Google has hit another guest blog network. Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed via Twitter that action was taken against PostJoint.
This is the second major guest blog network that Google has penalized this year, following the highly publicized MyBlogGuest penalty last month.
PostJoint probably brought attention to itself with a series of blog posts about why guest blogging isn’t dead despite Cutts’ claims and why their guest blogging system is different from MyBlogGuest. They also claim on their home page they had “no footprints”:
PostJoint’s website proclaims they are “not a dodgy link network”, and even has an article, “Will Google penalise me for using PostJoint?” which promises: “As long as you don’t let your standards slip just to make a quick buck and follow our guidelines, chances are you will be fine.”
Oops.
In his tweet, Cutts said anyone claiming “zero footprints” might as well be waving a giant red flag:
PostJoint has confirmed the penalty, and says it is a manual action penalty, not from any incoming links.
“Actually we’ve never done any link building to our site, so this is a manual action as Google has no other way of targeting us,” said Saleem Yaqub, director at PostJoint. “This will affect us very little.”
When you search for their name, you won’t find the company in Google’s organic results, but you will see a very poor quality AdWords ad. And it likely won’t be long before link cleanup companies target the PostJoint name, as we saw happen immediately following the MyBlogGuest penalty.
They publicly state that they process more than 3,000 blog posts per month, as of November 2013, and have earned their bloggers nearly $400,000. They also have an active affiliate program, which has resulted in plenty of spam from bloggers trying to get others to sign up using their affiliate link.
While there is no confirmation yet, it’s highly likely that bloggers within PostJoint’s network have been penalized, or likely will be soon, just as those who got involved with MyBlogGuest were.
Editor’s note: For more information, see our follow-up post: PostJoint Google Penalty Fallout Continues.