On 20th of January 2014, Google’s Head of Web Spam Matt Cutts answered this question in no uncertain terms. Lots of guest blogging is bad for SEO because it’s been abused!

For those of you that are unsure what guest blogging is, it’s the practice of writing an informative post for someone else’s blog. Back in the day these guest blogs were hard to come by and really meant something. Because of this, Google started to take them into account as part of its ranking process.

Unfortunately this resulted in more and more people trying to get guest blog posts to help them rank higher in search engines. As with most things SEO, not everyone played fair and it has been a common blackhat SEO tactic recently to pay for the privilege and for this reason alone, I agree with Google’s recent decision. In exactly the same manner as paid-for back links, this practice, along with the total volume of poor quality guest blogs on the web, rendered it impossible for Google to actually know if they are genuine good quality posts or paid for garbage.

So, in conclusion, guest blogging for SEO purposes is officially dead.

However, Matt Cutts did go onto say that there are still legitimate instances for guest blogging and if the fit is right, you should still do it. It’s just no longer a practice that will deliver any SEO benefits but could be quite detrimental, if the quality of the blog is classed by Google as ‘spammy’.

Food for thought the next time you are approached about guest blogging!