Is Zemanta Still Safe

[propertyhunter]

I have a quick question, I have been watching a conversation on Google+ where someone pointed out that they have found someone using Zemanta (free) but someone have republished the same article over and over to lots of websites. I think they mentioned 12 detected so far. He was concerned that these links would start to be considered spam because they are all identical content on different urls.

I know Zemanta has been lauded as great and safe before, but John Mueller from Google has commented and stated that it could be considered a link scheme and therefore he "would not recommend" that it is used.

Be good to hear some others thoughts on it!

Paul

[igzebedze]

hi all,

i'm bostjan spetic, ceo of zemanta,

thank you for the question, i'd love to hear more about that conversation, but the basic answer to your concern is that this problem isn't really tied to Zemanta in any way. If some someone links to you and someone else takes that article and reproduces it on 12 different sites (with that link included) then you cannot do anything about it. You can hope that google correctly notices stealing of content and ignores those 'same' links.

we are an editorial assistant, we take quality of recommendations as our primary concern, and manual editorial control of our users as the key product principle. I am happy to discuss the 'link scheme' question with anyone, because it simply is not correct or fair in any way.

thanks,

best, b

[propertyhunter]

Hi Bostjan,

It was a comment made by Rich Voller at this discussion on Google+ where he spotted multiple links from a redistributed article while checking GWMT latest links.

I have emailed Rich and actually he has said that he loves Zemanta but wanted more confirmation before turning it back on. I think the fact a Googler jumped in and said it was bad was why he wanted the confirmation.

Rich was saying that a few lower quality links are not a problem in his case as if there were too many he could either contact webmasters to remove links or disavow them.

I see what Rich was saying but I don't always have time to check my "latest links" section too often and I would be concerned that if that happened too many times it could be detrimental to my sites.

Paul

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Paul

You have this straight from the horses mouth as it were, not that I am calling John Mueller a horse.

If you take one article, then duplicate it across other sites this is going to be at best pointless and at worst a negative equity.

I am no expert on Zemanta but you could possibly use this as a way to put more content out there as a branding exercise but I would not add links and you still can't get around the duplication issues.

Some questions to ask:

Do they use canonical URLs to the original source?

What are you trying to achieve here? If it is just links, then this is not the droid you are looking for.

---

Have a look and report back but I would be very careful.

Marcus

[propertyhunter]

Hi Marcus,

Well perosnally I have been using it for brand building, but there is also the fact that it links back at the same time. I publish a lot of content so I get a fair few people linking back to me and it has been great but I need to be 100% as I dont want to unwittingly invoke a penalty.

Paul

[igzebedze]

hi guys,

thanks for the link, it seems that your question posted here, and the one in the Google+ conversation are not the same.

i thought you were asking about duplicates, and just wanted to stress that we simply suggest related content, and that what publishers do with them is entirely up to them. if spammers or anyone else takes that content and re-publishes it, it's a problem that we all have online these days.

the lower-quality links question from Rich is different. I have to defend our user base here, their profiles and their editorial control. we are making sure that only real-life bloggers are using our tools, for real-life posts. of course they will be of different quality, but we've learned that 'quality' is actually not easy to define, so we decided to rather focus on authenticity.

and on the other hand, of course seo professionals would prefer to have control over their links, but we will not allow for it, because the choice to publish something or not has to be editorial decision of the author.

i hope i'm not missing something

best, b

[Dr-Pete]

Looking at some Zemanta links in the wild, it doesn't seem too aggressive. Take for example, the bottom of this blog:

http://kevinwmccarthy.com

It depends on your goals. From a traffic perspective, as long as the links are relevant, it's fine. I can't tell you whether Zemanta will drive traffic to your particular site (I haven't used it), but it's certainly plausible. It probably depends a lot on your niche and the population of sites using the system.

From an SEO standpoint, my gut reaction is that it's fairly low-risk but may also be low-gain. Google could easily recognize these plug-in links and simply devalue them. I doubt a block of four relevant links is going to get outright penalized - it's more likely Google will just see this as a link-exchange of sorts and simply dial down the volume on those links.

That's not to say it's risk-free (we've certainly seen many link networks get hit in the past year), but I suspect that John was speaking in generalities and not about Zemanta in particular. On the other hand, no tool like this should be seen as some kind of panacea for link-building. It's just one piece of the puzzle for getting exposure and traffic.