Guest posting/blogging on someone else’s site is a great way to draw attention to your blog by putting some of your best content on a high traffic site. Guest blogging also provides a link back to your site, depending on the terms and conditions of that high traffic site. Links back to your site is great for serach enginge optimisation (SEO).
Some people will tell you that guest blogging is dead but it isn’t. Spamming is what’s dead.
By blogging about your niche on a similar site to your own, you highlight your authority on the subject and people may visit your blog to see what else you have to say on the subject. This is a good way of marketing your blog but some people take guest blogging too far and only focus on the backlinks.
In this video Moz.com’s co-founder, Rand Fiskin explains how bloggers end up on the slippery slope to black hat territory by blogging in places they shouldn’t. He predicts that Google will eventually target low-quality guest posts and this could cost naughty bloggers a great deal in terms of authority and ranking.
The important thing to remember here is a few guest posts are fine to bring people to your site but once you are up and running, you should keep all that quality content for your own blog.
Flawed assumptions bloggers make
Rand talks about flawed assumptions that bloggers make like:
- More links are always better – Rand says this is not the case, as all links are not created equal.
- The link matters more than traffic, influence and credibility – this is also not the case
To sum up he reminds bloggers that the Google spam team are working actively to take down spammy guest blogging sites. So don’t spread your writing thinly across spammy sites just for links.
Stay on the right track and happy blogging.
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