Few days ago, Matt Cutts warned people to stop guest blogging who were using it for building links. Because building links all by yourself is a way to manipulate the Google Search Engine and rank well. Something, Matt Cutts, a head of search team at Google, would not want to happen and that is why he wants you to stop doing it.
But he wants you to stop doing keyword research, include a keyword in your domain name or buy links as well, because all that is a way to play with their algorithm, which is used evaluate the value of a link and rank it.
So, has it been stopped? No, and in fact I have been reading few blogs that claim to do all these things to rank their websites in search engines.
Which brings me to a conclusion that Guest blogging is not going to be stopped.
I keep getting 5 to 6 guest post request in a week. I turn all of them down, not because they want a dofollow link from that 500 word essay. But the fact that their 500 word article sounds more like a Wikipedia entry and the guy has weird set of interests, like comparing hosting plans, or writing mortgage related stuff in free time.
“Jogn Parker is a technology freak who likes to compare hosting plans in his free time.”
And the reason number one is, they are getting paid by someone (either as an employee or as a freelancer) to publish that content on a blog. It is more like a sponsored post in the form of a guest post where my site gets affected and I don’t get the money as well.
Anyway, I have learned that the hard way, but I now say no to all the guest post request.
And about doing guest posts on other blog, I would say I have hardly done three or four guest posts in last 5 years, and that too were the ones that were not suitable for my blog or I was trying to build a readership of a new blog.
I did create a list of few blogs and article topics that I would guest posts on and submit to these blogs someday, but it was my laziness that made me keep postponing it, and now after reading the post by Matt Cutts, I think it is good to be lazy sometimes.
Though I have seen that Guest Posts have helped a lot of people but there is an equal number of people for whom it didn’t work.
So if you are considering guest posts as a way to improve your search engines rankings, it is not a good idea, but if you want more than a dofollow link, i.e, getting relevant traffic to your blog or trying to make a name in the your niche, it is still going to work the way it has always been working. Perhaps the SEO part as well.
