When Google decides to release something to the public that relates to their search engines, SEO and how websites are ranked organically, then it is always a big deal, considering that it affects, pretty much, every website on the internet.

In Google’s latest published release, the search engine giant wants to make website owners more aware of ‘spammy links’: excessive link building through guest posts.

In a recent article from Google, the main points it reads include:

• “Lately we’ve seen an increase in spammy links contained in articles referred to as contributor posts, guest posts, partner posts, or syndicated posts. These articles are generally written by or in the name of one website, and published on a different one.”
• “When Google detects that a website is publishing articles that contain spammy links, this may change Google’s perception of the quality of the site and could affect its ranking.”
• “For websites creating articles made for links, Google takes action on this behavior because it’s bad for the Web as a whole.”

What are ‘Spammy Links’?

Evidently, most websites will link internall and externally in their articles. For example, this article, just from the above content, has an external outgoing link to the article from Google. However, it is not deemed ‘spammy’, considering that Google defines ‘spammy’ links as:

• An article with lots of keyword-rich links in articles, where such articles are published acoss many different sites.
• In content where the content is not high-quality. This happens when the writer of the content is not knowledgable in the area they are writing about.
• Using the same or similar content for different articles.

What Should You Do?

It is not often that Google releases, what can be deemed, a warning to web developers of how to treat links. On the whole, the algorithms of Google for their search engine should automatically do this.

The fact that Google have released an article to address this potentially makes clear that their search engine is none of the wiser to this online problem, or is lacking the ability to properly distinguish spammy links to traditional links.

Nevertheless, every web develoer will have access to their site’s Web Master’s Tools for their website. In which case, if Google has a problem with the links on a website, they can directly address the website by placing a manual action on the Web Master’s Tools for that website for the owner to rectify.

Ultimately, what it seems Google is doing is cleaning up the internet further to make it a better experience for everyone. Bloggers should not be making content with the objective to place a link in it, be it for profit or non-profit reasons. The content should always come first. For this reason, the only people that should be worried from their ‘release’ by Google should be those that lack the understanding of how to blog and perform SEO correctly.