Article Marketing Robot is a very popular content “marketing” tool used by a lot of folks, specifically in the affiliate marketing world. I frequent a lot of SEO forums to keep my “ear to the street” as they say, and one particular Blackhat World thread caught my eye. Keep in mind that this person was most likely doing all sorts of junk link building like 2.0 and forum profiles, junk blog comments and other low quality stuff. The message I’m wanting to get across is that the Googly Woogly is cracking down a lot more on poor link building practices.
Short story: a few weeks ago 4 of my sites were penalized and I made a reconsideration request on all 4 of them. Of course they are were rejected so I have written them again with more details. Few days ago they finally replied me (this is the first reply from google in 5 years ).
Here is part of the email I got from them:
“Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank.To illustrate how these articles could apply to you [they mean google quality guidelines], here are examples of pages that contain inorganic links to your site: [they posted examples from which one is an AMR article]” To illustrate how these articles could apply to you [they mean google quality guidelines], here are examples of pages that contain inorganic links to your site: [they posted examples from which one is an AMR article]”
They tend to be really helpful now. They post links and even the anchor text. I replied them again and they answered within 72h.
I decided not to post a screenshot of this email because I am still trying to recover my rankings and I don’t want them to know that I am sharing this info here.
I know a lot of people say links cannot hurt you but the fact of the matter is they can. I’ve quoted Google’s guide on link schemes so many times my fingers hurt. Pimping low quality content going after certain anchor text is in direct violation and is risky business. We all know it works well so just be careful in how you go about your link building efforts.
I am by no means saying not to game Google. If you have a solid brand backed by wicked awesome content you’ll be able to get away with a lot more. The majority of affiliate sites will rarely ever get linked to and that makes it too easy for Google to spot a link scheme taking place.
