Yesterday, Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam and the most loved to be hated man at Google, posted on his personal blog that guest blogging is dead at least for link building or SEO purposes.
At first his language in the blog post was much more broad, saying guest blogging as a whole is dead. He then clarified that only for purposes of link building or search engine optimization is guest blogging dead.
Matt explained that while guest blogging was a great thing, the SEO space ruined it. He said, this is why "we can’t have nice things in the SEO space." Matt decided to use some serious language and said "so stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy."
He said:
In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Likewise, I wouldn’t recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging SEO as a linkbuilding strategy.
Later on he added a bit more clarification:
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.
Of course, the SEO community is buzzing on the topic. We have threads at Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and a big Q&A session at Hacker News. Of course, Twitter and Facebook is exploding, you can see Matt Cutts tweet.
Personally, I never felt comfortable allowing anyone to guest post stuff here. It is my site, I am not that inviting I guess. We maybe had three guest posts here from outside authors on rare occasions.
Of course, none of you should be shocked by this news. Here are some recent stories we posted on guest blogging:
- Is Guest Blogging Getting Out Of Control?
- Google's Matt Cutts Agrees, Guest Blogging Is Getting Out Of Hand
- Google's Matt Cutts Describes How He Finds Low Quality/Spammy Guest Blogging
- Google On Guest Blogging For Links
- Cutts: We Will Penalize Spammy Guest Blogging
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and Hacker News.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto for pitch forks
