Dichotomy of Guest Blogging – Spam vs Authority

By Jignesh Gohel - December, 19th 2013

If you are in SEO or online marketing industry, you must know about panda, penguin and other search engine algorithm updates. Day by day Google and other search engines are working hard to make their search result clean and spam free. You may know that the techniques that were helping few years back are now considered as a spam by Google. And same may happen in the future! Let us take an example.

Guest blogging is one of the most popular medium being used by online marketing agencies to generate back links. As per Google webmaster guidelines one should not built artificial links that pass page rank. Now the question is; does guest blogging is violating these guidelines? Does Google will take action against such links in the future?

Here is the answer!

Recently I came across one YouTube video by Matt Cutts, head of Google web spam team. In this video he answered the same question in his own style!

Here is the original question

I predict that in the future Google will penalize guest blogging sites. Any insight on guest blogging as spam?

If you are in same boat, you really need to understand the answer provided by Matt.

In this video, Matt started his discussion by saying that the Guest blogging is quite a cynical approach. Firstly he said there is a huge difference between the quality guest blogging and the low quality guest blogging sites and their posts as well. He focused on the high quality guest bloggers whose words are worthy of your trust. Lots of low cost guest bloggers sites are running their business. So he suggests that you must be aware about the low quality, automated and the guest blogging sites that have no editorial value. Cutts admitted that the automation of this guest blogging is a severe problem because anytime things can become automated like the blog comments and the Google might get suspicious about that and consider this as spam.

What not to do as part of your guest blogging strategy?

As we know that guest blogging is growing in terms of the spam and abuse. Many webmaster publishing bunch of duplicate & non quality content for the sake of generating back links. Being a website owner make sure that it is up to the standards.  Here are the best four recommendations to avoid falling of the guest blogging into the spam trap of Google. He focused on.

• Don’t consider guest blogging is the only way of gathering links. You really need to implement other link building strategies that can gain natural links to your website.
• Don’t use same article and spin it again and again to built cheap non quality back links from duplicate content.
• Don’t send thousands of emails to guest blogging sites have poor quality. You need to build best quality content that add some value and can attract more visitors.
• Don’t participate in paid guest blogging activities.

In nutshell, Guest blogging can be considered as a link building strategy but only when you write quality posts for the quality blogs.

Cutts said, “We are regularly seeing lot of abusive sites and the growing spam in the guest blogging space”.

So he gave some cautious tips to solve this problem, like when a SEO technique begins to become abused too much then Google takes a look and respond, if required.

Today’s many black hat techniques previously considered as pretty vanilla SEO techniques that are abused too much that’s why Google had to reprimand sites. Cutts said, Apart from this spam technique, we are always looking for the things that are responsible for more abused and we are always prepared to deal these things by taking suitable actions that will assure the users to get the best search results.

Conclusion

Guest blogging will definitely work and can be integrated in your link building activities but we must take some extra care while selecting websites. Content creation will also require solid ground work as high quality blog will not accept crap and non quality content. I recommend reading this wonderful blog post on content creation that will guide you on writing best quality content.

If you are still participating in low quality guest blogging websites, stop it now and start thinking on this recommendation that may save you from big disaster in the future.

Image by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/udo/