Hello and good to see you.Unfortunately, there is bad news in this post. But, also, some good ones.I will start with the one which is not welcome: Google (through the mouth of an important googler – Matt Cutts) announces that guest blogging is not consider important for them. “Matt Cutts made his strongest statement yet on guest blogging, declaring it dead as a linkbuilding tactic”. hammer time
Now, let’s step back a few months and look at how this online marketing tactic was presented last years: big encouragement, big fuss about it, all conferences talking about it and praise it. You see below just a small evidence of it. guest_blogging
Something similar happened before with another version of the link building tactic (links from sites and directories). And, because of abuse, it became very scrutinized and a lot of sites were punished because they got links from ‘strange’, ‘irrelevant’ or farm sites.For a small and medium business this can be scary, if they based their online marketing success on these types of recommendations. Even for online marketing consultant is scary. Because they need to find alternatives.BUT, here is the thing: if you are able to scrap away all the hype and trendy and ‘used only by the big companies’ tactics, you will see that there are a few main ideas which will keep any site out of trouble:
  1. Have a clean built site (technically speaking)
  2. Build it with conversion in mind (so you will not have high bounce rate)
  3. Create new and relevant content
  4. Use other online properties to increase your online footprint
And the Google sheriff will be less probable to give you hard time. Google-Penguin-and-black-hat-seo-300x300
This approach has other advantage: the investment you made it remains useful in time. Because the companies who paid for links … now they have to pay to have these links remove. Double dip!In conclusion: do not get anxious. There are ways to stay in the game and get results. More to come soon.