Irrelevant Outbound Links
Suppose you came across a website in your niche with solid domain authority that accepts guest posts. However you notice some of the guest posts are linking out to somewhat off-topic sites. If you already have an article that you think would be accepted easily and all you have to do is spend 10 minutes to craft an email pitch, would you do it? Why?
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
Sites Ranked Again - Post Penguin SEO Help
Got destroyed by Penguin because of questionable links. I had most of the links removed and my sites have been restored for the most part - though lower than they previously ranking for keywords. What is the best SEO strategy to move up in rank? Link Building strategy? Is there a penalty for domains that have keywords in them?
Link Building | | veed230 -
What article directories (if any) are still worthing posting to?
While article marketing my not be at the top of the SEO strategy heap, it has, thus far, had a place small place at the table. In light of the Panda-Farmer-Anti-Demand-Media-Content update, I'm re-thinking article marketing altogether. Which, if any, general article directories are still worth adding content to in terms of links and eyeballs? Should these general article directories be avoided altogether?
Link Building | | Gyi0