MyBlogGuest: Relax and network (Photo credit: seosmarty)

Google really went after guest blogging last week penalizing any site associated with the popular blog community MyBlogGuest. If you ever posted a guest post from a site on the service, you might have had your Page Rank removed and received a notice from Google in Webmaster Tools. Regardless of the quality of the post or of other quality posts on a site, ranking in the search engine was greatly compromised by this heavy penalty.

Some upset site authors are voicing their opinions on blogs and on Google Spam Chief Matt Cutt's blog. Seems a little unfair that an entire site is penalized for a couple of quality posts that could have been posted years ago when guest blogging wasn't considered bad by Google, some blog owners feel.

The time has come to survive in the Internet world without Google traffic, it appears. A number of other methods to get traffic have emerged that serve as substitutes to search engine traffic, including social media, email lists, RSS feeds, etc.

MyBlogGuest was the first and only major guest blogging community to be penalized by Google. There might be others but there could be safe communities for years to come, no one is sure. Google is suggesting removing the links on guest posts and asking for reconsideration, which isn't a bad ideal. Both the site linked to and the linking site will probably find the removal of the links beneficial when trying to rank. This was the first time that a majority feel removing links is worthwhile.

The one advantage to sites in keeping guest blogging links active, is the readers of one site could get value from the guest post, go to the linked site, and subscribe to their feed. Thus increasing the readership of the guest author. This was the original concept apart from building links.

Google didn't see the value and across the board categorized all sites on the service as spam and acted to minimize their exposure in the search engine.