The company has recently updated their webmaster guidelines to reflect the new algorithm change about guest blogging, and building web links using this strategy.
In short, Google now considers low quality guest blog posts as an example of scraped content.
This follows the recent statement from Matt Cutts (the head of search spam at Google), who specifically said that guest blogging done for SEO purposes is now done. Finished. The content guideline section now includes a mention of this.
Here are two screenshots of the guidelines page, before and after the change:
Here’s the interesting bit, though. Going for original content is fine and dandy, but the low quality part is bound to create some level of confusion among bloggers and website owners. The obvious indicators are there, like scrapped, badly written or even promotional content.
But Google wants people to aim for authority content when putting up guest blog posts. This means content written by experts in their fields is the only thing that is going to fly from now on. Anything below this mark is asking for trouble.
As long as your guest post has some unique and valuable content, you are in the clear.
The search engine giant, for all intents and purposes, now has the basic ability to read and understand content, as opposed to just scanning it in.
It has already penalized several guest blog networks in the past few months, and now looks set to target websites and blogs that aim to manipulate their search results via techniques like these.