The Rise And Fall Of Guest Blogging for SEO

Inevitable isn’t it….Guest blogging became a great idea in SEO for awhile and was being used (or abused) greatly by the SEO industry. As expected, the quality of the guest blogging has gone down and poor quality guest blogging has become much more prevalent. Google noticed it and it was about time that they do something about it.

Matt Cutts wrote in his personal blog that we shouldn’t use guest blogging as a way to get links. The other side of the coin is true as well meaning if you are accepting guest blog posts, make sure that you personally check the quality of the article and aren’t just accepting whatever comes your way as “free” content. This is applicable for every blog post that you submit or accept.

If you are still doing guest blogging as a method to gain links, you need to stop doing that in 2014! The reason is simple – with time it will just become another spamming technique. There might even come a day when you will have to go for a link removal process to remove these links you are creating via guest blogging. It is only a matter of time before this becomes a completely spammy technique in the eyes of Google and to be 100% completely honest, that time is dawning upon us. Don’t take the shortcut! If shortcuts worked… they’d be the way!!

Guest blogs used to be a very important and prestigious weapon, especially when high authority sites would ask you to write for them. It was as honorable as being a guest columnist of a leading daily. It is of course very prestigious for anyone to know that any high profile site or portal thought their content to be of the excellent quality. It will also make you feel important as the site is willing to republish something which you have written. It certifies that you know what you are talking about and the site is accepting that you are an expert there. In those glorious days of guest blogging, even the sites used to feel proud when a real expert decided to write for them.

It is for this reason, many websites and portals used this technique but the aim wasn’t to give or take links. The main advantage of this strategy was to get high quality write up at free of cost which is always welcome or to get published at a great place which is always a nice feeling for any author. The websites can easily cater to their readers without producing the high quality content constantly and also can introduce authors which they thought their readers will like.

When you look at guest blogging, it wasn’t initially considered to be a SEO technique, but then the SEO industry realized the excellent potential it has for earning links. At first, they approached it slowly, writing really good content and getting links from good quality sites but then the spamming started, especially when Google came down against article posting. Fake guest bloggers came into limelight with mass produced guest blogs which are poor in quality. Guest blogging deviated from the original purpose which was very popular with site owners, authors or the readers.

The quality of the guest blogs have come down really in the last year or so. Guest blogging has become a new source of low quality content online and the only difference is, these contents are now known as guest blogs instead of articles. For the site owners, when you accept crappy quality guest blogs, you are really risking the reputation of the site and there is a good chance that you might turn the visitor off, permanently.

In fact, the ‘authors’ are offering money to the site owners to publish their content, the game has stooped so low recently. You might get tempted, as a site owner, to take that easy money but beware of the Google wrath. Think of the future, when Google discovers that your site is full of crappy content, it might ruin your ranking immediately and permanently. Google can also sniff paid links rather well, so don’t chop your own roots like that.

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