Matt Cutts On Guest Blogging

[DarrenHaye]

The Video

My interpretation is.. guest blogging is fine as long as it's a quality article on a quality site and that sort of link is fine.

Maybe someone else will watch it and get something different out of it.

[distinctseo]

Certainly one method that many many SEOs are jumping on board lately. You'll see this tactic expand and consequently dilute.

[nehasharma5552]

Hi nice information ............

[Dr.Marie]

I interpreted it as Matt saying that if you are guest blogging on a large scale so that you can get links, don't.

[Belfast]

As with anything else... if you're manipulating SERPs - don't.

[ChillDot]

As with anything else... if you're manipulating SERPs - don't.

Haven't Google been saying this from the beginning though?

Essentially if Google got rid of all SEO's they would be happy, although they are saying dont do this, the answer still relies that if you can guest blog and get links to your site without looking like your spamming, Google wont know your manipulating serps and still rank high.

I wonder how long til Google manage to implement something so they can see the IP address of where each link was posted from and working on an algorithm to judge popularity by number of IP's.

[DarrenHaye]

Essentially if Google got rid of all SEO's they would be happy

They like SEO's in the way of optimizing a site so they can better crawl it, index it and what not.

[Belfast]

They like SEO's in the way of optimizing a site so they can better crawl it, index it and what not.

I reckon they're not even that bothered about SEO's for that. There is enough basic information about that online - google webmaster forum, etc. for a webmaster or web designer to sort. They are pretty good at finding and indexing stuff - and if even 10% of the web needed indexing help and couldn't get it - so what - there's the other 90% and of course there's always Adwords.

There is enough 'SEO' information for them too - "just build a great site", that's pretty much the sum total of it.

As bitter old czoom would say, "Google don't like you, now stop kissing their..." (I think I might be getting bitter to!)

[realityhack]

I thought Matt was quite clear in the video. I am not sure how he could be misinterpreted.
Putting up a high quality guest blog is fine. It is natural behavior on the web and a great way for new people to get exposure.
Spamming the same guest blog around the web is... spam. Who would have thunk it.

Same thing I said back on the 'article marketing' thread a few days back.

[Belfast]

I thought Matt was quite clear in the video. I am not sure how he could be misinterpreted.
Putting up a high quality guest blog is fine. It is natural behavior on the web and a great way for new people to get exposure.
Spamming the same guest blog around the web is... spam. Who would have thunk it.

Same thing I said back on the 'article marketing' thread a few days back.

More thinking of the general, "Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings" or indeed 'link schemes' from the quality guidelines...

[JBacchi]

I like his comment on "quality people." Makes me think they have a list of "quality authors" that they don't ding their articles. I again get the feeling that the algo is determining quality content by trying to read and understand it.

[dzine]

Ooh does anyone have this list? Am I on it?

[JBacchi]

Ooh does anyone have this list? Am I on it?

I'm sure you're right at the top, right behind me.

[Dr.Marie]

I wanted to add this observation. I have been helping with some manual unnatural links warnings for a few clients. With these warnings, you need to go back and remove all unnatural links that were made by an SEO.

As I am processing tens of thousands of links I am getting to see an awful lot of article spam. I used to think that articles would not work to rank a site but I am seeing sites that previously had #1 rankings for competitive terms all based on spammy articles.

Many of these articles are hard to distinguish from what some people would call guest posts today. In some cases the article is relevant to the site and the keywords are in an author box.

So I was thinking about how Google would go about determining whether a link from a guest post was a good one or not. I came up with a few things that could flag a link as spam as opposed to a valid good quality guest post:

1. If the author box text was duplicated across the web. (i.e. "Joe is an author who writes about real estate in Seattle. You can find him selling homes in Seattle.)

2. If the website on which the articles are posted consists of mostly all guest posts.

3. If the article is totally unrelated to the theme of the website. (This may be hard to prove in some cases but sometimes it is obvious.)

4. If the page being linked to has an excess of guest posts/articles linking back to them, especially if these guest posts all link back with the same keywords.

I think Google is ok with webmasters gaining links by supplying another site with a great quality article. But, if done to excess then it's a sign of manipulation. It's really no different than directory listings - a few are expected, but if you've got hundreds of them then that's not natural.

[JBacchi]

I think Google is ok with webmasters gaining links by supplying another site with a great quality article. But, if done to excess then it's a sign of manipulation.

If Google analyzed my site, it would see that 100% of my site is 'guest post" by one author, so that would be in "excess" but somehow they know it's not a poor quality site. They must use something other than sheer numbers.

I think anything against Google's TOS is acceptable if not to excess. Google has to cut some slack for things that happen naturally. The key is to figure out where the line of excess is drawn.