We are aware of the previous text that James did, where it showed that re=sponsored passed no juice. It had been his suspicion that just a mention of ‘guest post’ on a post would harm rank. He decided to test it and check if it really does.
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Transcription below:
Clint: Test 550 was just having words guest post on a page harm rate. I didn't even know this test was coming, James did. And I thought it was really smart. Because if you pay attention to any of the news, John Mueller claims Well, we can find guest posts, we could filter that stuff out. And my response has always been okay, boy, how do you do that? Right? How are you gonna just identify? And then James is kind of like, Peter Captain obvious use put guest posts. Right?
So he tested that, and he added guest posts to his pages, guest posts by guest is kind of obvious, right? And here's the test page, where it started out, as you see it dropped and bounce back up and dropped. And now, 9 again. So it's kind of got legs, that concept. If you have the words guest post on your page, you might be earning your rankings. So I would want to take this one as a definite yet because I think this one has to be duplicated on multiple sites. We don't have the systems in place right now.
We're still waiting on Ted's testing tool to be updated, or someone to make it a new testing tool. That's better that can allow us to launch the same test multiple times and then increase the leaderboards. Right? So but I would seriously consider not using the term guest posts based off of this test alone, right? Like, why add that to the pieces of content anyway? No one else does it? Why would you have that as a standard practice to put guest post on site inside of a category? Or inside of your titles and descriptions of your content?
I think that, well, it's not a definitive, hey, this is kind of how they're doing it. Send me anything I can move from five to nine is probably a bad thing. So I would say leave that content.
Dori: Yeah, this is really reminiscent of sponsored links, when people would say, you know, put sponsored links on our sidebar, and then, you know, put people's links that we're paying to be there. I don't know if Google ever demoted the page that they were on. But I know that they demoted. Well, I don't 100% no because I didn't test it. But they said they would demote those links.
Clint: You would think of the associated so sponsored link is in the same div. Okay. If it's in their same div, we're going to reduce the level of power that's passed on. That makes sense. That was also a really great, but print for lack of a better word, because I hate that word. For to find reciprocal link networks created by plugins, those things used to work like gangbusters until you will figure out the footprint and went after them and then take out site after site using finding that way.
Be a little bit leery about that as well. I think James's test is, honestly even without the 10 very 10 separate tests and 10 separate keywords and stuff, I would just stop putting guest posts inside of your page.
This goes along with the thing that Ted Cobias talked about on Search Engine Journal that we're restly bricks out I think, they did a post where they listened to you, Gary Ellis podcast and he was talking about if you put the words page 404 not found inside of your comments or anywhere on your page in a predominant area that is not surrounded by other related information, you could inadvertently be indexed your page and head tested that on search engine journals blog the exact story and the the disk is comments section was indexed.
Then Ted added the 404 page not found mission from the website to comments and at the index. So I'm clear that they can actually pull that off. Guest post by seems like a good filter to find guest posts right