Google’s Matt Cutts : Guest Blogging should not be used to gain links

Matt Cutts, the man that heads the Google webspam team (of course you know him), said last week that guest posting should not be used to gain links. According to him, you shouldn’t be guest blogging – its considered as spammy.

So, if you’ve got a blog where you accept guest post ( like on this blog, where I have guest contributors ) that you need to ensure that its clean from spammy links and the posts are of high quality.

On his blog Matt mentions that Google is going to take a pretty dim view about guest blogging going forward.

The big question for bloggers: Is Google’s next algorithmic change going to impact Guest Blogging ? What are you thoughts ?

Check what Matt has to say about Guest Blogging

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7 comments

Ajith Edassery January 23, 2014 - 4:55 am
Thankfully, I never did any guest post elsewhere nor accepted anything on my blogs. Perhaps, I am a bit anti-social that way lol. Jokes apart, I feel that guest blogging in moderation and with the true intent of adding value to your readers is good. But then there's no sureshot way for Google to determine the intent in each case right? They can only apply a blanket rule on their algorithms.
rakesh kumar January 30, 2014 - 1:11 pm
first think first - In recent time whatever matt said is not followed by the google. Second, most of the time guest posting is spread like a disease because of link building and nothing. Thus blogs start publishing thin contents and thus a concept of multi author started that further reduced the concept of authorship and all that so in my opinion google will come with some suitable solution where a certain length size guest post will be considered as a proper post and all other will be treated as spam.
Chitraparna Sinha January 24, 2014 - 2:05 am
Zubin, There is no way for any search engine to "technically" distinguish between a guest post and the "usual" content. If Google slams down on guest blogging, think for those multi-niche blogs who publish varied content written by their "in-house" writers and credit them for the job, what will happen to them? Should such blogs be penalized? If Google does that, it will be really unfair on their part. I feel that guest blogging should continue only if it's relevant. Further, if advertisers contact us for the same, the links should be made "no-follow". What do you think?
ZK January 24, 2014 - 9:23 pm
Been quite a ride for Bloggers over the couple of months with SEO changes. The way to go is "no follow" I guess. However will need to wait and watch :)
Robert Singh January 24, 2014 - 5:04 am
Hello Zk, Yeah just came to know about this new update regarding guest blogging and I'd say matt is right about it. I guess most of blogs will stop accepting guest posts from now.
Dixy January 27, 2014 - 1:40 pm
There's no way Google can penalize sites for building links via guest blogging unless and until you are posting on a relevant blog and linking back to a similar content based page.
Robert January 30, 2014 - 5:45 am
I do not know what is true and what is not, but if that is real like he said, then what is next? Comments on blogs, article sites...?
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