It’s quite interesting that last week I wrote an article about how guest blogging can help you build backlinks to your website and blog and get your name out there and noticed in the blogging world. It’s a growing side of SEO and one where SEO companies have started to “offer” guest posts based on the topic of your site.
This is of course in some cases a good thing, especially if they provide you with quality articles and interesting copy that will attract people. The problem you have to be aware about is the quality of what they supply you with and what these links a
re actually doing. So the question is, when do you accept a guest article and when do you decide that this is a bad idea?
Weeding Out the Unwanted “Guests”
Some people may ask at this point, if the content is good why even question it, just post? But the problem is yes, it may be good but what about that link that appears in a strangely placed location and that is obviously a keyword to gain the search robots interest? Oh, and why is there a “rel=dofollow” attribute on the link? This is part of where the problem lies.
I can take one example that I recently had from what would normally seem to be just an average blogger, who said they would LOVE to write for my site, can I take a look at their article and see if I want it? Of course I said yes, I’d love to see their work. This is the first naïve mistake you could say, but I decided to give it a chance. Once the article arrived it was soon found that although the content was good the link was to a fairly average shopping site with no real relevance to the article that had been written or to the site at all. I replied to the writer and said that I liked the article and would be happy to post it, but I would remove the link. The reply I got was to forget about it and to delete the article without using it. This was fairly rude and in my view underhand of the article writer, or as I should actually put it the SEO “content provider” who had hidden the real reason for the article.
The fact is though this is not the case of all SEO companies that want to provide you with content for your site with the caveat of having a backlink to one of their customer’s sites. If they are open about what they are doing, that they are providing this content with a link to another site then fine, you are aware of what you are accepting. This means that you are prepared for what the link will be and your choices. Why is this important? Because of Google of course, you have to protect your website/blog from weak links such as this, it’s not fair to risk your page rankings so that another site can prosper.
So in short, how do you protect your site? When you are contacted by people who want to post a guest article on your site don’t just walk into the situation blindly, if you are interested and they do sound like they understand what your site is then agree to see the article, if links are provided within the article be sure you are happy with the quality of the site you are being linked to and more importantly if you don’t feel happy with any part of the situation then trust your instincts. In the end this is your site be it for personal or business use and you have the right to use it as you see fit.
