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There was a time when bloggers used the guest blogging technique to create backlinks. For those who are not aware, in Guest blogging, SEO agencies or companies pay website owners or writers to publish a guest blog post with one or two backlinks to another site.
Companies use this technique to rank their sites high in search engines. They are constantly in search of high domain authority websites or sites that have a valid Google page rank. When the company’s SEO executive find such site, he’ll drop an email to the webmaster asking them to publish a guest post in exchange for some USD or free product.
Google has practically made impossible to use this technique these days, thanks to the roll out of Google Penguin algorithm. The algorithm has been designed to lower the ranks or punish blogs that use black hat techniques of creating backlinks.
The algorithm is accurate, and it can distinguish between white hat and black hat link building strategies. Some pro bloggers claim that guest blogging is safe, but I don’t think it is.
Once your website has been penalized (when Google Penguin algorithm has been refreshed), it is tough to get your website traffic back on track. The webmaster will have to use third party tools to find toxic backlinks. The subscription cost of such tools is high and many people will not be able to afford it. Once the toxic links are found, the webmaster should create a disavow file for the same, and he must submit the file to Google.
If the backlinks are not too many, the links section of Google search console will be useful to you. You’ll have to wait for the next algorithm update to notice changes.
In the case of a manual penalty, you will have to remove the backlinks by yourself. To do the same, you’ll have to contact webmasters of other blogs and request them to remove the link back to your website. Believe me; this takes a hell lot of time. You’ll have to make use of the whois tool to get the contact details of webmasters.
The best way to keep your website‘s Google Adsense revenue and traffic on a rising trend, make sure that you ignore all guest blogging requests. If you’ve already published such posts, you should remove them or add a nofollow attribute to external links in the post.
