If your website and content strategy are designed specifically to influence Google search results rather than provide helpful information to your audience, (1) Google will always discover what you’re trying to do and will label you (correctly) a spammer, or (2) Google has already labeled you a spammer and you don’t know it.

Background

The latest tactic the search engine giant has targeted for extermination are “spammy guest blog posts.” According to Google’s top anti-webspam cop Matt Cutts, “if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you are doing a lot of guest blogging then you are hanging out with really bad company.”

(Photo: Thomas Hawk via Flickr)

Fortunately, what Cutts is talking about is not a practice most reputable organizations and Main Street small businesses use. The practice he’s referring to is similar to the practice of selling links on a website, or, worse, setting up vast networks of website farms for the sole purpose of providing links to websites.

Cutts indicated on his post that if you have a group blog, or if you invite experts to blog on an issue that’s related to the topic of your blog or the products and services you sell in your business, Google won’t likely treat that as a “spammy blog post.”

But it does raise this warning flag: Be careful about anyone who approaches with a flattering email and who offers to provide you with a free post.

To help you avoid getting on the wrong side of Google’s spam cops, the search engine provides a wide array of Webmaster Tools that can train and help anyone who runs a website, from beginner to advanced expert.

However, you must understand the Google’s “goose that lays its golden egg” is the quality of their search results. If you or I start noticing that the results we get are not matching up with the information we’re seeking, we will be disappointed in that thing which has turned Google into one of the most valuable companies on the planet.

And when you are Google, you can hire the best engineers in the world to spend days and nights looking for and crushing anyone you may be tempted to hire and who guarantees you they have a secret way to get you on the “front page of a Google search.”

(via: SearchEngine Land)