Sponsored Posts

[GaryVictory]

Hi

I'm a little curious as to what the lastest guidelines are for sponsored posts by Google?

The writer blurb at the bottom of an article is of course ok, but what about companies who pay money to another company to have a fantastic piece written "with a link" but with no evidence who the writer is?!

Thanks

Gary

[KaneJamison]

Hey Gary,

The Google stance is that anything paid like what you outlined in #2 and #3 should have nofollowed links on it. It's the same story for giving free stuff to bloggers in exchange for reviews. The official stance can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en.

The reality is that there are still plenty of people getting away with this behind closed doors. The ones that are subtle about it can likely keep doing it for a long time with low risk. The ones that are blatantly doing it are much more at risk for being penalized or losing the value of those links, however I haven't seen many public stories of paid link penalties for awhile.

If you choose to do this, do so with the understanding that it carries some risk, and your competitors are going to be happy to report you to the webspam team if you make it obvious that you're doing it.

[GaryVictory]

Thanks for your help guys.

I want to make sure our link building campaign is done within Google's guidelines. Here is currently what we are doing, or intending to do;

1. We're producing unique content on our site and sharing this with key influencers organically on Twitter, Facebook and G+ communities. This so far is working well for a new start up.

2. Writing guest posts on authoritative sites (with only our author bio at the bottom, branded link to our site with social links) sharing knowledge or interesting content which readers would want to read. Sites like HuffPost, The Guardian would be great although we're starting on authoritative well maintained blogger sites with the industry to begin.

3. Reaching out to industry influencers who may like to review our products. Many of them have got back to me stating that they "can" run commissioned posts (normally requires a large fee) which carries a followed link, branded or unbranded. Although we may have initially contacted them, and money could be exchanged, in the eyes of Google wouldn't this appear as a natural post?

Please let me know your thoughts on this? It would be great to gain more of an understanding exactly what I can or cannot do when it comes to developing high quality links for our business! I would like to be more pro-active.

Your feedback (sharing any examples if possible) would be truly appreciated.

Thanks

Gary

[MoosaHemani]

My answer might not go by the book but reality is if they didn’t get caught, its fine but they got caught, the game is over J

Hope this helps!

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Hi Gary,

While I wouldn't advise dabbling in black hat (the things you mention are all against Google's guidelines), my experience from cleaning up other SEOs' messes has always been that doing things like this won't get you in trouble if you do it right.

2 factors to keep in mind:

1. Don't do it at scale.  1 Sponsored Post may help, but if you try to do 100 of them, you're creating a clear pattern that Google will pick up on sooner or later.

2. Don't do this on sites where they disclose that the post was sponsored (either on the post itself or on an "advertise with us" page.  Google can crawl that text and thus knows right away to discount those links.

Again, this is ALL black hat, but if done right in the past, I wouldn't even disavow because the link may actually be providing value.

Let me know if you'd like to discuss further!

Mark

[Yeeply.com]

Hi Gary, what's up?

I found this video from Matt Cutts from a year ago: https://youtu.be/zupIbMyMfBI but I don't know if it will answer all your questions.

Regards,

Luis