Google Updates Webmaster Guidelines for Link Schemes and Scraped Content

Date Published: 20-Jul-2013 | By: lynda S White

On 18th Jul’13, Google updated its Webmaster Guidelines on Link Schemes and Scraped Content. The newly added guidelines once again emphasized on unnatural link building and participation in link schemes as a violation to Webmaster Guidelines.

Changes in Link Building page

  • Building keyword-rich anchor text links by involving in large-scale article marketing and guest posting comes under link schemes and it negatively impacts a site’s ranking
  • Building links with an intention to manipulate PageRank is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
  • Building links that weren’t editorially reviewed by the site’s owner comes under unnatural link Building and is considered as a violation
  • Advertorials where payments are received for articles that include links that pass PageRank again come under unnatural link building
  • Distributing links with optimized anchor text inserted in the articles or press releases is an unnatural way of link building

Here is the screen shot from Google Webmaster guidelines for your reference:

Google Webmaster Guidelines on Link Schemes

All these changes do not imply that link building or article syndication is dead. Matt Cutts recently mentioned that not all the link building is bad; links are still the best way that search engines use to discover authority of the website.

It clearly indicates that promotion on the web is important and it should be done in a strategic way. The same old link building practices to get link juice and huge number of links is not applicable today. Links should look natural, that is why they have included one final point in the page saying the best way to get high-quality and relevant links to your site is to create good content that naturally attracts links that are nothing but ‘editorial votes’ given by choice.

Changes in Scraped Content page
Earlier Google in its ‘Content guidelines‘ mentioned only about text content, now it says about images and videos:

  • Sites that copy content such as images, videos or any other media from other sites and use it without adding any value to the users come under thin affiliate.

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