Is guest blogging bad for SEO?

Guest blogging has been an area of contention with many SEO professionals lately. With the advent of Panda & Penguin, fears that Google would view guest blogging as a paid or inappropriate link scheme have grown in the SEO & digital marketing community. Matt Cutts recently outlined in a video the differences between spam and organic guest blogging. One of those differences is that spam content or link schemes doesn’t match the subject of the blog itself and will contain keyword rich anchor text.

What is guest blogging?

Guest blogging is when someone posts an article on a blog or website that is not their own for the purpose of generating links back to their own website. Typically guest blogging is used to increase their own site’s search engine ranking.

Differences between guest blogging & SPAM

Matt Cutts recently outlined in a video the differences between spam and organic guest blogging. One of those differences is that spam content or link schemes typically do not match the subject of the website, blog or publication and contains keyword link text. The act of dropping heavy keyword links back to another website is a clear giveaway--often a tactic of blackhat or poor quality SEO.

Matt Cutts explained that if an organization's marketing strategy focuses on guest blogging driving much of the traffic to an organization's website, then "you’re probably not doing any favors for your site’s reputation."

Marketers need to be concerned with violating quality standards established by Google. Rather than gaming the system, marketers should focus on creating useful, interesting, helpful or another form of quality content that users (not just robots) like to read.