Are Guest Posts Still an Absolute No No?

[JesterMagic]

99% of the articles on my site are either written by me or written by article writers I pay to write about the industry we are in. Articles are tied to a user account which is linked to a user profile page which contains a BIO etc...

We don't have the time or the $ to write content about every single product. I always get requests for guest posts and just ignore them especially since Matt Cutts article about the practice back in 2014. If the product is interesting enough the odd time I may pass the info on to one of my writers to create a post about it or about the news about it.

Lately I have had a few requests for posts about products I know of but have not written about. If the article submitted is genuinely about the product (and is a true look at what it offers or news on it) and not full of marketing speak do you think the Search Engines would have a problem with this? If a link is included (almost all of the articles we write have links in them) it would be nofollow.

Thoughts?

[engine]

The approach was taken because of abuse, and I don't believe the policy has changed at all.

If the article submitted is genuinely about the product (and is a true look at what it offers or news on it) and not full of marketing speak do you think the Search Engines would have a problem with this?

Part of the problem stems from re-use of the articles, followed by the linking. Nofollow solves that in one respect because it's suggesting, "i'm not asking you to follow the link as it's not there for spam."
Just because it says nofollow doesn't mean it won't be followed, it'll mean, "i didn't mean you to follow this, but as you've found it, you might as well go and look."

Re-use is just duplicate content and spam: There's no originality, which Google hates.

Google understand a great deal more about sites, and any other sites which happen to have similar content.
Unfortunately, imho, it's not infallible, and some still gets through.

[tangor]

If the guest post is original and unique content there should be no problem.

[Dimitri]

To me guests posting is fine, just review them before letting them go live. Keep in mind this is "your" site, so you are liable in a way or another of its content.

[tangor]

Guest posts are problematic only when they are duplicated elsewhere on the web ... I have several sites that live and exist primarily because I have "all these authors" who chose to post their content on those sites. I treat them as I would any content ... it must be unique, to the point, and not an "infomercial" fluff piece...

No different than any paid content (contracted articles) some webmasters seek all the time.

As far as SEO is concerned, your content (guest or not) should be unique and relevant ... else why do it?

[JesterMagic]

@tangor - My thoughts exactly and I would treat it the same as all my other content. I would never allow the reuse of an article on my site (scrappers are another matter though).

followed by the linking. Nofollow solves that in one respect because it's suggesting, "i'm not asking you to follow the link as it's not there for spam."
Just because it says nofollow doesn't mean it won't be followed, it'll mean, "i didn't mean you to follow this, but as you've found it, you might as well go and look."

I nofollow maybe half my links to be on the safe side. When I reference other material that is always do follow but when I point to a product I nofollow even if I like it and recommend it and have no relationship with the company. Just to be "safe". While I understand why Google introduced nofollow I feel this in a large part is what is killing small business and seeing the rise of large brand/media sites. Almost everyone now days nofollow all their outbound links even if they are used as a reference (Wikipedia, Large media brands, etc...) that it is very hard to build a decent backlink catalog by creating good content.