Matt Cutts - Guest posts are dead comment

[Gavo]

It seems like it was a while ago now that Matt Cutts made his announcement "that guest posts are dead", however, does anyone know if Google has acted on this? Most particularly, for those that are targeting guest posts on high-quality sites, what has so far been the effect since the announcement on rankings? Anyone seen a dip in rankings from their high-quality blog post strategy?

[Vizergy]

Well I appreciate your experience enough to believe you are probably correct.  I have read many of your responses to people here.  You know your stuff.

[MarieHaynes]

I don't think anyone can say that guest post links pass nothing.  We have no way of knowing which ones Google thinks are unnatural and which are natural.  I do have a theory that with the next Penguin update Google will devalue links that they can tell for certain are in an author box as they are not really editorial votes for a site.  But...that's just a theory.

[Vizergy]

Agreed that it wasn't significant however we were told they passed nothing.  And now they may very well pass nothing - it was the statement I was questioning.

[MarieHaynes]

I've definitely worked on sites that had to remove guest post links in order to get a link based penalty removed.  I have no doubt that overdone guest posting can get a site penalized.  But, it's about quality and scale.  In some cases, the "guest posts" were glorified article syndication.  In other cases they were guest posts on good sites but done on a huge scale.

I believe that right now Google is penalizing some sites on manual review for overdone guest posting and my guess is that when Penguin rolls out, a lot of this will be taken care of algorithmically.  That doesn't mean that you need to stop guest posting altogether though.  For example, I'll still write posts for Moz and other good sites.  But, my main reason for writing these is because they bring potential clients and traffic to me and they build my brand.  When I'm guest posting I think, "Would I still want this link even if it were nofollowed?"

Should it still be part of an SEO strategy?  I don't have a problem with getting some links from high quality sites via guest posts.  But, I wouldn't make it a major part of the strategy by any means.  I'd stay away from using keyword anchor text and I'd only guest post on sites that have good user engagement (i.e. don't exist just for the point of publishing guest posts) and I'd only do it occasionally.

"However... I can't help but remember when links from Press Releases, according to Matt Cutts, were useless... then it was proven that they certainly did count. "

I didn't put a lot of weight in that "study".  They published a press release and showed that the link caused the site to rank for a made up term with zero competition.  I don't think that they proved that press release links actually passed significant value.

[Vizergy]

Ha!

[EGOL]

Sometimes I think that Mr. Cutts will say these things knowing that many webmasters will believe him and stop doing what Google wants them to stop doing.  Then later they may make some algorithmic changes...

I think you are right!   Thanks for the laugh.

[Vizergy]

I am not disagreeing with EGOL - I know when someone has more experience than me

However... I can't help but remember when links from Press Releases, according to Matt Cutts, were useless... then it was proven that they certainly did count.  Or when exact match domains weren't supposed to help... but they still did...

Sometimes I think that Mr. Cutts will say these things knowing that many webmasters will believe him and stop doing what Google wants them to stop doing.  Then later they may make some algorithmic changes...

This is clearly speculation on my part.  It just seems this way sometimes.

[EGOL]

**Anyone seen a dip in rankings from their high-quality blog post strategy?    **

Just browse through Q&A here and look for posts with a title something like......  "Wah!  my rankings dropped."   You can see plenty of people are still getting smacked.

Probably part of the reason is that people who are doing "high quality guest posts" today were doing "spam quality guest posts" last year and have that link profile on their site.... and some of the people who think that they are doing "high quality guest posts" today are really doing "spam quality guest posts".

[KeriMorgret]

I certainly haven't seen a dip in submissions to YouMoz!