Back in January, Matt Cutts wrote that if you use guest blogging as a way to gain links, you should stop, because it had “gotten so spammy” that he would “stick a fork in it”. The line got quoted everywhere, and a lot of people read it as guest posting being finished full stop. Four months on it is worth being clear about what he actually said, because the panic was wider than the point.
He was talking about a specific abuse. The model where you churn out mediocre articles, or pay someone to, and place them anywhere that will take a link back to your site. That was already a tired tactic before he said anything. Networks had grown up entirely to sell these placements, the writing was thin, and the only reason the posts existed was the link in the author bio. Google was always going to come for that.
What he did not say was that writing for other people’s audiences is dead. Those are different activities that happen to share a name.
If you write a genuinely good piece for a respected publication because their readers are your audience, that is still worth doing. The value is the exposure to the right people, not a line of anchor text. That was true before the fork comment and it is true now. Where I would be careful:
- Stop chasing sites purely for their link. If you would not want the placement without the link, that is a signal about the placement.
- Watch the anchor text. Exact-match keyword links in author bios across dozens of sites is the exact pattern that got flagged. A natural mention or a link on your own name is a different thing.
- Look at where a post would actually sit. A site that publishes anything from anyone, stuffed with unrelated outbound links, is a bad neighbourhood to have your name in regardless of what Google thinks this week.
The disavow tool and Webmaster Tools are getting more use as a result. People who built links this way over the last couple of years are now working out which ones to distance themselves from, which is not a fun job.
My read is that this is a correction rather than a catastrophe. The tactic that got named and shamed deserved it. Writing something good for an audience that is not yours, and being read by people who might not otherwise find you, was never really an SEO trick. It got lumped in with one, and now the two are being pulled apart again. That is healthy, even if it made a lot of link builders nervous for a quarter.
