Guest Blogging and Google

[engine]

Guest blogging has been on Google's radar for some time, and this video from Matt Cutts is really aimed at anyone automating or spamming with "low-quality."

It's clear that Google are aware of the growing abuse and spamming, which means it's bubbling up on Google's list of techniques to tackle.

I read from this that if you're producing quality, you're not going to be on the radar. The worry is that even quality sites could be hit if a panda or penguin-like algo change or blanket penalty is applied.

What's your view on guest blogging and how it's being used?

[EditorialGuy]

I think that, like most things, writing or publishing "guest posts" on blogs is fine in moderation.

(I didn't need a video to figure that out, but I can see why Matt Cutts feels the need to make such videos: Some bloggers are clueless, and those who merely pretend to be clueless no longer have the excuse that they weren't warned.)

[netmeg]

Just when I wanna say "No kidding, Captain Obvious" to stuff like this, I get no fewer than three email solicitations to "guest blog" for links on one of my sites. So yea, I guess he still needs to make the videos.

[viral]

Personally I have never been a fan of guest blogging in the modern sense (by modern I mean last 2 years or so).

The blogs end up just being massive links farms that are usually only barely relevant to your niche.

A good rule of thumb is. If someone contacts you about a guest blog spot via email don't accept because they will have very similar articles out there in the blogosphere. guest blogging spots should come through personal interaction. Hard to do but not impossible.

Those sites that bring "guest bloggers together" are just ramping up the hate towards guest blogging at Google.

Why? As Matt always says he wants people to collect links naturally and unfortunately those sites aren't natural.

Good links should be extremely hard to get so any kind of mechanization of link building even in this fuzzy guest blogging sense will cause a negative reaction in the halls of the Googleplex.

[webmarketingxpert]

I believe in one simple concept in present Google's and SEO scenario and that is of being 'Natural and Organic' with what you are doing. Google has targeted guest blogging because it was actually required. After the guest blogging method gained popularity several sites irrespective of any category or plan just opened a site with 'blog' in their domain and use to allow free or paid guest posts in multiple categories which triggered Link Farming.

Not just that, I get several emails a week with a list of sites that I can guest post on for a small amount. If to be said then several sites are using guest posting as Link Networks only. Since Panda and Penguin have been introduced I have worked on several and believe me none of them dropped from the ranking or had any sort of penalty and I believe that is just because I followed a work procedure that seem natural to be followed a site owner. I focused on improving the website instead of just building links. We should focus on building traffic and give good reason to the visitors to land on a site.

Thanks
Harsh

[n0tSEO]

Guest blogging is akin to magazine contributions by freelance writers. There is nothing wrong with it.

The problem Matt is addressing is the abuse of the practice (journalistic in nature) to spam crappy or unrelated links. A good guest post only carries links that are relevant to the topic and audience at hand, what in magazines shows up as a resource box in an article sidebar.

Link building may be a consequence of guest posting, but it shouldn't be its goal. If you allow guest posts at your site, make sure the writers you welcome have insightful ideas and research to share and won't use your site just to drop the casual link.

[diberry]

There's an additional problem, though: even if you screen someone's guest article and their website link for quality and determine that it's awesome stuff your readers will love, they could republish that same article all over the place... and Google may rank the "dupe content" articles higher than yours, even if yours was the original, because of their policy that "readers might prefer to read it somewhere other than the original site".

So once again, Google has created a problem but they won't acknowledge it in its entirety and offer advice. If you allow guest blogging, you will have to take the time to check regularly for republished "dupes" of those articles - with even more hypervigilance than you already use to look for scrapings of all your other pages. Because scraped pages with outbound links all to the same place may send an even worse signal than a normal page/article that's been scraped.

Sorry, Google's failure to either keep redundant publications out of the net OR just not count it against anybody when they appear really gets on my nerves because it creates unnecessary time waste and trouble for webmasters. Bing can sort it out, no excuse for Google.

[EditorialGuy]

even if you screen someone's guest article and their website link for quality and determine that it's awesome stuff your readers will love, they could republish that same article all over the place

Sure, and that was as true in the days of print as it is now.

If you're going to publish material from outside contributors, you have two easy options:

1) Demand exclusivity (assuming that you're hoping to attract searchers with the third-party content), or...

2) Noindex the "awesome stuff that your readers will love." (Your readers will love that awesome stuff even if it has a "noindex" line hidden between the head tags.)