Yesterday, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam and the most loved to be hated man at Google, posted on his personal blog that guest blogging is dead at least for link building or SEO purposes.

At first his language in the blog post was much more broad, saying guest blogging as a whole is dead. He then clarified that only for purposes of link building or search engine optimization is guest blogging dead.

Matt explained that while guest blogging was a great thing, the SEO space ruined it. He said, this is why “we can’t have nice things in the SEO space.” Matt decided to use some serious language and said “so stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy.”

He said:

Later on he added a bit more clarification:

Of course, the SEO community is buzzing on the topic. We have threads at Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and a big Q&A session at Hacker News. Of course, Twitter and Facebook is exploding, you can see Matt Cutts tweet.

Personally, I never felt comfortable allowing anyone to guest post stuff here. It is my site, I am not that inviting I guess. We maybe had three guest posts here from outside authors on rare occasions.

Of course, none of you should be shocked by this news. Here are some recent stories we posted on guest blogging:

Is Guest Blogging Getting Out Of Control?
Google’s Matt Cutts Agrees, Guest Blogging Is Getting Out Of Hand
Google’s Matt Cutts Describes How He Finds Low Quality/Spammy Guest Blogging
Google On Guest Blogging For Links
Cutts: We Will Penalize Spammy Guest Blogging

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and Hacker News.

Image credit to BigStockPhoto for pitch forks