Is Guest Blogging for Links Building a Dead Practice?!

Google's head of Webspam, Matt Cutts released an article title, "The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO". Now, before you go and add nofollow tags to all the links on your blog let's be sure you understand the details.

To be clear, this isn't a line suddenly drawn in the sand by Google. It's just yet another clear warning of what they've been telling people for the last year or more, which is that people have continued to leverage guest blogging in such a low quality way that it's completely devaluing the practice as a whole.

This is how Matt put 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...In general I wouldn't recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well."

And the most recent of five videos Matt Cutts has done covering guest blogging:

As you can imagine when that article went live the comments started rolling in by the hundred forcing Matt to add a postscript saying...

"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'm talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes."

The bottom line is keep your guest postings relevant to blog audiences and offer unique, high-quality content. Continue to exercise caution when accepting the occasional guest blog post on your blog. Only the best content should be accepted by authors and sites that are reputable. Anything less could end up hurting you in the end.

Interested in seeing the complete picture on guest blogging as a link building tactic then see our resources here: