Google’s head of spam Matt Cutts announced on Twitter at 2:13am, Wednesday that Google had taken action against a “large guest blog network”. Though, this time he didn’t specifically say which network had been hit.

Matt linked to his post on his personal blog ‘The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO‘, and cited the fact that Google has started to turn it’s attention on guest blogging:

 

Since Matt posted an ominous video about the future of guest blogging, many guest blogs have continued to work and lead to great rankings, but this time the website in question was hit with lost ranking, penalties and unnatural link notifications.

News started to circulate about this penalisation, and eventually people cottoned on to it being MyBlogGuest:

 

Later on Ann Smarty of MyBlogGuest confirmed on Twitter that it was her site that received the penalty:

Penalty Effect

What we don’t know is how far this penalty stretches; the extent of it’s effect. SEOs, authors and most importantly blog owners are now trying to find out whether it extends to their own sites, blog posts and links acquired via MyBlogGuest. There’s a lot we don’t know, but we do know this:

  • Matt Cutt’s tweet mentions specifically taking action against a “network”, not just the one site that manages the network
  • When Google penalises link networks, it never affects just the network; it penalises all the sites/links in the system

The most immediate and obvious impact that My Blog Guest has suffered is that it no longer shows up on page on Google when searching organically for the company name:

 

myblogguestpenalty

 

We’re seeing MyBlogGuest currently sit at rank 54 on Google’s search engine. You can read our other material about Google penalties with Expedia and Irwin Mitchell here.