Is hiring bloggers to review my products while back linking to my website bad for SEO?

[DebashishB]

For many months I have been following this strategy of hiring high domain authority bloggers to review my products and link back to my website.

For a month or two my rankings improved but now I suddenly lost rankings. Can Google penalize me for hiring bloggers to review my products? Bloggers do mention in the blog that the product was requested for editorial review.

Any tips will be helpful.

Regards
Deb

[brettmandoes]

Yes, Google can penalize you for hiring bloggers. They view this is a link scheme (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356) and it's something that SEOs have been doing for a long time. Google has gotten better and better at catching these types of schemes, so it would not surprise me in the least if you were caught up by Penguin, which now operates in real time and simply devalues links instead of putting your entire domain into a sandbox.

To keep your strategy in line with Google's webmaster guidelines, you should request that those links be marked "nofollow". There is still a lot of value to this kind of outreach even with a "nofollow" added, so I wouldn't recommend you necessarily stop doing what you're doing as the bloggers have been honestly informing their audience that an editorial review was requested.

Some of the ways nofollow links can still help you:
1. quality referral traffic
2. backlinks generating backlinks over time

Best of luck, let me know if you have additional questions. Thanks!

[DebashishB]

Thanks so much for the advice. I will take immediate action.

So I am going to ask my bloggers to mark these links with "nofollow"

Some of my web pages which were ranking in 2nd page have disappeared from search probably due to this penalization. Because I remember from my work that I have not done any major changes to the website accept ask bloggers to link back with a product review, which did help to boost rankings for a month as I mentioned earlier.

Need to ask you 2 more questions:
1. How long do think it will take to recover from this penalization once the links are marked "nofollow".
2. Can I somehow de value or disregard (or nofollow i know no follow doesn't make sense but I guess you understand what I mean?) these links from my end of the website or do the backlinking website webmaster has to devalue the link?

[brettmandoes]

Hey Debashish, I'll try to answer your questions in order so they make the most sense, because they're good ones and they mirror perfectly the same questions we all see in this industry.

1. We really need to define penalization here first. Unless you're getting a message in Google Search Console telling you that your site has been manually penalized, then you haven't been penalized. Next we're going to make an assumption, which is that you gained some ranking benefit from illicitly garnered backlinks. And finally, we're going to assume that Penguin caught on and devalued those links. This means you haven't been penalized per se, but you're no longer deriving optimization benefits from those links. So 'recovery' in this sense is going to mean something different.

Recovery from a manual penalization does not mean you will return to your previous rankings and organic traffic. It means that you are no longer being blacklisted by Google and your site is being indexed by Google again. But in both cases, what a client wants to know is "when will my previous rankings return" and the answer is that they will not. If you were ranking highly before due to inadvisable link schemes and those beneficial links were devalued or disavowed or removed, then you aren't going to see a return those strong rankings. You're going to have to fix things so you're obeying webmaster guidelines, then begin competing in another way that's within guidelines to bring yourself back to the top.

John Mueller gives this response every time he's asked this question in his Hangout series, and he gets asked it A LOT. You can see those videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUMqH8IyzOMBc_Z8i-S6-tVJ. This channel is a really fantastic resource for learning some intermediate to advanced SEO tactics via Q&A with John Mueller himself.

2. You can submit a disavow file via Google Search Console. Again, this is going to tell Google that you don't want any of those links to be associated with your site for the purpose of ranking. What some SEOs are guilty of doing when clients were hit with Penguin penalties was to disavow ALL backlinks instead of just the naughty ones, and this got them back in the index but completely nullified a lot of valuable and credible links.

Consider that it takes 4-12 months to implement and begin to reap the benefits of well thought out white-hat optimization strategies, and use that as your timeline for 'recovery', because again you're not going to see an immediate return to your previous rankings and will need to implement new tactics.

[DebashishB]

Hi Bret, Thank you for answering my questions so well. I will be taking the following steps please respond shortly if I am on the right track:

1. I did not get a manual penalization message in my search console. So I think Google just devalued those links.

But one of the keywords completely disappeared from SERP, how is that possible without any manual penalization, have you come across this before?

Thanks for sharing the John Muller Youtube playlist, it looks very helpful. Already subscribed to the google webmasters channel

2. I will be disavowing only the links I earned through paid product reviews. 
Besides these paid links, how do I identify the naughty links to my site, do I check the spam score of these backlinking sites in OSE(open site explorer). What is the spam limit I should be sticking to? Moz has a metrics from 1-17.

Thanks for taking the time out to help me out. Really appreciate it! Happy Friday!

[brettmandoes]

1. It's great that you haven't been manually penalized! Unfortunately, yes I have seen pages drop off the map entirely before for specific keywords. Most keyword tracking tools only search the first 100 results, so if you don't make it inside that bubble it will display a null value like (--). It basically means you need to up your game. Most often you can make it well inside those first 100 results by applying on-site SEO tactics. Update your meta data, make sure relevant pages are linking internally to the page you're trying to rank, and improve the amount of unique quality content on page. Put some focus on the user experience.

2. You can disavow them, but I would strongly recommend you first check which ones are marked nofollow. You don't want to disavow those because they're already compliant with webmaster guidelines. For the rest, communicate with the bloggers you've paid and see if they can switch it to nofollow. Give them a couple of weeks. I don't think you need to jump straight to the disavow file if you can get a significant percentage of those links marked nofollow. I generally avoid using disavow files as much as possible because it's like the nuclear option. Last resort.

Moz has a pretty sweet tool with their spam score. I love how easy it makes it for the novice-intermediate SEOs to do a good job keeping their site quality up without needing a ton of oversight from a director or SEO manager. Check out Moz's article on spam score to get an idea how it works: https://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk

I think if you have 4 or less that's pretty rock solid. It's an approximate value, so don't hyperventilate if you can't get it down to 0. Even this blog has a spam score of 1/17.