Q: I’ve read recently that Guest Bloggers are negatively impacting search results. Why is this?
Around 3 months ago Matt Cutts, Head of Webspam at Google, wrote a post entitled “The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO” where he elaborated on the fact that, over the years, requests for guest blogging on sites around the web has been used in such a way to go against Google’s Webmaster guidelines. This was done by offering direct payment in exchange for links to a given website.
Because of these actions, Google have started to make efforts to negate these practices. Last month Matt Cutts tweeted about how the Webspam team took manual action over a large guest blogging network including some of the sites using that network. Although guest posting is technically an authentic practice today, the nature of their acquisition is becoming more of a practice that go against the guidelines set by the search engine you may be trying to rank within.
