If you blog, there’s a good chance that you’ll regularly field emails from people saying how much they love your site and offering to guest blog for you. It’s all about search engine optimisation, of course, and it’s particularly annoying when your contact page says you don’t post such things. So it’s nice to see that the tactic’s about to be rendered redundant: Google’s changed its webmaster guidelines again, and such attempts to game search results are likely to backfire. As Google says:

The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.