 |
| blogging (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee) |
Virtually every week, I receive emails from people offering to write guest posts for my blog. I used to be flattered by the offers and think that, finally, my blog had arrived and that it was being taken seriously.
But, then I wised up when I realised that the offers for guest blogging were there to take advantage of the Google PageRank that 'Digital Business' enjoys, namely a PR of 1 (Ok, it’s got some way to go, but it’s better than zero). The writers wanted to get a good back link from my site to their own or their client’s website.
Some time later, I began, also, to get emails from the websites which had inbound links from my blog to remove the links. They were very polite and said that the company that had provided the article and the link had not had permission to do so. I obliged and removed the links from the guest posts in question.
With my suspicions raised, I then read Matt Cutts’ blog post which confirmed what I had been thinking: Guest blogging is not what it used to be.
Guest blogging had once been a very good activity to carry out to help you develop high quality back links from relevant content and websites to your own to help with your SEO results. But, the spammers have started abusing it and putting in spammy links to the content which Google had picked up and started clamping down on the bad practice.
However, all is not lost for guest blogging. I still accept guest blog posts on my personal and business websites from reputable people that I know, and I will continue to do so. Guest blogging provides from good, authoritative writers is useful for my readers. I am happy to insert links back to their websites.
I just won’t be accepting blog posts from ‘strangers’ without them having first told me a lot about their content, their clients and which links they want to use. Funnily enough, when asked for all these details, very few get back to me.
Comments
Post a Comment
Thank you for your comment!