Guest blogging has always been a powerful way to gain traffic, and improve search rankings, but it has been rapidly growing in popularity over the past few years, due to the Panda, Penguin and other Good changes. Many people have been pushing out guest blogs as quickly as possible to help improve their search rankings. While this can be helpful in some cases, it needs to be done with care. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search engine spam, recently commented on the difference between safe and spammy guest blogging.
There is a pretty clear distinction between an occasional guest blog, versus someone who is doing large scale pay-for-links kinds of stuff.” Said Cutts, “There is guest blogging, which can be low-quality, and frankly, I think there has been a growth of low-quality guest blogging recently, or it can be higher-quality stuff where someone really is an expert and you really do want their opinion about something that’s especially interesting to your blog’s audience.”
Just like all link building, if you do it properly, guest blogging will help you rank well in Google’s search results. If you do it in a spammy way, however, it will get flagged and your site will quickly get pushed down in the SERPs. Of course, until Google makes an update which specifically targets spammy guest blog links, marketers will foolishly continue to make these low-quality guest blogs. When Google finally slaps them down, they will be the ones to cry the loudest, even though Google has warned them. Repeatedly.
When evaluating guest blogs, Google looks at things like purchasing the links, contributing to blogs that are not relevant or are off-topic to your site, and the use of over optimized anchor text as spammy. When these things are seen in a guest blog, Google will reduce or eliminate the value of that link, and they may even put in some sort of punishment in the future.
Positive things they look for in guest blogs would include having guest blogs written by experts in an industry, a paragraph introducing the author and why he or she is guest blogging, and the use of proper anchor text.
You can see Matt Cutts’ video on this topic HERE.
