Matt Cutts – Google’s head of search spam – last Friday somewhat confirmed via Twitter that his employers have yet again taken action against another large guest blogging website, this time PostJoint, who claim “there’s no footprints”.
Matt was tweeted by a user who claimed that the guest blogging network had been penalised. This was true. You could see this – and still can – by performing a simple search for their name with the search engine. As you can see with the screenshot below, they don’t appear anywhere near the top of Google.
PostJoint Penalised
Matt Cutts this morning confirmed it on Twitter saying “any link or guest blog network that claims to have “zero footprints” is waving a giant red flag.”
Google recently also penalised My Blog Guest last month, another large guest blogging network.
In the same vein, “unnatural inbound links” was named as the prime reason for this penalty in Google’s official warning to PostJoint – part of the infamous confusing messaging that the search giant delivers via Webmaster Central. PostJoint have also admitted that some of its users are seeing “unnatural outbound links” warnings in their webmaster account.
It also appears that a small number of our registered sites have been penalised with an “unnatural outbound links” penalty and have lost their PR. We think the action is most likely down to an overall discernible pattern of unnatural linking activity and that using PostJoint has contributed to this in some way (too much of anything can be bad for your health).
Barry Schwartz, News Editor for Marketing Land, spotted that PostJoint’s blog post originally claimed that “only 16% of our sites have been hit,” and claimed that the low number “shows that Google can’t in fact trace all of the sites using PostJoint.”
The stat (and the dig at Google) has since been taken out of their post.
PostJoint though have said the penalty won’t be the end of them:
We will continue with the same values and focus on building relationships. Guest blogging will remain as a viable content marketing strategy even though its under attack from Google. Marketers will still want to reach their target audiences on blogs, and bloggers will still want to monetize their sites and offer a fresh voice to their readers.
