MyBlogGuest.com Confirms It’s Been Hit By Google Penalty

MyBlogGuest, a well-known service that helps pair writers and blogs for guest blogging, confirmed this morning that it’s been hit by a Google penalty.

Google has been aggressively going after companies that it believes are violating its SEO guidelines in recent months, particularly link networks. This is first penalty that we know of against what Google considers a “guest blog network.”

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, recently warned that Google would target guest blogging, and then confirmed this penalty via Twitter early this morning.

Today we took action on a large guest blog network. A reminder about the spam risks of guest blogging: http://t.co/rc9O82fjfn

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 19, 2014

Although no specifics are given in his tweet, MyBlogGuest founder Ann Smarty confirmed a few hours ago that it was her site:

[Official] Even though #myblogguest has been against paying for links (unlike other platforms), @mattcutts team decided to penalize us…

— Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) March 19, 2014

Penalty Impact?

What’s unknown is the extent of the penalty. A lot of SEOs, authors and especially blog owners are wondering if the penalty extends further to their own sites, blog posts and links acquired via My Blog Guest. We don’t know for sure, but we do know these two things:

• Cutts’ tweet specifically mentions action taken against a “network,” not just the single site that manages the network
• When Google penalizes link networks, it doesn’t just impact the owner; it penalizes all the sites/links in the system

One obvious impact is that My Blog Guest no longer shows up on page one of Google’s search results for its company name.

I’m currently seeing it at No. 58 for its own company name.