Guest Blogging Is DEAD for SEO (According to Google)

This is crazy. Google once put up a post tearing down one of the most widely done link building tactics there is guest blogging. Google's head of web spam put up a post in 2014 called the decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO. And it is 2026 and I still know a lot of people who are focusing way too much on guest blogging. I skimmed through this post. I thought it was really good. I'm going to share it. I'm going to share my take on it. And after all of this, you can decide how much should you be relying on this once sought after link building method. Now, guest blogging, if you're new to SEO and you don't know, instead of posting content only on your own site, you contribute content to another website, hopefully one that is in your industry, and in return, you get a backlink to your website, which increases the authority of your website. You're supposed to get exposure to a new audience, though a lot of SEOs are just doing guest blogging for the backlinks. And you're supposed to get increased credibility. Look, I appeared on this website. I wrote for this website. That makes me more credible. You run a fitness blog. You write an article for a popular health website. The article includes a link back to your blog. Readers and search engines both find your site through that link. Very, very simple concept. And so this is what Google's former head of web spam, Matt Cuts. He wrote an entire post about this, the decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO in 2014. and he said, "Okay, I'm calling it. If you're using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop." Why? Because over time, it has become a more and more spammy practice. And if you're doing a lot of guest blogging, then you're hanging out with really bad company. Again, this is still so relevant in 2026 because there's lots of SEOs who are doing a lot of guest blogging and a lot of SEOs who are doing all this guest blogging and they're not getting great results. Maybe, maybe, just maybe, they're doing it wrong or they're focusing on the wrong type of link building. So, Matt Cuts continues, "Back in the day, guest blogging used to be a respectable thing. Much like getting a coveted, respected author to write the introduction of your book. It's not that way anymore. Here's an example unsolicited spam email that I recently received. And if you have a blog, you've probably gotten things like this, too. My name is soandso and I work as a content marketer for a high-end digital marketing agency in a city halfway around the world. I've been promoting highquality content in select niches for our clients. We are always on the lookout for professional highclass sites to further promote our clients and when I came across your blog I was very impressed with the fan following that you have established. I would love to speak to you regarding the possibility of posting some guest articles on your blog. Should you be open to the idea we can consider making a suitable contribution benefiting to a high standard of services that your blog offers to to a larger audience? This this example is also filled with typos and broken English. On my part, I assure you a highquality article that is 100% original, well written, relevant to your audience, and exclusive to you. We can also explore including internal links to related articles across your site to help keep your readers engaged with other content on your blog. All I ask in return, and here it is. You see this all the time if you have a website. All I ask in return is a do follow link or two in the article body that will be relevant to your audience and the article. We understand that you will want to approve the article and I can assure you that we work with a team of highly talented writers. So, we can guarantee that the article would be insightful and professionally written. We aim to write content that will benefit your loyal readers. We are also happy to write on any topic you suggest for us. So Matt Cuts, former head of web spam at Google, says about this email, "If you ignore the bad spacing and read the parts that I bolded, someone sent me a spam email offering money to get links that pass page rank." Page rank is, if you never heard that term, it's like SEO link juice. When you get a backlink, it's passing this SEO link juice that makes your website more authoritative. And Matt says, "This is a clear violation of Google's quality guidelines. Moreover, we've seen more and more reports of guest blogging that are really paying for page rank or worse will insert some spammy links on your blog without you realizing it. Paying for links and I've had some really good SEOs on the show who have said that they've actually never purchased links. Just a fun fact, and plenty of other SEOs purchase links and get great results. Personally, I play the long game with SEO, so I take less risks than other people, but there's definitely a time and a place. And Matt Cut says, "This is why we can't have nice things in the SEO space. A trend starts out as authentic. Then more and more people pile on until only the barest trace of legitimate behavior remains. We've reached the point in the downward spiral where people are hawking quote unquote guest post outsourcing and writing articles about quote unquote how to automate guest blogging." This is also kind of what happened with the helpful content update. There were lots of great niche blogs out there. Things were working. There was a pattern that was working so well people abused it. Worse people started coming in and it was giving a very bad experience for searchers. Google nuked all of these niche blogs many were many of which were spammy but many many of which were also very legitimate and a lot of people hate Google for that. But it's very similar to what Matt Cuts is saying. A trend starts out as authentic, then more and more people pile on until only the barest trace of legitimate behavior remains. And this is where Matt Cuts kills guest blogging, he says. So stick a fork in it. This 12 years ago, stick a fork in it. Guest blogging is done. It's just gotten too spammy. In general, I wouldn't recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Likewise, I wouldn't recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging SEO as a link building strategy. For historical reference, I list a few videos and links to trace the decline of guest articles. Even back in 2012, I tried to draw a distinction between highquality guest posts versus spamier guest blogs. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't seem to hear me say to steer away from low-quality guest blog posting. So, I did a follow-up video to warn folks away from spammy guest articles. Man, Matt Cuts so great being in SEO during the time of Matt Cuts. He put out so much good stuff. Oh, wow. This is He's writing about John Mueller. John Mueller is Google's search advocate and now in 2026 is a major figure in SEO. And Matt Cut says of John Mueller, "In mid 2013, John Mueller gave spot-on advice about no following links in blog posts. I think by mid 2013, a lot of people saw the clear trend towards guest blogging being overused by a bunch of lowquality spammy sites." And John Mueller, I'm looking at this from search engine land, John Mueller said, "In general, it is best you no follow links in stories you write, especially when those stories are guest blog posts for the purpose of link building." So if you link to something with the intent that it should help your Google rankings, then no follow the link. If you write something without that intent and the link is really natural, then there is no reason to no follow the link. And I shared that actually on a previous episode, episode 986 of this show. Google recommends outbound links. Most SEOs ignore this. That's a very good episode. Matt Cuts continues and we're almost done now. Then a few months ago, I took a question about how to be a guest blogger without it looking like paying for backlinks. Even the question is a clue that guest blog posting has been getting spammier and spamier. I tried to find a sliver of daylight to talk about highquality guest blog posts. But if you read the transcript, you'll notice that I ended up spending most of the time talking about lowquality/spam guest posting and guest articles. And then in this video that we posted last month, even the question itself predicted that Google would take stronger action and asked about guest blogging as spam. So there you have it, the decay of a once authentic way to reach people. Given how spammy it's become, I'd expect Google's web spam team to take a pretty dim view of guest blogging going forward. Now, because a lot of people misunderstood what Matt Cuts was saying, he added this part at the end to give more context about when it's okay. So, he said, "It seems like most people are getting the spirit of what I was trying to say, but I'll add a bit more context. I'm not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging, exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc. Those reasons existed way before Google and they will continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic highquality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I'm talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization SEO purposes. I'm also not talking about multi-author blogs. Highquality multi-author blogs like Boing Boing have been around since the beginning of the web and they can be compelling, wonderful, and useful. I just want to highlight that a bunch of low-quality or spam sites have latched on to guest blogging as their link building strategy and we see a lot more spammy attempts to do guest blogging. Because of that, I'd recommend skepticism or at least caution when somebody reaches out and offers you a guest blog article. So, this is my take now. Edward St. This is my take on guest blogging for SEO. Should you rely on it? And I'm going to say it is only worth your time. If you believe the link will bring you relevant traffic, optimize for that. If the link that you get in your guest blog post will bring you relevant traffic, do it then. Or if you are in such a good publication that you can actually put it on your LinkedIn, you could put it on social media. You could include a logo of that publication on your site to increase credibility of yourself and your brand. If you optimize for those two things, you will only do guest blogging that is actually valuable, which is why the tactic existed in the first place. Because the reality is there's lots of better ways to build backlinks. And if you are thinking about taking guest blog posts and you are playing SEO for the long game, and this isn't just a turn and burn website, and I've had plenty of people on this show who like doing turn and burn websites, and I'm not I'm not bashing that, but if you're playing SEO for the long game, which is what I personally like to do, only do a guest blog from somebody who is going to make your brand look more credible. And if you think this is somebody with a decent audience as well who might share what they wrote on LinkedIn, I I had a strategy for one of my sites where we actually had tons of guest blog posts. And so what happened was people would say, "Oh my gosh, we appeared on this website and then they would share their article on LinkedIn on it was Twitter at the time, sometimes on their own blogs and that brought us legitimate traffic in our industry. It was a great tactic. I love doing that. And it made us look better, too, because we were interacting with tons of people again in our industry. So, it made us look more credible from the outside, from people looking at our brand from the outside and then from the inside cuz you're in our blog and you see, oh, all these people in the industry, these real people are writing for this blog. That makes us look better. But if you want to do guest blogging to get links, please, I am begging you. I feel like I say this on every episode of this show, optimize for backlinks that will bring you traffic, relevant traffic, or that will make you more credible. And you will be so happy that you did not waste your time on backlinks that honestly they're not going to move the needle. And if you do too many of these backlinks that aren't going to move the needle, could end up well, some people might think it could end up hurting you, but at the very least, it's going to be a waste of time. And I really I see it a lot. Here are three resources that you can use for alternatives to guest blogging. Number one, episode 939 of this podcast, how to build backlinks for a brand new website from zero authority. That is an excellent episode. You will love it. Number two, this article on my website, the AI system to find relevant journalists, land coverage and earn ongoing high authority backlinks. These are relevant backlinks that will bring you traffic. These are great great links. Number three, how to rank for competitive keywords without backlinks because you can also you can create authority for your website just by ranking just by ranking and having clicks that don't result in pogo sticking. And you can create authority and then funnel this authority to your valuable SEO pages. And there's a bonus number four for building backlinks. My SEO course compact keywords. There is a 2hour link building section showing myself building backlinks. How I build backlinks in SEO. 2-hour link building section in compact keywords. People are loving the course. You will love it too. There is so much in it. It is about doing SEO that gets customers, that gets users, that gets warm leads calling you up. It is about doing SEO that gets results, not meaningless traffic. It is a 13 and a halfhour course. I have my templates for creating conversionbased SEO landing pages, how I find high intent keywords, how I structure my site for these pages, examples in every niche. So, so much is in this course and I update it constantly. I update it every week or two. So, if you haven't checked it out, that is at compactkeywords.com. You're going to love it. And that is everything that I got for you on this episode of the show. You know, yesterday was a very special episode. Yesterday was episode 1,000 of the Edward Show. 1,000 days in a row doing this podcast. And now we are on 1,0001. I can't believe that I am now into the thousands. This is just so insane. A thousand1 days in a row doing this show. If you watch us on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again tomorrow.