Guest blogging and SEO, a new post by Matt Cutts

Guest blogging has been a staple fare for companies wanting to increase their inbound links in a responsible fashion for years. But like most good things online once they become popular, less reputable companies and individuals come in and start abusing the system and it all goes pear shaped.

That’s exactly what’s happened to guest posts in Google eyes. Even if you’ve applied logic and common sense to your guest posts, Google can still bite you, and it will hurt.

In a blog post yesterday Matt Cutts at Google stated that SEO backlinking from guest blog posts was dead, then after some interesting comments, you can see them for yourself here, Matt Cutts has had to add three new paragraphs to the end of the post to give more “context”, they are:

Added: It seems like most people are getting the spirit of what I was trying to say, but I’ll add a bit more context. I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

I’m also not talking about multi-author blogs. High-quality multi-author blogs like Boing Boing have been around since the beginning of the web, and they can be compelling, wonderful, and useful.

I just want to highlight that a bunch of low-quality or spam sites have latched on to “guest blogging” as their link-building strategy, and we see a lot more spammy attempts to do guest blogging. Because of that, I’d recommend skepticism (or at least caution) when someone reaches out and offers you a guest blog article.

In my view this is a statement of the obvious. I have used guest blogs for my clients in the past but the content has always been first class and the blogs have always been on a relevant web site or blog. For me this is just common sense.

Defining what Google call a low quality spam site is very hard. If you’ve had a Google Webmaster Tools link notice then that should be a prompt to have a wider look at all your backlinks and do some housekeeping of your own. You don’t need to delete these articles if you think they are valuable, but you will have to change the link/s back to your site to NO FOLLOW links so Google won’t see this as a backlink spam opportunity.

If you’ve been paying an agency to do this work, whether with good, average or bad results, then it’s time for a deep breath and a links audit. If you are interested in a links audit please get in touch with me at  alan.tomkins@alpha-tango.co.uk, it could be the best SEO connection you’ve ever made.

See Matt Cutts original post here https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/