The search giant Google is out for a little housecleaning. Seeking those people that distribute contents to the web, Google said that if their primary purpose is to get links, both the authors and the publishers are at risk of receiving a penalty.
Google warns that no content marketing should be done for links.
Google also reminds those that produces published contents in multiple places. Without proper care, they could also violate its rules against link schemes.
What Google is doing here isn't like the search engine is against article distribution in general. Google only highlights that the distribution of contents shouldn't be all, or primarily about getting links.
"For websites creating articles made for links, Google takes action on this behavior because it’s bad for the Web as a whole. When link building comes first, the quality of the articles can suffer and create a bad experience for users."
People on the web tend to aim for backlinks, especially from reputable publishers, because this is one of the ways for a content to rank better on Google.
But people are abusing the method.
According to Google, the company is looking forward for websites for not: stuffing keyword-rich links to posts, having articles posted to many different websites, hiring people that aren't knowledgeable about the topic they're writing on, using similar contents across multiple articles, and so forth.
Google is also keeping a close eye to those websites that are publishing articles with spammy links.
In order to stay safe in distributing those contents without being penalized by Google, website publishers and authors can use the rel="nofollow" tag on specific links to prevent those links from passing along ranking credit, or use the canonical tag on the page itself to tell Google not to let any of the links on the page pass credit.