Do Guest Blogs No Longer Make SEO Sense?

“Head of the webspam team at Google“ Matt Cutts thinks so, as he makes clear in his own blog post. Because of his position, this proclamation carries extra weight:

“…if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.”

Google has discouraged everyone from relying on guest posts to boost search rankings for a while, but they’ve never released such a bold statement.

Might be time to rethink that aspect of content strategy for your blog, because it looks like the spammers have almost ruined an otherwise good practice.

We have to agree that the example Cutts gives is pretty bad: an unnamed digital agency offers him the opportunity to post “a high quality article” that is “Relevant to your audience” as long as he allows the org’s “team of highly talented writers” to insert “a dofollow link or two” within the text.

Beyond the inanity of the “we’ll pay you...