Is Guest Blogging Over for your Link Building Service?

Over the years, guest blogging for SEO purposes has been a popular tactic for building links. Google’s view on this tactic has been steadily declining over the past couple of years and this week, the infamous Matt Cutts came out with the statement that really puts Google’s feelings at the forefront. “Stick a fork in it, guest blogging is done,” says Cutts referring to using guest blogging as a way to get links. This is a tactic your link building service has to stop.

The main reason that Cutts says that Google’s webspam team will “take a pretty dim view of guest blogging going forward,” is because guest blogging has become a spammy practice. Guest blogging could potentially harm your link building service in the long run. Guest blog posts shouldn’t be accepted unless you truly know the person that has sent the post and are within a respected online community. This means that your link building service can no longer rely on guest posting all over the web, on specific guest blogging sites, or using guest blogging SEO as a strategy.

This isn’t to say that guest blogging altogether is a bad idea. What this means, is like Google’s recent updates to how they rank SEO, you have to treat guest blogging the same way, quality over quantity. You have to be careful about where you are guest blogging, try to stick to well established and respected blogs in your industry. Another place to look is high-quality multi-author blogs where bloggers get together to collaborate on topics to talk about with their audience.  Guest Blogging for the following reasons on quality blogs is always a good idea:

• Exposure
• Branding
• Increase Reach
• Community

On the other side, this isn’t the first time that Google has warned the web community about those link building service tactics they find to be bad. The month before the Panda update was released, they warned against the use of content farms. The question is, will there be a new algorithmic update with this new warning as well?

In the mean time, your link building service needs to revamp their link building tactics to better fulfill Google’s requirements and to increase your overall SEO. The watch is on to see if Google releases a new update in the coming months that impacts overall guest blogging.