Last week 3 of my many site got an outbound link penalty probably based on guest blogging.

But what I found interesting is this.

Blog 1: To be fair the poportion of guest posts to my own is high (lack of time). all posts were aquired from that well known guest blog site that has now been penalised by Google.
So that is the bad news and I should be put up against the wall shot for that.
But I would argue, that I was very careful to only choose posts that were 100% on topic for my readers and written to a good standard ( I refused many, after reading through them fully). I don't have a lot of time for this blog, so it will now become defunk, unless someone is still prepared to contribute with a nofollow link.

Blog 2: This is a different story in that the percentage of guest blogs is very low, ceratinly under 5%. That is because there is only one type of subject matter, I would allow guest posts for. I have to guess that the penalty was not applied because of quantity but because of the google profiles of the writers. My contribution to that blog is much much higher.

Blog 3: There are no guest posts at all on here, did I say zero. I was just very happy to link out extensivly whilst writing the posts. This blog is more of a hobby than a business, I write about what I enjoy and link to anything I think is relevant without thinking about SEO, bad neighbourhoods and that kind of stuff. But I got an outbound link penalty. It is true a few sites there are lots of links to ( I have no connection to them). But I do that because it is relevent to that post. not because of any foresight to penalties.

I have now nofollowed all links and all penalaties have been revoked.

But I say this to the whole world. I will never give a dofollow link to anyone from any site I own.

The advice I will give to any other webmaster is, never link out to anyone with a dodollow link. It doesn't matter what your opinion of the content or site. You have no guarantee that search engines will see it in the same light, it now been proven to be too risky.

I know a few people who run big branded sites with authority. I can tell you, no matter how hard you work, they will never give out a dofollow link. its just too risky for them now.

The fact is Linking is no longer a natural process and any site worth its salt will put its own priorities first.

I accept that exchanging money etc is not right for attainling links, but good fresh content, I think should be should have been accepted. Its a shame, that search engines can't tell the difference between good quality guest blogs and spam.

I predict in 5 years time there will be no link spam team , because links will no longer be counted and will be replaced with something else (is anyone brave enough to do this? Make their spam departments redundant and replace them with "content quality advisers".

We don't need external links anymore. We all add our site to WMT, use authorship etc. Search engines can find our pages, without external links. So much time is spent by trying to prove, that there is link spam out there, that you have to wonder why bother?

Stop counting links and the spam goes away.