Guest posting is still worth the effort when the placement is genuinely relevant and lives on a real site with a real audience, and it is a waste of effort (sometimes a liability) when it is run at scale on low-quality sites purely to manufacture links. The deciding factor is not whether guest posting works in the abstract, it is relevance and site quality, not link count.
A relevant placement on a real site earns more than a link. It puts your name in front of an audience that already cares about the topic, it can drive actual referral clicks, and it builds the kind of brand recognition and topical association that compounds. When a site that genuinely covers your field links to you in the natural course of a useful article, that link carries weight because everything around it is real: the editorial standards, the readership, the relevance of the surrounding content. That is the kind of guest post worth chasing.
The other kind is the problem. Mass guest posting on thin, off-topic sites that exist mainly to publish anyone’s article for a fee is a pattern Google has spent years learning to recognize. Links from those placements get discounted at best, and at scale they can read as a manipulation footprint that invites trouble. The tell is intent: if the article was written to host a link rather than to inform a reader, and if the host site would publish anything from anyone, the placement is working against you no matter how many of them you stack up.
So the pivot is simple to state and harder to honor: pursue placements you would be glad to have your name on, on sites you would read yourself, where the link is incidental to a piece that actually belongs there. Walk away from the ones whose only product is the link.
Before you commit to a guest-posting effort, look at the target site and ask whether you would value the placement even if it carried no link at all. Pursue the ones that pass that test, and avoid the link-farm style outreach that treats publication as a vending machine.