Today, Matt Cutts dropped a metal folding chair on the SEO community’s head.

He declared, once and for all, that guest blogging is dead and you should stop doing it.

So, naturally, I decided that now is the perfect time to ramp up my ambitions that have been festering for a few months: I’m pitching myself for guest blogs more.

Why, you may ask?

Well, this kind of post from Mr. Cutts is a perfect way to scare away the low-end of the guest blogging pitches. SEO’s who were abusing this practice just tucked their tail between their legs and let those who’d like to post high quality, relevant and useful content on others sites much easier.

Hopefully the deluge of webspam targeted at many webmasters will slow down. Hopefully an email from a digital marketer outreaching for relationships to share content and expertise will carry more weight. Hopefully it scares away spammers.

I think that was the whole point of Matt’s post. Those up in arms about sites like Moz, iAcquire and others accepting guest posts are totally misguided. Matt specifically mentions this in an update to the article:

There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they will continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I am talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

That’s a much more fair assessment of the way to intelligently do guest blogging. Guest blogging with high quality content is here to stay: spammy guest blogging is on the way out. This isn’t anything new, it wasn’t a revelation and those who suggest otherwise were scanning headlines.

Perhaps the most interesting part for those who are abusing this tactic is the following quote:

I’d expect Google’s webspam team to take a pretty dim view of guest blogging going forward.

This, right here, is a classic Cutts carpet bomb. I’d expect to see a swift update punishing these types of guest blogs on both ends: the site that allows spammy guest blogs will be punished along with the site that’s being linked to. If you have abused these tactics in the past, I’d even consider proactively removing much of your keyword rich anchor text links. I foresee a future where a Hummingbird release knocks down the authority and rankings of websites abusing this at scale.

But, for those who are looking to pitch themselves for more guest blogs, I think the door just opened a little bit. Websites and brands running authoritative blogs will hopefully see the volume of their pitches drop some and it may let in more people trying to start guest blogging for promotion of their personal brand, authority and knowledge.