What are Guest Posts?

Guest posting or Guest Blogging is a Link Building technic consisting of publishing articles (guest posts) in websites which collaborate with you.

Inside every article, there is a link to your website.

In 2012 Matt Cutts explained the Google point of view on this strategy through the following video

These are the main points extracted from the video.

Extreme Guest blogging

Google judges publishing low-quality guest posts to be unfair with the only purpose of adding a link to another website.

 By low-quality they mean: 

• The publication of the same article in more than one website (or with little variation); 
• articles that have less the minimum number of words to be published; 
• articles that are not written to say something original but only to add a link;  
• off-topic articles as compared to the websites that published them. 

High-quality guest posts

Matt Cutts said that there is nothing bad if a blogger that is an expert on a topic, publishes his post on another website.  

It could be the start of positive collaboration and it could be a win-win situation for both the blogger and the website that will publish it. The website can have a point of view of an expert on a topic and the blogger can expand his audience. 

This kind of collaboration has become a sort of tradition but it is important not to exaggerate. 

The link acquisitions through a guest post should not be the main element of an SEO strategy. 

If you build massive low-quality links, Google won’t count them.

As Matt Cutts said:

The sorts of links that we’d like to be counting more would be the higher quality articles where somebody really put some work into it and they have something really original to say.