Guest Posting in 2015: What's It All About?
Since Matt Cutts declared it dead for SEO, what are the benefits of guest blogging for writers and publisher?
Since Matt Cutts declared it dead for SEO, what are the benefits of guest blogging for writers and publisher?
Since Matt Cutts talked about sticking a fork in it back in 2014, there has been much debate about the purpose and value of guest blogging.
I think it’s still worthwhile, and we value contributions from beyond our team, but the landscape has changed over the past two years.
In this post I’ll look at what guest posting is all about now and the value it has for writers and publishers.
The key point from Matt Cutts’ statement is that guest blogging should not be about obtaining links from sites like Search Engine Watch. Or link-building in general.
Matt Cutts’ statement on guest blogging:
So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well.
Likewise, I wouldn’t recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging as a link-building strategy.
Despite this pronouncement, it still happens. Guest writers will try to insert links to their sites, and we editors receive approaches from people who are clearly all about the links.
In the past, it has been an easy way to gain links. This resulted in a torrent of crappy guest posts and – I speak from experience here – tons and tons of low quality blogging approaches to editors. As someone who has worked for online publishers, I welcomed Cutts’ statement to an extent, as it did ease the flow of guest blogging approaches for a while. Moreover, it forced publishers to deal with the issue.
Some blogs and publishers were concerned about the penalties they may suffer if Google perceived that they’d provided links in return for free content.
In this context, it was obvious that the link between SEO and guest blogging needed to be broken.
As a publisher, my approach to this is to have a policy of no links to guest authors’ own sites, or to those of their clients.
This has a number of positive effects:
For the publisher, contributed articles have several benefits:
I should add that editors and publishers need to be careful about relying on guest bloggers and the types of articles they publish. It’s important to make expected standards clear, as well as general expectations over frequency of posting.
On Search Engine Watch and ClickZ, I intend to have our in-house writing teams producing more, and so the proportion of in-house to guest content will change.
I value guest writers, but it’s important for sites to have their own distinctive editorial voice.
What of the guest author who has sweated over the creation of a masterful blog post?
Well, there are benefits for them too:
Audiences for established sites like this aren’t stupid. They can see if a post has been written with the aim of nabbing a link. Or if a post has been written just for self-promotion. It can be very obvious and reflects badly on the author and the site.
On the other hand, if you offer knowledge and insight, and provide your audience with tips and guides which help them do their jobs better, then you will see the benefits.
While guest posting has changed recently, I think it still retains a lot of value for publishers and guests alike.
The key is the quality of the contributed articles. If content is written for the right reasons, not for links or self-promotion, then it helps the writer find an audience, and helps the host site achieve its goals.
What do you think? Do you still see guest blogging as valuable? Has Matt Cutts’ statement reduced the number of low quality guest posts?