To "Guest Blog" or "Ghost Blog"?

[JustDucky]

To "Guest Blog" or "Ghost Blog"?

I've been wondering which would be better given G's "authorship" tracking program.

"Onreact.Com" indirectly raised this issue in a recent blog post "Google Authorship Markup Disadvantages Everybody Ignores" as :

"Google might dismiss your guest articles. Your great guest blogging campaign on dozens of other blogs might fail because Google will count the links all as one as the same author has written all the posts and linked to himself. So maybe the links won't count at all."

Assuming all other things are equal, would you use "Guest Author" with G Authorship attribution (if allowed) or just ghost the article and include an in-text link without attribution to you as the author?

[DarinPirkey]

This is simply my opinion and has no "data" behind it. FYI

I personally like to write with Guest Author and authorship markup. For two reasons

1. If I've written a great article, I want people to know I wrote it to help my "brand"

2. I don't agree with the article.  I do think that Google will monitor your writing but only in what will be something called "AuthorRank" (or something along those lines) If you become an "authority" in a field with your "authorship" and you write a new article, why wouldn't Google want that to be up in the SERPS.

Google's been talking a lot about brands lately and I think this only the beginning.  I would "Guest Blog" to be my brand out there.  Besides, If you are guest blogging on the right site, it should build you traffic to your site and some of those people will naturally link to you.  I don't see the point in the other way unless you are a copywriter and only write for other people.

Just my thoughts. Hope it starts the conversation for you.

[CMC-SD]

Ideally, guest blogging should be #RCS that introduces your brand to a new audience, and also happens to have an inbound dofollow link. It's possible that authorship markup will make you choose one or the other -- sign it and get the branding, or don't sign it and get the inbound link credit. But that's speculation at this point. Maybe Google will think "Well gee, the blog owner wouldn't have let that person write on their blog unless they were a fan of their work. That counts as a vote for their website."

If it becomes an either-or proposition, I would just treat guest blogging as a branding/inbound traffic strategy with no direct SEO benefit.

[JustDucky]

Darin & CMC-SD.   Thanks for your comments.  I am highly experienced in my field.  Very few guest blogging opportunities are available in the properties that occupy the SERPs I'm competing in.  Smaller indy blogs (whose owners I've known for years) probably offer realistic opportunities for guest blogging. But I don't want to convert their customers to mine. (The product should be inherently local but there are national providers.)

My concern is how to counter the "authority" of the copywriters.  I'm concerned that G will look at the authority, page rank and engagement (bounce rate & time on page) of larger sites and reward the copywriter with authority status based more upon the platform they publish on than any real authority on the matters they write.

Although G could begin to compare the number of fields an author publishes in and add an educational history and licensing status to G+ pages, I suspect that G wouldn't bother to go through any extra steps (costs).  Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but selling Adwords is G's business and search results just need to be "good enough" without being too darn good.

Again, thanks to both of you.