Yesterday, I came across an article at Search Engine Land where a few words from Google’s John Mueller made me shocked. “It is best you nofollow links in stories you write”. Here, Mueller meant guest posts by STORIES. So what does it mean? Is Google preparing any scary update against guest blogging? This is the hot discussion which is circulating among blogosphere now a day.
According to Google, when you write guest posts and build links to your blog or website, it is an unethical attempt, because you recommend your content by your own to Google for ranking it. Google aims to rank content based on quality and this metric is calculated by inbound links to the concerned content. It is commonsense that when your content delivers value, people surely link to it and this is what Google considers for generating SERP results.
In Google’s eyes, guest blogging is as unethical as spamming. When someone spams a source, the purpose of this attempt is to build backlinks. You build similar backlinks through guest posting also. There is nothing different in front of Google. So we can say that guest bloggers are SPAMMERS in eyes of Google J.
Guest blogging may doesn’t leave any difference between guest bloggers and spammers in front of Google, but for guest bloggers, there is a very gigantic gap. When you will compare two posts of a guest blogger, one on the blog where he has posted the guest article and the second on his own blog, you will feel a big difference in quality. You will find the guest post much better than posts on the guest blogger’s own blog. It is so because when someone writes a guest post, he crafts it by heart by the fear that his post might be rejected by the owner. So spammers and guest bloggers can’t be same at any cost as spammers build links in seconds and guest bloggers spend hours in crafting quality posts.
When I started my blog last year, I included guest blogging in my SEO strategies, but later, I failed to do it due to lack of time. Still I’m lucky that people are linking my content and I don’t need to do much in SEO sector. But today, when I visited David’s blog here, I decided to share what I read, by assuming that you might won’t know Google’s ideas about guest blogging till now.
As Google has said to nofollow the links in guest posts, so I am going to follow their suggestion in my first (and might be last) guest post.
So what do you think about future of guest blogging? Will Google develop any algorithm to recognize and penalize links contained in guest posts? Will you continue to post on blogs or will stop it? Don’t forget to share your ideas in comments. I’ll love to initiate a discussion with you on this topic. Just leave your comment below!
