Google’s engineer Matt Cutts today revealed an official view about Guest blogging links from the Google search engine perspective which webmasters need to look out for. Guest blogging blogs continue to dole out free links, and we warned you that Google might penalize guest blogging blogs!
Google View on Guest Blogging Links
Watch this video answer by Google spam team engineer Matt Cutts which answers Google’s view on guest blogging links.
I think Google is realizing the menace of the new link market for SEO which is growing under the garb of guest blogging. Here are the key messages for site owners engaged in guest blogging.
1. Reputed writers are welcome anywhere
Google trusts high-quality writers and the websites on which they write, and Google would welcome their content on guest blogging sites anywhere. Google believes such authors maintain high trust and reputation and will definitely publish great content wherever they write.
I think this might also be established well by their Google author profiles linked across the web on many such articles. Its not too difficult to find reputed writers on Google.
As Google has always highlighted – Google wants to rank higher authority useful articles, written well and by experts who know what they are writing (rather than simply outsourced from some article spinner). Google welcomes these guest bloggers.
After all those Panda updates, I think this was a very good clarification, and we might just decide to reopen guest blogging for high-quality writers, who want to showcase their content and not just desire dofollow backlinks for targeted keywords. Of course, Google search is changing, and it’s not always Panda.
2. Never create low-quality article banks
With the evolution of cheap SEO writing services, link buyers continue to push the same or slightly modified articles across multiple guest blogging sites. Google dislikes such duplicate content and will not look favorably at such article spinning sites. Don’t let your site become a ‘low-quality article bank’. Low-quality content is a major cause of Google penalties like Panda and Penguin, and you really need a lot of effort and reconsideration requests to recover from Google penalties, if you ever do.
Duplicate low-quality thin content stuffed with suspicious links to bad sites, from your guest writer who just bought a guest blogging backlink packing from freelance writers for a few dollars, and republished it across a few websites – to get hundreds of links from unsuspicious good blogs – not a great idea from Google’s viewpoint!
When it is taken to extremes, Google is watching and guest bloggers need to be careful about what they accept to publish. Google has still not developed a link disavow tool like Bing and removing a bad backlink profile is not easy. What do you think about this video?
Update: In another video, Matt Cutts confirms Google will penalize spammy guest blogging.