What happens now? Guest blogging dead?

[FedeEinhorn]

Today, Matt Cutts published an article on his blog saying pretty much "Guest blogging is dead". Seemed a little harsh to me, but what happens now?

Is GOOD guest blogging still allowed or will it be seen as spam too?

I even picked up a chatter on Twitter about YouMoz: https://twitter.com/rustybrick/status/425374254465445888

[FedeEinhorn]

And just minutes ago, Cutts changed the post title and clarified he was referring to "guest blogging for the sole purpose of SEO"...

[WhiteboardCreations]

Hi Federico,

I saw the title change too. I'm sure the social chatter was going nuts all over the world seeing something like that initially. Hopefully, SEOs and content marketers have settled down a bit, like I have.

Guest blogging will continue, I believe, so long as it doesn't look spammy and/or paid for. I mean, how else will we be able to distribute content all over and build relationships?

Building the brand with guest posts should be a focus, rather than linking out to exact keyword phrases as many do and have done. I'm guilty of it for our site and clients. Things now need to change and that's our goal. Adapt and improve and be as proactive as possible. Much like you keeping up on the latest from Google HQ

We'll be the ones adding value to our service offerings and ultimately for our clients. - Cheers! Patrick

[Asjad]

This is extremely funny. A bold guy is offering Matt Cutts something he is going to love...Lolzzzzzzz

A part of it. Sometimes, I get confused. Let me recall

• Google spammed millions of websites on April, 2012 (Penguin 1) on account of low quality directories (I got an email from an eCommerce Store which was penalized by Unnatural Notice. Somehow we could not make agreement. But I analyzed his back-links. Just hundreds and hundreds of low quality directories nothing else)
• On 20th Oct, 2013. I got email from same source with amazing words "We have started to get leads from our website suddenly. We havn't done anything on it in last 1 and half year. We are ranking on many keywords as well"

Directory Submission was crushed and now we can see directories pages ranking even for competitive keywords.

Similarly, Guest Blogging (Particularly For SEO Purposes) was promoted too much in last 1 year and I was anticipating this from last couple of months. Finally, it comes. Don't worry. Guest blogging will be revived in next few updates;)

Guest Blogging for branding purposes (Nofollow Linking) will not be penalized by the way!

Regards

[GPainter]

It's nothing new and its been coming for a long time, did you see rands blog a while back on the subject - http://moz.com/blog/guest-posting-blogging-slippery-slope-whiteboard-friday

Guest blogging is still great for communicating but not for gaining links. If in doubt use a no follow link, or write a blog on your site and try to get people to organically link to it.

[artdivision]

if Matt Cutts said it, that means it works.

Joke aside, guest blogging is not bad but getting links ONLY from guest blog is I guess. I dont think matt cutts referfs to guest blogging opportunities between good web sites, news and organisations he is more into the unsolicited spam emails I get every day by hundreds offering 400 word articles with links in exchange of guest blogging to their site as well. This will leave a footprint between my site and his/her site. My assumption is that if you have a profile with hundres of these you will get devalued. No need to panic every time Matt releases a video

[FedeEinhorn]

Have you read the post? First he was talking about ALL guest blogging. Then he retracted and fixed both the title of the post and added a note to it.

FYI: This wasn't a video. It was a blog post on Matt's blog.

[MarieHaynes]

I think that the message Matt was trying to get out is that if guest blogging is a linking strategy then stop doing it!  However, when he changed the post to say that some high quality guest blogging is ok, I feel that SEO's are going to misinterpret this.

What I hear Matt saying: You can guest blog, and it's even ok to get the occasional link out of it, but don't use it as a way to get links.  Only guest blog somewhere where you would have taken advantage of the opportunity even if there was no link.  (For example, I guest blog on Moz for the exposure and the link I get is just an added bonus.)

How I feel a lot of SEOs are going to interpret Matt's change: Don't do glorified article syndication, but as long as it's not a spammy site, sure, go ahead and do a guest blog.

I think that a lot of SEOs are going to justify their link acquisition through guest blogs by telling themselves that they would have done the post even if there was no link, but in reality they are fooling themselves.

I personally believe that the next Penguin algorithm is going to discount any links that Google can tell are from guest posting.  It may devalue links that are in sentences like, "Marie Haynes is a writer for example.com...", or "Visit my website at example.com".  When those links get devalued then it's going to look like a penalty to sites who have relied heavily on guest posting.

[nezona]

It is really interesting. I had been thinking about stopping this for a while, because as Rand says whats starts as an authority source i.e you look for the best sites, you slowly try and scale as you get more clients. I have used Myblogguest and Postjoint for a while now but never did any "exact match" anchor text and also avoided "so-and-so writes articles on (example.com). I tried to only go for authoritative and relevant sites, but yes hands-up this just for links.

I think it is time to sit up and realise we have to adapt our skillset to become digital marketers, not just SEO's. Is this the end for SEO, of course not!!!.

My question is if we do have a few links we feel although relevant and authoritative, could be called into question, do we get them removed or leave them as is?

[Jeepster]

_I personally believe that the next Penguin algorithm is going to discount any links that Google can tell are from guest posting.  It may devalue links that are in sentences like, "Marie Haynes is a writer for example.com...", or "Visit my website at example.com".  When those links get devalued then it's going to look like a penalty to sites who have relied heavily on guest posting.  _

Let's assume I put a quality guest post on a quality site, with the do-follow link to my site embedded naturally in the copy and among one of half a dozen links to half a dozen sites (ie, the thing doesn't remotely look or smell like a guest post).
Does that pass muster?

[artdivision]

I have mentioned this a number of times but will rgab the opportunity and say it again.Nobody can fix google's algorith, not even Google itself. It's out of their hands, always was, always will be. The past already shows, that their algorithm gets a lot of things wrong and penalized small biz and ranks spam high, you all got examples of that. They are already bad at identifying machines or humans.

Assuming they will go for keyprhases such as Marie Haynes is a writer for example.com...", or "Visit my website at example.com" is simply impossible, for thishappen 99.9% of the guest post authorship tag must include the same keyphrase which i doubt. I find more likely to devalue for example ALL authorship links or even anything with /blog/ in its url, but for that to happen it would mean that 99% of the blogs have the same phrasing which I doubt.

If you are wondering how they will try to minimise that, my pov is that they will take into account a couple things such as 1)frequency of posts, 2) how many of these posts are original content and 3)OBL which to my surprise noone mentions here.

Matt refers to spam sites that are there for link selling purposes. If you follow his tweets and his latest activities you would know he is after the private blog networks advertised on the most popular black hat forum on the internet. What does that mean? that the algorithm cant track them thus he is trying to figure it out manually.

Black Hat SEO is the art of making a machines work to look like it has been done by a lot of humans. Google's job on the other site is to find out who's the human and who's the machine. Google gets better at identifying machines, so the SEO industry gets better at mimicking human behaviour. Guest Blog is an area that got abused but trust me there is a difference having a guest blog on a PR5 site, with unique content and 1-2 links and a total OBL of less than 30 than a guest blog of 500 words with 3 EM ancor links on high competitive keyprhases and roughly 20 comments with link in them. Then again in this case OBL would explode so why would you want a link like that anyway? You lose the value thus wasting money, time and resources.