Once every now and then Matt Cutts answers questions from ‘the field’. This time the question came from AJ Kohn who asked about guest blogging.
Now we get a lot of guest post requests, we understand why, it gets links and attention. But is it really good for SEO? Matt tries to answer that question and kind of says “Yes, maybe, but it depends on who you are”. He talks about influential bloggers and about how guest blogging can be good to get attention, but he also seems to hint at that not all guest blogging is appreciated by Google. Which makes sense, he just says it a bit vague.
What do you think of what Cutts is saying here?
Posted in Google | Tags: guestpost, Matt Cutts
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I think he knows what he is trying to say, but he confuses the issue by talking about the number of words in a guest blog, as if that were in any way a measure of quality. The tone of his comments suggests that guest blogs work now, but that he’d like Google to get smarter in the future at sniffing out low quality blog posts.
I just think the number of words he refers to is about covering a subject properly. You rarely see short blogs on SELand and MOZ and we all know how cheap it is to buy some throw away PLR content for a client site.
I agree, quality has nothing to do with quantity, but an algorithm might think dfferently.
[...] Cutts posted a video last week explaining how Google views guest blog posts. He explained that they see two types of guest posts, and how Google reacted to each [...]
I had a Twitter conversation with Matt a few weeks back (3rd October) about guest posts:
To one question he answered the following…
Gary Taylor @garyptaylor
@mattcutts – for clarity does “exchanging goods or services for links” include guest posting, in the manner SEOs use guest posting for?
Matt Cutts @mattcutts
@garyptaylor guest posting can be okay in theory, but recently we’ve seen a large uptick in guest posts getting spammier & abused more.
I think the common sense approach needs to be applied here. A guest post is fine as long as it is adding value and not just some keyword packed, deep-linking spam-fest, designed purely for SEO benefit.
Its back to the age old strategy of writing good content for your users, not for search engines.
Liked watching the video..