Noa Eshed — March 16, 2020 
Recently Google announced that it was penalizing guest blog post articles.
This is a huge deal for many marketers basing their SEO strategy on link building.
At Bold we’ve ceased utilizing this best practice for a while now. Backlinks built via link building outreach tactics are in many cases completely unnatural.
From our experience, even before this announcement, Google doesn’t buy this anymore. Submitting guest posts doesn’t actually lead to any improvement in rankings. Having a guest post or not having it doesn’t matter from an SEO perspective. So we’ve stopped focusing on link building but we didn’t have anything against guest posting once in a while.
Now, Google officially want backlinks from guest posting to be nofollow. A nofollow link doesn’t deliver SEO juice so it doesn’t impact the rankings. On the other hand, dofollow links are mostly discredited by Google, so in the best case scenario they will have no impact, in the worst case scenario they will lead to penalties.
Basically, from now on Google will not completely ignore nofollow links, the algorithm will take them into consideration giving them very little importance, but still, it won’t ignore them completely.
We don’t recommend not guest posting at all as there are other added values to guest posting such as building authority and generating relevant traffic to your website from publications your target audience reads.
So what should you do?
Don’t abuse guest posting, be moderate
In order to be on the safe side, when you guest post, ask the website that hosts your post to use a nofollow attribute. You can check that was done by viewing the page source, look for your link and see if the nofollow tag appears there.
When you publish guest posts on your own website – use a nofollow attribute as well.
Don’t guest post aiming for ranking improvement. When you choose a website to host your guest post consider other parameters that might benefit you such as the traffic it can potentially bring you, the relevancy and the authority of this domain.
Guest posting purely for SEO ranks is almost dead. Content on the other hand, is still king, and it’s there to stay.
Good luck!
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