Guest Blogging Isn’t Dead — MBG is Just Too Huge and Too Popular
Matt Cutts Said “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’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality 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.”
MBG de-indexing doesn’t surprise me at all, I was kinda expecting it after Matt Cutts “Stick a Fork in It” post. Even Ann, they owner of MYblogguest already knows that it was being targeted from this post. MBG is quite huge and too popular guest blogging network and Matt Cutts knows there are a lot of webmasters using it so it appears to be the perfect example for guest posting penalty to spread fear in the SEO world and keep people from using it just like what they did to huge blog networks in the past, but in reality they don’t have the capability yet to penalised every guest post in a scalable manner. They can’t kill it with their algorithm, collateral damage is simply too huge.
It wasn't MBG’s fault though, I do believe that (SPAMMING) is not Ann’s intention for creating MBG, but she obviously lost control over spam as MBG grow large. The real culprit here was the link hungry guest bloggers and content hungry blog owners that transform Myblogguest into a huge public network full of low quality sites and make it look spammy. In a technical point of view it became a glorified public network with only one purpose in mind — Backlinks for SEO Purposes.
Guest blogging is still one of the most effective linkbuilding tactic (just avoid “PUBLIC NETWORKS”). Fair enough, because the main purpose of guest blogging is exposure and branding but SEO people turned these simple concept into link juice funneling and link exchange which eventually pollute and make it look spammy in Google eyes.
In fact, Matt Cutts did change the post title of his blog post to imply that you should not guest post solely for acquiring links and manipulate Google. Which means it will all boil down to guest blogger’s INTENTION for guest posting. To me it simply means that Google has to manually examine every guest post on an individual basis (next to impossible since they love to do everything algorithmically) simply because their algorithm can’t really tell if the content is good or not or whether it is just for SEO benefits. This is why Matt Cutts, is asking us to help them find scraper sites.
In fact, I have a scraped content ranking on the 1st page for almost all Google data centers for a very competitive term outranking even the original page.
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