Guest blogging, as Matt Cutts says in this blog post, isn’t as good an idea as it used to be a few years ago.
Guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Likewise, I wouldn’t recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging SEO as a linkbuilding strategy.
Being lazy, being possessive about what I write and being highly distracted (and of course there was also this fear of rejection faced by every author) I was never much into guest blogging although it always hung over me like a heavy weight. People were doing wonders with guest blogging. People made entire careers out of first guest blogging and then blogging.
Let’s be frank. There are very few bloggers and webmasters who guest blog simply to add value to the blog or online magazine where their content is published. In most of the cases guest blogging is done to get quality back links because when you publish your writing on another blog or website, they also publish your profile with a link back to your website or blog. Fair enough.
In a recent blog post titled After content marketing, definitely focus on networking I stressed upon the point that it is not wise to solely depend on Google and other search engines for qualified traffic. You should develop your own traffic sources. If and when I indulge in guest blogging, it will be more for expanding my presence rather than getting back links.
Guest blogging gives you recognition. It helps you build audience for your own blog or business website. It gives you the much needed initial thrust. In fact, it would be wrong to say that I barely invested in guest blogging. In the early days of business I submitted scores of articles (those days I used to develop websites so my articles were on this topic) to many websites and most of my traffic came from their and this gave me a big boost and I’m still benefiting from that effort.