If you happen to be an owner of a popular blog, your mailbox is most likely to get flooded with innumerable guest blogging requests. It seems overwhelming at first, but soon you will learn how to lead a life with it.
Since Penguin has thrown a spanner on all unethical online marketing techniques like article marketing ( the great art of publishing the same content in hundreds of crap article directories), social bookmarking (scare the hell out of bookmarking sites with automated submission), directory submission (my favorite, submitting links blindly) etc, marketers are left with fewer choices other than guest blogging.
Now, this is exactly where the problem creeps in. People are sending mail to guest blogs without caring a fig to look at the sites in person and building up a great relationship with the blog owners. They are treating it guest blogging an evolutionary form of Article marketing or Article marketing 2.0. But I personally strongly denounce this kind of practice.
Unique Content does not Mean Crap Content: It seems people have not received the message of Google clearly.
Panda was never meant for punishing sites with duplicate content, rather it is a holy war against sites with thin content i.e. content that makes little sense or fails to cut an ice with the targeted audience. But as it appears, SEO professionals are living in a state of denial.
They are well aware of the fact that posting crap content or rehash content is not going to help a website in the long term, they are not making any kind of changes in their policies as they laboring under the burden of projects. So, the sites that are accepting those content as guest posts are going to pay a heavy price in the form of losing readership or inviting penalty.
Setting the bar High: As people have already started treating guest blogging sites as a means of attaining only links caring a fig for adding value, high quality sites have already started setting the bar high.
One of the common vice of all SEO professionals or those writers who are writing for links is that they find it irksome to write 700 words + posts. And if you ask them to post the content with citations and proper images, you will see significant drop in the number of applications.
These writers are too lazy to write more than 500 words content and in majority of cases, you are not likely to see much difference in the title of these guest posts. Either these guest posts are overtly promotional in nature or else, they are only regurgitation of the same content with different words.
How Genuine Guest Bloggers are Suffering: Since there are too many players in the market, blog owners are finding it really tough to differentiate between a genuine guest blogger and an SEO company. And sometimes, they are making the wrong choices. Now when these webmasters feel cheated or just feels frustrated after reading those crap content, they finally decide not to accept anymore guest posts. And this is how the story ends.
So being a guest blogger myself, my humble request to all bloggers – please keep the ecosystem clean and never ever treat guest blogging as article marketing 2.0, as this will bring about our own destruction.
About the Author: Michael Evans is a passionate writer and he contributes to GlobalServe.com.cy, a company works on Cyprus Taxation.
About Guest Blogger
Hey, I'm Trung - the founder of this blog. I'm a part-time blogger who is making real money online from blogging.
Yes, I think it’s a real worry that because of Google making article marketing far less effective, many spammers are focusing on guest blogging. So maybe it’s just a matter of time before this method, too, becomes seen as a bad link building technique.
Yes, Matt Cutt has already released two videos focusing on the downside of guest blogging when the purpose is only links .. it has be to be about engagement and connection
Guest blogging is a good way in making public relations…but one should always care about his blog . so the post should be according to the blog . nywy nice topic ..get gng…:)
praveen recently posted…Tricks for Writing a Post People Will Study
What i believe is that it is about the quality of the post.. the content has to be well researched and the link page should be related to the topic posted .. i mean you simply cannot link out to spammy sites
Sometimes guest blogging can affect our blog if not reviewed nicely There are some guestpost that has been published out of the topic and that makes the blog unrelated. So I guess holding it for moderations and get it reviewed, proofread it many times can do a good effect that will not hurt our blogs.
yes relevancy is the key .. you simply cannot accept all guest blog posts that come your way .. you need to have some sorts of editorial policy otherwise you will find yourself struggling
Due to the evolution of automated tools and competition between web masters for getting No1 ranking for a keyword, SEO war starts on the place and people trying to over optimize their keywords and using guest blogging to achieve their goals.
So they using some un ethical ways like writing thin articles or spinning the contents and using it will affect real guest bloggers.
The only way to at least protect it is search engines should stop crawling the contents written by un ethical ways and block the automated tools using for SEO.
Naveen recently posted…Mac OS X 10.8 – Mountain Lion Review
Yes I agree with you . because of these so called guest bloggers, real guest bloggers are getting affected .. and of course the mad rush for link earning is deteriorating the situation further..
Well, I guess, the best thing to do to make a very good guest post is to review it first, proofread it so that it will not hurt your blog!
@Ashleen Moreen – you are bang on it
you are right. I too beleive that guest posting is the fast way to get quality backlinks. It worked good for me to drive enough traffic to my blog
Sandip Bhagat recently posted…How To Import All Your Photos From Facebook To Google Plus In Few Steps?
yes .. guest blogging should be treated as a way to drive traffic to your website and not the other way round .. it is better than other common link building kinda things
Guest blogging is a nice way to get traffic and links but some times it’s not good for your blog. Sometimes guest posts are not good content and quality wise. It’s a good idea to ask guest bloggers to write 700 + words posts.
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I do not think 700+ words post would necessarily be a good one .. these people are smart enough to beat this .. they pay pennies to writers and would give two pennies more to get 200 words more ..
I think you have a good point. Sometimes you would get requests and its difficult to say if they are proper bloggers or SEO companies. I think asking to write 700 words + makes all the difference and I think its a good idea actually.
Shalu Sharma recently posted…Tourist places in East India
True words, Guest posting is my primary link building method. Its worked well for me, Also I’n planning to start working on article zine soon.
sai krishna recently posted…Optimize Your SEO and Stay Ahead of the Pack
nice to know that it works for you mate