MyBlogGuest Penalized and Many Bloggers Along With It

Literally within 24 hours of Google penalizing MyBlogGuest publicly all of my sites that had occasionally published articles from MyBlogGuest have been punished by Google and slapped to PR0 with manual actions taken as Google notified me in Web Master Tools.  Now MyBlogGuest was a resource I leveraged to find articles to help cover content on my site when I went on vacation or didn’t have enough time to write content and helped provide some filler articles.  The service in itself has a good intention, to bring guest bloggers and blogs together, the problem is that the system is rampantly abused by SEO companies and people who are paid to put guest blog posts into the system which have dofollow links to companies that paid them to put the posts and links into the system.

MyBlogGuest does what it can to scan for this, but it obviously is not immune and is being held accountable for what poor quality advertisers have done with the marketplace.

I have been a member of MyBlogGuest for a long time, and never paid to put articles into the system except for an initial review, but I often found articles in the marketplace and used them as filler articles for my site when I had to go on vacation and/or didn’t have time to write many articles that week. My sites were all penalized from hosting and linking to MyBlogGuest in previous posts, 5 of my 7 blogs were dropped to PR0 from PR4 and PR3 in most cases. I don’t think the network in itself should be penalized, do many of the people who publish articles into the network get paid to put blog posts with dofollow links in them, yes, and those links/and those sites should be punished. MyBlogGuest is merely the host of bloggers meeting with each other and offering content. Really the advertisers who buy into the system and put the articles into the marketplace, the target sites that aren’t nofollow from the guest posts should be penalized if there is a penalty to be had.

Still, I also know from the quality and types of articles, there are some good ones, the ones with valid Google Plus author bio tend to be more legit and higher quality than the ones without. But 90% of the advertisers in the system are there only to promote dofollow links for the guest posts, they don’t ever respond to comments on their guest articles, it is published content abandoned and leveraged for the dofollow link in the author bio. The community itself is excellent, the forums are excellent, but the system was abused by companies hiring SEO people to put articles in the system to be picked up by bloggers. This was instead of the olden days when they would fish and just offer to pay bloggers directly to host articles, they still paid for someone to create the articles and put them in the system and fish them to various sites, this is why PageRank requirements exist for articles, nobody would care about PageRank it would be more about traffic.

For MyBlogGuest to continue as a valid service and perhaps recover from Google Penalties, and it can, it needs to switch and focus on audience/visibility and social brand promotion for the guest author, rather than the dofollow link in the article. If the continue to allow dofollow link, then I think enforcement of Google Plus Authorship and some sort of site verification/ownership of the link should be required to further cut back on abusers taking advantage of the marketplace.

Even now, the requests to remove links from former MyBlogGuest articles COME POURING IN and I get them via email and from MyBlogGuest Inbox messages as well.

What one can do in the meantime would be to nofollow every single link in every post to be sure to prevent penalties, one such plugin is http://wordpress.org/plugins/follow-nofollow-control/ which can nofollow all external links out of your site so you don’t have to go through dozens if not hundreds of older posts to find the external links which may cause you grief.