Does Google take action on spammy guest blogging activities?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from India. Nandita B asks, “Currently, guest blogging is the favorite activity of webmasters for link acquisition. Due to its easy nature, lots of spammy activities are going on like article spinning, et cetera. Is Google going to hammer websites for links acquired by guest blogging?” It’s funny, because I did another video recently about guest blogging. And it was sort of saying, well, can’t it be an OK activity? I was sort of saying, well, if you get a really high quality blogger, it can. But this is the flip side, and I wanted to specifically address it as well. If you are doing so many guests blogs that you are doing article spinning, and likewise if you’re allowing so many guest bloggers that they allow things like spun blogs, where people aren’t really writing real content of their own, then that is a pretty bad indicator of quality. And if your website links to sites that we consider low quality or spammy, that can affect your site’s reputation. So the short answer is yes, Google is willing to take action if we see spammy or low quality blogging, guest blogging, whatever you want to call it. It’s basically just placing low quality articles on that site. And so I would be cautious about using that as a primary link acquisition strategy. And if you have a website where you’ll just let anybody post, probably the kinds of links that you get embedded in those articles as a result might affect your site’s reputation. So do think about that. Don’t just think, of course, it’s called guest blogging, therefore it must be good. You always, as the site owner or as the person who’s trying to get links, have to think about the quality of the links, the quality of the content, the amount of work that is put into it, and fundamentally whether users are going to be happy if they land on that page. If it’s down to the level where spammy activities are taking place– whether it be article spinning, or a really low quality syndication, or whatever– that is the sort of thing where those results are going to make users happy. And therefore Google is going to be interested in ways to solve that. So do think about that whenever you’re thinking about either writing a guest blog post or having a guest blogger place an article on your site.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: