Matt Cutts has long been Google‘s first and foremost outlet for what to do and what not to do in regards to your SEO. Yesterday Matt Cutts published a blog post outlining what can only be described as pretty clear advice on Guest Blogging, particularly the following quote:

Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.

Pretty clear right? Well you’d think so as Matt continues along this vein and further discredits the act of guest blogging due to the fact that, as ever, spammers are flooding this practise with low quality guest posts.

This is now and forever will be the case. Look at link directories, now they’re spammy and very low quality, apart from the rare hidden gems. But once they were a great source of links. The same happened for article marketing to a lesser degree, when once you might have decided on running some, this now is a very bad idea.

I think the straw that broke the camels back with Matt was when he received an unsolicited email from someone that just didn’t sit well with him. It wasn’t specific to his blog and was poorly written. AKA spam.

But Matt went on to give further advice after, I suspect, a poor reaction to his blog post. He clarifies further by stating that:

There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.).

I just want to highlight that a bunch of low-quality or spam sites have latched on to “guest blogging” as their link-building strategy

So it seems that guest blogging is still a good idea. All that Matt wanted to point out is that it’s being exploited by spammers, as is pretty much every other SEO technique out there. So why, at first, did he come out to say to definitely stop Guest Blogging?

What do you think?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey