Michael Martinez: Throughout 2013 I saw a lot of people complaining about receiving Google penalties (manual action notices) over their guest post links.
In early 2014 Matt Cutts (then head of Google`s spam team) officially told the link building world to "stick a fork in it" about guest posting for links. He only did that because they were penalizing so many sites he felt it was a kindness to warn people about the risk.
When the Penguin 4.0 link algorithm went live, Google stopped punishing sites for link building and simply ignored the links.
So they`ve been on to this guest posting business for years (probably before 2013).
If they say they are ignoring guest post links, you can be sure they are at least ignoring a LOT of them.
Ethan Lazuk: Michael Martinez Nice summary. Curious about how the links are ignored. This is my understanding of PageRank Updated: Google uses authoritative seed pages (e.g., NY Times article) and link length to create a diminished link graph. Links outside this graph, i.e., too far from seed pages, are discounted or ignored, likely including most guest posts. Is that fairly accurate?
Michael Martinez: Ethan Lazuk The "seed pages" concept came from a Yahoo patent that - so far as anyone outside of Google knows - Google has never used.
Google updates PageRank on a continuous basis as it crawls the Web. They have not (to the best of my knowledge) published any algorithms that explain how they can do that.
The original PageRank paper published in 1998 required that PageRank be calculated for the entire index through several consecutive iterations. That was one of the processes that forced Google to do a monthly dance (they rolled out new data to all their data centers once a month).
Ethan Lazuk: Michael Martinez Oh, interesting. I didn’t realize it came from a Yahoo patent. I’ll have to look that up to learn more about it. Appreciate the response!
Brett Tabke: Notice the caveat: "if you`re just doing it for the links". So, that is not to say the link won`t help if: If you are doing it to help crawl rate. If you are doing it to get that first proper indexing. If you are doing it to link to a high ranking page on the current keyword (theme of the page). If you are doing it to get the images on the page indexed in g images. (link to the image directly) Anchor text? Bueller, Bueller?
Qsudip Bhandari: Apart from link value, there are other benefits. Like, you can drive people to your site visibility of your site might increase.
But make sure to guest blog only those site which has decent amount of traffic.
Michael Romano: Does the empirical evidence match what Google says?
Ethan Lazuk: Guests posts should help build your brand, not your backlink profile. 😉
Perhaps we can stop asking about Guest Posts now 
