Matt Cutts Declares the Downfall of Guest Blogging for SEO

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Do a lot of bloggers want to write for your site? The phenomenon of guest blogging has caught web writers’ fancy and how!

The benefits cut both ways…

It was considered an honor to be a sought after guest blogger or a website so big that many credible guest bloggers wrote to you asking you to consider their articles.

Guest blogging owes this popularity to bloggers and brands alike. Both were lured, in part, by the SEO benefits it offered. Some of the benefits of having a guest blogger are:

Link building tactic

For the guest blogger, it is a matter of pride to have posts on a reputed website. He also benefits from the back links to his blog. The website too benefits from the traffic arising via the back links of the guest author’s blog.

Increasing engagement

Guest bloggers offer different perspectives that may lead to their posts being liked, shared or commented on, all of which improve reader engagement and the blogger/website reputation.

A way of content generation for websites

Having guest bloggers write for them helped websites in reducing the pressure on their content development teams. It also gave them the chance to offer readers variety in their content by featuring different writers.

Helps build a reputation for thought leadership

Guest blogging aided websites and guest bloggers build their individual reputations as thought leaders in their industries.

End of Guest Blogging for SEO

The enormous benefits of guest blogging eventually led it to being overexploited to the point of becoming spam. Many websites and bloggers began hosting and writing guest posts to gain links without focusing on quality. So much so that, this practice led Google to make a move to end the practice of blogging for SEO.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team recently announced on his blog that guest blogging exclusively for its SEO benefits, must end. So if you were in the habit of accepting guest posts only to build links, you should stop doing that. Or, if you are a guest blogger writing for websites regardless of their credibility, you would be hurting your own reputation.

Matt Cutts has called an immediate stop to the practice of accepting guest blogs that only serve the purpose of SEO. He gives the example of an email he received that actually hinted at offering links, which would pass PageRank! These kinds of practices would definitely not endear you to Google.

So, unless you want to attract Google’s wrath and be penalized, stop guest blogging purely for SEO and do it for all the other benefits that it offers.

Looking At the New Scenario

Guest blogging for SEO is not going to work!

So, what should guest bloggers and websites who accept guest posts do?

Do you stop guest blogging altogether? Or, should you continue it by following certain rules?

Of course you should continue. It is, after all, only the misuse of guest blogging that is under the scanner and not the practice itself.

Here are some rules that you can follow when it comes to blogging for your website:

• Look at guest bloggers as a means of generating great content variety and not from an SEO perspective.
• Continue accepting guest blogs only if you can vouch for the reputation of the guest blogger. Be selective.
• Sift through the blog requests for unique, good quality content.
• Use guest blogging as a tool to bolster your content generation efforts. Don’t be so dependent on it that you rely only to fulfill content sourcing requirements.
• If you are a guest blogger, be selective about sites you partner with. Don’t let your great content be undermined by poor quality websites.

What are your thoughts on the current scenario in guest blogging and Google’s stand?