Hi, Google now punishes advertorials and "native advertising", this will eventually put an end to the typical guest blogging, guest commenting. (article: http://searchenginewatch.com/articl...Press-Releases-Advertorials-Can-Hurt-Rankings) In "normal" limits I still use guest blogging to attract attention to new articles and fresh news, issues on the sites that I manage... but with these in place, I guess we should expect Google to start harshly penalizing again. What do you think and how would you SEO from now on?
I would like to know this as well. I hope Google actually does go through with the direction they are headed and getting rid of the importance of unneccessary link building tactics, but it's hard to keep up with when and what they are putting less of an emphasis on.
They must be taking account of links, since most of the web is about that. I have a feeling that "nofollow" links are very important, exactly because they are legitimate. If you have plenty of them, a variety of such links on relevant quality sites, it should help climb in the rankings. As for "do follow", even CNN uses them! And many major sites... I bet 100 % that they count too. But there might be patterns, even blacklists that Google takes account of... It's so shocking to read that they are bothered by article posts.