Guest Blogging

This is very true.

The thing so many people forget (and maybe it's a good thing if it stops them acting on unsavoury motives) is that Matt Cutts leads the web spam team.

The "PR" aspect of his job isn't so much to encourage more people to manipulate Google's algorithms in nice, fluffy "whitehat" ways, but to deter people from doing it in ways that degrades the search experience and ultimately reduces Google's value as an advertising platform.

As you can imagine, some sleight of hand is employed.

When making these kinds of pronouncements, he appeals to the lowest common denominator in the SEO world, where good promotional tactics are routinely hijacked, at least nominally, by unscrupulous SEOs - spammers - desperate to lend a veneer of legitimacy to otherwise shoddy techniques and services.

This is when something like guest blogging comes to mean blasting content ["spun" or not] to scrappy blog farms, backlink networks and 'web 2.0' sites probably with the aid of some automated tool or service, for the sole benefit of link juice rather than any potential readership.

He lays down the law using terms the greatest number of people respond to. Given our nature to whitewash over bad decisions we have made in our haste to fulfil our short-term self interest, it stands to reason that very few otherwise upstanding folk who have succumbed to lacklustre SEO methods would self-identify as Cutts' intended audience if he were simply to call what they do by its birth name: link spam.