Google has finally declared guest blogging is over and is another bad link-building practice. We had warned guest blogging will be penalized and the challenges for guest blogging. Google has been warning and trying to get some order in the guest blogging practice with subtle hints and warnings.
But guest blogging has come a long way from being a respected practice by good writers to get exposure on top blogs – to being a whole business of link building with dedicated guest writing services and getting unwary top blogs at the bad end of Google penalties.
So what happened now…
Google Ends Guest Blogging
Google Engineer Matt Cutts has been warning for a long time, but this time he made it blunt and clear.
I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Likewise, I wouldn’t recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging SEO as a linkbuilding strategy.
He also warns that if you continue accepting guest posts for free-content building purposes with disregard to kind of links you give out – these are his instructions to the Google webspam team.
I’d expect Google’s webspam team to take a pretty dim view of guest blogging going forward.
Guest Blogging and QOT
You probably remember we used to accept guest posts a few years back and were a popular destination for the same. Then as guest blogging matured into a full-blown link-building business – we had warned guest blogging will be penalized by Google and there will be challenges for guest blogging in 2013. We restricted guest blogging a year ago and cleaned up lot of stuff after we realized that it had emerged as merely a bad practice to get links.
Well, it is surprising that we still get over 10 emails every day offering guest articles and eager guest bloggers willing to write auto-generated articles for ‘just one’ dofollow link. Mostly it’s just AI written content, without experience (note EEAT guidelines by Google stress now on experience for higher Google rankings)
Google just ended guest blogging… in one post.