The actions of @anyx (author of @cheetah bot) will give Steemit a Google penalty and here is why!

As you may or may not know, we own a website that publishes daily science news and we also publish our content on Steemit. Since we have been publishing content to our website for months now, we usually publish a few old articles and few new ones (usually four per day as that is the limit on Steem).

We never publish our articles on Steem the same day that we publish it on our site to give Google a day to index our content and avoid any duplicate penalty issues that might arise from posting the content on two places in the same day. If you are posting on your site and Steem, you should do the same. Here is a great case study that will show you that you can lose a ton of visitors if you get a duplicate content penalty:

https://www.quicksprout.com/2014/11/03/should-you-repost-your-blog-content-on-other-websites/

So why should you take my word on this? Well I have been doing SEO as my regular job for the past 6 years and I know a thing or two about it :) The above is just advice for website owners, but the recent communication from @anyx leads me to believe that Steemit might be heading into a Google penalty and this should be avoided at all cost!

Steemit is currently getting most of its traffic from advertising and similar activities, but I have already witnessed that it is ranking in Google for certain keywords. For example:

The guide to splitting your ETH that was posted on Steem became quite popular and I think I read that even Vitalik Buterin linked to it. As you can see from the picture above, Steem is ranking above reddit and many other websites. As Steemit grows I think that it might rank for many keywords in Google and get a significant amount of traffic and new users from search engines. But not if it gets a Google penalty!

So why should Steemit get a Google penalty? Because @anyx demands that you link from your own site to the article that you reposted on Steem which I think is complete nonsense and also completely against Google's terms of service in regards to good SEO practices. Here is a picture of @anyx demanding this from us to be put on "his whitelist":

Another reason why this will lead to a penalty is also if people actually listen and do this, then Steem will receive hundreds if not thousands of low quality links and as the user base grows, so will the spam links…

I like the @cheetah bot because it prevents content theft and it actually pointed us to a site that was stealing our content (thank you for that) and we got things resolved with them. That is also why we happily obliged when we were asked to prove that this is our content and that we are reposting the content to Steem (we added a HTML tag to our website). But these new »terms« that are on the table to get whitelisted are not acceptable to us and they also shouldn't be acceptable to @dan, @ned, @dantheman or any of the other admins because they could ruin Steem.
If you check this picture you will see that Google.com is the biggest traffic referral according to Alexa.com:

And that number is just going to increase while Steem grows and gets more authority and ranks for more keywords. But not if Steemit gets a Google penalty. @anyx I recognize all the work that you do for this community and I respect and applaud it, but this move is not right for Steemit and I hope that you will rethink it and change it.