Guest Blogging is About Links

A Twitter poll shows that the main reason for guest blogging within our industry is to get links. More than half of our respondents participate in guest blogging with link building being the main motivation for most. Google has been clear about guest blogging for links. It's inorganic, manipulative and against their guidelines.

• Google: Guest Blogging For Links? You Better Nofollow Those Links
• Google Says Some Guest Post Links Are Unnatural
• Google's John Mueller: Nofollow All Guest Posts Links

Despite all this, the guest blogging machinery doesn't seem to be slowing down. I get daily offers for guest post services, outsourcing and even requests from people to guest post on this very blog in order to get links. One thing is clear though, guest posts have detectable patterns and I wouldn't be surprised if Google's algorithms simply filter these links out in the near future. Google's John Mueller thinks so too:

The other thing is that because this is so old, we have a lot of training data for our algorithms. I wouldn't be surprised if the largest part of those links are just ignored automatically. If all that work is for ignored links, why not just do something useful instead?