Google is keeping an eye on those linkbuilding by guest blogging everywhere

Jan 21, 2014 08:49 GMT  ·  By

Those chasing better SEO ratings by guest blogging everywhere have managed to ruin this form of writing.

According to a blog post by Google’s Matt Cutts, the head of the webspam team, they are going to “take a pretty dim view of guest blogging going forward.”

“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company,” Cutts said.

He explained how he received a spam email offering money to get links that passed PageRank, which is a violation of Google’s quality guidelines.

“Ultimately, this is why we can’t have nice things in the SEO space: a trend starts out as authentic. Then more and more people pile on until only the barest trace of legitimate behavior remains. We’ve reached the point in the downward spiral where people are hawking ‘guest post outsourcing’ and writing articles about ‘how to automate guest blogging’,” Cutts wrote.

This isn’t the first time that Cutts advises people to steer away from low-quality guest blog posting, going as far as to warn them that Google is, in fact, taking measures against such practices.

“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,” Cutts writes.