Has Guest Blogging Gone Bad for SEO?

One of the reasons why guest blogging gained in popularity over the years is because it worked well for SEO purposes. With guest blogging you can:

-       Expand your SEO influence, through linking or by using relevant links

-       Explore opportunities to connect with a new and a wider audience and

-       Improve your overall SEO rankings

These reasons, combined with a fairly good practice at guest blogging or guest posting, can make your search engine rankings fairly positive.

So what went wrong?

You could say that bad guest blogging practices are the culprit. Guest blogs are advantageous for SEO purposes, yet this tool has been overused, tainting a good blog that should have been of good quality and well-defined links and rendering it a horde of spammy or low-quality content. Instead of providing readers with information, a lot of guest blogs today have been swamped with links, forgetting the importance of high quality content in their bid to hastily work their way up the Google rankings.

Has Guest Blogging Gone Bad for You?

Wrong practices have given guest blogging its bad reputation. Matt Cutts, head of Google Web Spam, even hinted that guest blogging is already dead. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you should bid goodbye to guest blogging altogether. With regards to spammy content, which quality bloggers can spot a mile away, there are actually four ways to make your guest blogging a positive SEO tool.

Choose high quality guest sites. Pitch articles and contribute content to websites that are relevant, reputable and are already experts in your kind of industry. There are a lot of websites and those of any quality will always be thorough with the posts to their sites. If it sounds like “you can write anything you want and we’ll post it”, back off already. Quality is the key here and sites with words intent on luring you into guest posting, are more often than not spammy.

Write for quality with quality. Picking up a quality site to do your guest blog is just the beginning. The next thing to focus on is writing high quality content. Quality guest blogs will always follow a specific requirement including topic relevance, length, formatting, spelling, readability, appropriate linking and of course, quality content that is original. If you write well, your readers are likely to follow you on your own website.

Use links smartly. Don’t just insert links and flood your post with them. If you don’t want Google to crawl your content as spam, keep the links to a minimum and make them look as natural as possible, as you place them in your content. To be on the safe side including two or three links back to your site will suffice.

Always build relationships. Establish yourself in the guest blogging community and the doors of opportunity will open up, helping you to successfully build on your SEO rankings. Guest blogging may not be easy - all things considered but continually building relationships and keeping the value of your content will doubtless see you becoming an expert in your field, not to mention the guest blogging community.

In terms of SEO, guest blogging is still a gold mine of opportunity for success. The real deal here is that guest blogging is not dead or bad, despite rumours to the contrary. If you want to maximise your SEO efforts with guest blogging, speak to an expert at the Devon SEO Co.