Spammy Links Can Harm Your Site’s PageRank; Google Reminds Site Owners and Content Marketers

Many site owners engage in link building practices to help rank their sites stronger organically while some make money online by selling links that pass pagerank to other sites. Some content marketers even get paid to ‘build links’. Well, it seems people have gotten too loose with these practices thereby forcing Google to publish a reminder that spammy links violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Google’s post reminds those who publish articles referred to as guest posts, sponsored content, press releases etc, that if done aggressively, with intention to build links that can manipulate pagerank, etc they could expose their sites to being penalized in Google.

The penalty of course, will affect the ranking of the site that published the content that contains the spammy links and also the sites that are linked to. There is nothing really new about the reminder though because Google published same warning in 2014. However, this reminder is more specific in terms of large-scale article campaigns.

According to Google, below are factors that, when taken to an extreme, can indicate when an article is in violation Google’s guidelines on link schemes:

  • Stuffing keyword-rich links to your site in your articles
  • Having the articles published across many different sites; alternatively, having a large number of articles on a few large, different sites
  • Using or hiring article writers that aren’t knowledgeable about the topics they’re writing on
  • Using the same or similar content across these articles; alternatively, duplicating the full content of articles found on your own site (in which case use of rel=”canonical”, in addition to rel=”nofollow”, is advised)
link building search engine optimization policy





How To Stay Safe

Whether you are distributing content or you are the one publishing those content on your blog, you might escape manual actions or penalties by simply placing rel=”nofollow” on  those links.

Kindly note that Google is not against article distribution in the cases when they inform users, educate another site’s audience or used to increase brand awareness. But if such distribution is done primarily to pass pagerank, then there’s a problem.

If you’ve got spammy links on your site, you can disavow them.

Please Share :

Like What You Read?

Sign Up to get similar articles delivered to your email inbox.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

15 responses to “Spammy Links Can Harm Your Site’s PageRank; Google Reminds Site Owners and Content Marketers”

  1. Bayo Avatar
    Bayo

    In this recession? na wa oo

  2. Elvis E Avatar

    This one weak me.
    tecpharmacy.com

  3. Uthman Saheed Avatar

    Alright. Noted mr and mrs google.

  4. Adesoji Awobajo Avatar

    that one doesn't mean i would say am Commenting from Safaxnet.com.ng

  5. Joshua Orekhie Avatar

    You talked about rel canonical. How do I go about that. Thanks. God bless.

  6. Hadharm Hiidee Avatar

    Yes there's a point here and we have websites like ahref, semrush and others to detect spammy links and get rid of them.

  7. Adebayo Adeyinka Avatar

    Thanks for the update bro

  8. Tunezmp3 Avatar

    Boss Jide, This Disavowing, I dont really understand it, How will I know a link that is spammy??

  9. Certified Rockson Avatar

    Thanks for the information

    Commenting
    From

    Entpaded.com

  10. Techy Data Avatar

    spammy links has thought me a lot in the past and how to be careful when it comes to building links because some sites looks good but their links are spammy too

  11. Nwoye Gabriel Avatar

    Really informative

  12. Stanley Emmanuel Avatar

    Boss jide is there anyway I can know if the links to my blog http://www.stanleysblog.com is spammy?

  13. James moses Avatar

    Hi ogbonge, thanks for this post. I will try and disavow all the spammy links on my link profile.

  14. Larry Frank Avatar

    Oga Jide, I will continue this practice for my event blogs, reason being that they are on sub domains and I can change at anytime.

  15. Blogoratti Avatar

    Interesting tips thanks for sharing.

    http://www.blogoratti.blogspot.com

Search

Copyright © 2025 | About | Advertise | Privacy Policy | Proudly powered by WordPress