Matt Cutts chose his next 1 Month difficulty would be to trigger mayhem and angst in the SEO community by revealing the death of visitor blogging as a strategy for getting backlinks.
It’s a lengthy post, with lots of validations for the move, however boils down to this:
“So stick a fork in it: visitor blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy. In basic I wouldn’t advise accepting a guest post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Also, I wouldn’t suggest depending on guest posting, guest blogging websites, or guest blogging SEO as a linkbuilding strategy.”
According to my Twitter stream, almost every SEO I understand was in favor of the move. Which goes to show the high caliber of SEOs I occur to understand. 
As a blogger, I was likewise grateful to see this move. Why? Because I have actually grown exhausted of the gazillion guest post pitches I receive every day. Seriously, it’s become worse than the paid link spam e-mails.
Take this one, completely unsolicited:
Below is the link to the post for your testimonial. If everything looks great you are free to post it.
“Implementing International BYOD Policies: Obstacles and Solutions” ([ Connect to content farm generator]
If you have any questions please let me know.
Thank you so much!
My reply?
Thanks, we’ll pass. It’s not on subject and we do not accept posts from content farms.
Regards,
Andy Beal
It had actually gotten to the point where I had actually quit on accepting visitor posts unless I personally knew the author and could vouch for the quality of their work. Now that Matt Cutts has actually said that visitor posts for links are dead–– or a minimum of as dead as Google’s algorithms can discover them–– I’m wishing to have some peace of mind back in my inbox.
Of course, much of the discussion focused around whether visitor posts had any value at all, now that Google had taken action. Well, naturally they still have value. There’s nothing like a quality visitor post to get your name in front of a different audience and create direct traffic back to your website. That’s something that Matt wound up clarifying with this addendum to his post:
“It seems like the majority of people are getting the spirit of what I was attempting to say, but I’ll include a bit more context. I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are still numerous good needs to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed method before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some great, premium guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post making it more clear that I’m discussing guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) functions.”
As the adage goes: visitor posts are dead, long live guest posts!
Why I"m Appreciative Matt Cutts Kneecapped Visitor Posts for SEO
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