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Last week we covered that Google said again, nofollow links in guest blog posts, even if they are not paid guest blog posts. This is not new, Google said this many times over the years. But whenever I cover these statements, some SEOs are a bit shocked. Well, Google's John Mueller again over again said, nofollow them.
John said on Twitter when questioned about what he said earlier last week "essentially if the link is within the guest post, it should be nofollow, even if it's a "natural" link you're adding there." He did add that "none of this is new" and this is the messaging Google has been using for a while (like I said above and showed).
He also added that this is not about any new plans to go after sites using guest blog posts links. He said don't expect any "ramp up manual reviews of this." He said most of the time Google can "catch most of these algorithmically anyway."
Essentially if the link is within the guest post, it should be nofollow, even if it's a "natural" link you're adding there.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 13, 2020
FWIW none of this is new, and I'm not aware of any plans to ramp up manual reviews of this. We catch most of these algorithmically anyway.
Then you get all the "but what about these types" of questions:
Yes, even there.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 13, 2020
Dejan did a small poll asking SEOs why they use guest blogging. Most do it for links, which is no surprise.
Why do you do guest posts?
— DEJAN (@dejanseo) June 13, 2020
Again, Google isn't announcing anything new here, so no need to panic:
The other thing is that because this is so old, we have a lot of training data for our algorithms. I wouldn't be surprised if the largest part of those links are just ignored automatically. If all that work is for ignored links, why not just do something useful instead?
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 14, 2020
Google does not like links guest posting and hasn't for several years.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
