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• Todd Johnson
• December 24, 2013
• Comment(s) | 2
• Posted 7 years ago

With each Google algorithm update, the SEO community is pushed into chaos. Before the update hits, bloggers take advantage of curious website owners by posting speculative articles on what the update might result in. Once an update hits, the focus is on salvaging penalised websites and trying to repair whatever you have been doing wrong on your SEO strategy. This is where SEO fads are created. When an SEO guru states a method that has a positive effect on a site's rankings, people go overboard with it and end up making it irrelevant in the process.

Let's take guest blogging as an example. When Matt Cutts of Google, first mentioned about how guest blogging, in moderation can improve a website's credibility after the Penguin update. After all, it really is a great way to get exposure for a blog, provided that the guest blogger is a relevant person to the industry. However, after the statement was made, there was a great big rush for guest blogging and people took it to the farthest extreme. From low quality blog articles sent manually to thousands of prominent bloggers in the world all the way to automated guest blogging, guest blogging was quickly turned into the new link spamming technique.

Whether it is guest blogging or link spamming, search engines are capable of recognising low quality links. What went wrong for guest bloggers who took the practice to the extreme is that they failed to do it in moderation and to pay attention to quality. One thing that SEO professionals and website owners need to keep in mind is that no link building method is safe or recommended if low quality content and massive numbers are involved at any point. As for the current status of guest blogging, unless it appears perfectly natural and paired with excellent content, it is highly unlikely that it will contribute to improved rankings. If you are guilty of spun articles, automated link requests and mass emails, it's better to stop now and invest in more natural SEO methods.

We see people and companies claiming to have come up with the perfect formula for SEO and promise top rankings within unbelievably short time periods after each update. The majority of these involve link spamming which still might offer a quick ranking spike but drop just as fast. In some cases, your website can even end up penalised.

In reality, there really aren't any 'new and improved' SEO techniques to speak of. Only quality links and quality websites have hopes of remaining in the top of the SERPs, update after update. Should a new method be introduced, it's best used sparingly and definitely not as the primary method of link building to maintain a good reputation and high positions in the long run.

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