As the name suggests, guest blogging is when someone provides an article to another blog, as a third-party contributor. Guest blogs are usually written for free, unless that author is specifically invited by the blog owner due to their expertise within a particular niche and therefore offered a payment in exchange for their insight. Guest blogs must be of good quality – well written and of value to the reader.
Guest blogging benefits both the site owner and the guest author because:
- The site owner gets a new article, relevant to their target audience, giving the visitors new and interesting content to read.
- This helps with the ranking of the site for new topics, through Google search. This can help bring in new visitors.
- It gives the site owner something new to share through social media channels, which helps to increase the website’s traffic and help Google rank it better.
- The author of the article benefits by increasing his or her credibility, as the guest post can link to the Google Authorship profile of the writer. This builds up their Google Author profile.
- Guest bloggers can add links back to their own site within their text. This can drive traffic to their site, and improve the ranking of their site for their chosen keyword phrases.
So why would Google want to penalise anyone doing guest blogging?
Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your own, in order to improve your SEO. You can read more about link building here.
SEO managers are always looking for ways to create links to improve the ranking of their websites. On the other hand, Google are trying to close such loopholes and penalise the sites which attempt to manipulate rankings, and reward those that have ‘natural’ links.
In effort to build links which appear to be natural, many SEO spammers started creating low quality posts, purely for link building purposes. These low quality spam blogs are precisely what Google does not like.
For Website Owners
What can I do to ensure my guest blogs do not get penalised?
The term “guest blogging” isn’t a scary or spammy word; with Google’s Penguin update it’s actually doing internet users a big favour. Having good quality content online is better for your company and better for your clients, but how do we get the most value from our blogging efforts without getting penalised?
1. Do Not Allow Guest Bloggers to Put Unnatural Links in Their Articles
Google’s algorithm is constantly being updated in an effort to reduce web spam online. More and more websites are receiving penalties from Google for unnatural links which go to websites which are completely unrelated to what the article is about.
Whether a link has been wedged into the middle of a paragraph or added into the author’s bio doesn’t matter. When checking guest blog submissions, keep the following in mind:
- Only include links where they add value to the reader.
- If the guest author provides you with the content and links included, make sure you check that they are natural.
- Make sure they link not just to their own website but other sources, which add value to the article (for example Wikipedia).
- If you are unsure about any links, it’s better to remove the link or use the rel=no follow tag, rather than risk a penalty. You can find out more about no-follow tags here.
2. Use Copyscape To Make Sure the Content Is 100% Unique
It is important that you double check that all the submitted articles are completely unique. Google doesn’t like duplicate content, and you can get in trouble for passing off plagiarised content as your own, even if you are unaware that it is plagiarised.
There are many free services online which will check to make sure that your content is unique. We recommend Copyscape, which checks webpages for copied content.
For Guest Bloggers
Write unique and quality content
There’s an endless amount of quality websites which require articles on a daily basis and new sites are constantly being developed. As a result, the pressure to get quality content is continuously growing.
As an SME, you should be aiming to get your posts up onto high quality websites which have a dedicated, and large, following. You don’t want to spend the effort crafting a brilliant blog, if that blog is going to be used on a small site with no traffic. It is a waste of your time.
Good quality content matches the background of the site it’s posted on, as well as the tone of the articles which have been recently posted.
Your guest blog needs to solve a problem for readers, or offer them value in some other way, you need to be giving these readers a reason to click back onto your own site and begin following you.
When considering publishing onto a high PR website/blog, it’s key that you look at their guest blogging or editorial guidelines, if the site has any.
If your guest blog doesn’t meet the editorial criteria of the website in question, you should revisit and rewrite your article.
Guest blogging CAN be done
We all know it can be difficult to find good blogs to publish your content on, but it can be even more difficult finding quality authors. As long as you stick only to including natural links, create exclusive content and follow all the other tips we’ve provided, then you will be well on your way to becoming a guest blogging pro and you won’t have to worry about getting on Google’s bad side ever again.
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Guest blogging is very much effective for increasing traffic on a website, A great content for getting the proper information regarding guest blogging. Thanks for sharing such useful information in your blog…. 🙂
thank you for this information so help me 😀