More guest blogging penalties coming?

[Ron10]

Does anyone foresee any future guest blogging penalties coming from google if the guest blogs are high quality blogs?  I'm wondering if a future google update is going to hit even more sites that have used guest blogging as guest blogging continues to grow.  I like guest blogging to drive traffic to my site but am scared to used it for fear of future updates in the algorithm.

Thanks mozzers!

[SamuelScott]

I can only hope that we'll see more penalties for guest posting. It's a tactic that I truly want to die because "guest posting" is just an amateur form of marketing and public relations that deserves to get penalized. It's trying to shortcut the traditional marketing process in order to get higher rankings quickly for a brand that probably doesn't deserve them in the first place. Nothing good comes quickly.

Why do I mean when I say "guest posting"? As Jen Jopez wrote here on Moz, it's "trying willy-nilly to get your posts on every blog for the sole purpose of building (probably bad) links." Google, after all, doesn't want to give websites credit for links that they build themselves.

In this and this post of mine here on Moz, I outline the proper process for obtaining the best links naturally through the traditional practices of public relations and publicity. Two of the parts are audience and channel research: determine the websites, blogs, and news outlets that are read by your target audience, and then aim to get news coverage from them or quality articles published on them. One of those links is better than 100 or 1,000 links on random guest-post websites that no one even reads.

Just do good marketing, and the good links will come just as natural by-products without you even needing to think about it.

EGOL, thanks so much for the kind mention -- you've got an upvote!

[MattAntonino]

I'd like to say "no, high quality guest blogging won't affect your SEO" but we've seen youmoz links penalised so I'd say the answer is "yes, any site is at risk if the link itself is risky."

Matt Cutts did directly answer on why YouMoz may have been targeted and you can read the full discussion here.

Matt Cutts: ...That said, with the specific instance of Moz.com, for the most part it's an example of a site that does good due diligence, so on average Moz.com is linking to non-problematic sites. If Moz were to lower its quality standards then that could eventually affect Moz's reputation.

The factors that make things safer are the common sense things you'd expect, e.g. adding a nofollow will eliminate the linking issue completely. Short of that, keyword rich anchortext is higher risk than navigational anchortext like a person or site's name, and so on."

[EGOL]

Check out Samuel Scott's recent YouMoz post... and be sure to watch the Copyblogger video.   Samuel's post and the copyblogger video are a fantastic pair.  (I am really surprised that the post has only gotten a few thumbs up so far.... but like most things that require very hard work and talent, people either "don't get it" or "ain't got it"... and a gem goes unappreciated.)

http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-approach-owned-and-earned-media

(To fully understand the Copyblogger video you got to know about "The Guiding Light"... "Marvel Comics"... and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" and how content creation, content ownership, content revenue generation and retail products can form a constellation - wikipedia articles are recommended but you only need to pay attention to who owned the content and how movies, TV programs and comic books were used as enormous advertisements.)