Google is on the warpath: Guest blogging is a no-no

Guest blogging was once a major weapon in the fight to improve your search engine rankings, but Google mogul Matt Cutts has announced the tide has turned.

Guest blogging as link building

In years past, guest blogging was touted as a cheap and relatively effective way to boost your incoming links. The idea being that the more inbound links your website boasts, the more authoritative it will appear and the better search engines will choose to rank it.

While link building remains an important part of any SEO (search engine optimisation) campaign, Google says guest blogging is now no longer a positive way to go about it.

The rising spam of guest blogging

Matt Cutts – head of Google's Webspam team – has announced that whatever weight guest blogging once carried is now lost. On his personal blog, he explains that guest blogging might have once signified a seal of approval from another website, but that the practice has becoming increasingly degraded.

Cutts first noticed a decline in the quality of guest blogging back in 2012, and in recent years he produced several videos suggesting a change in tactic. Now he's ready to call the whole thing off, saying, “So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy.”

He says that the real problem is the vast number of people who treat guest blogging purely as a cheap SEO trick, creating low-quality blogs with suspect links throughout.

Should you give up guest blogging?

While it's clear that Google is no longer going to treat guest blogging as a trustworthy way to determine your website's merit, that doesn't necessarily mean you should give it up altogether.

A good guest-blogging campaign can still help you build brand exposure, increase your reach and grow your community – it just shouldn't be thought of as a link-building technique. There's more to guest blogging than simply trying to boost your SEO.