Matt Cutts From Google Announces "Guest Blogging Is Dead" & More On New SEO Malpractises

This is a very bold statement but to be honest we can sort of see why this has come about. If you have a website with a blog you may also have been approached by somebody purporting to be in your industry and offering to write for you. A win win situation it may seem like; you get content, they get a link back.

Does this really add any value to you though? Matt Cutts says it depends who the content writer is. If they are of note, such as a journalist or even a highly regarded blogger, and have high quality content which is highly relevant to you, and provides insights in your industry then there is no problem. These are the kind of people you would obviously want to collaborate with.

However if the person approaching you has maybe been outsourced, is passing the same articles round multiple people then the principals are wrong in the arrangement. Here at Bongo IT we always believed that there was a fine line between creating great content and business affiliations, and blogging for the sake of getting backlinks.

So what else is new with regards to backlinking techniques? Well here’s another thing. If you are a website developer it used to be the case that for every website you make “go live” you would usually have a link back from the footer saying “Designed by Mr So and So http://soandso.www” (or something along those lines). It is now deemed bad practise to do this. You (the developer) haven’t really contributed anything (other than blood sweat and tears) content-wise to the site, so why should the backlink we worth anything? Even worse these kind of backlinks can be damaging to your SEO “score”. We are investigating whether having a link to a private page on the website (from the footer) with your company profile on there is an acceptable way to go about things.

So time to plug myself back into the Matrix and fill my HDD with more Kitties doing something unspeakably cute. Thanks for reading.

You can read more here

Matt Cutts SEO

Or watch this video on what Google think of guest blogging for backlinks