Is Guest Blogging the Next Link Buying

[HandsomeWeb]

I like the guest blogging idea for two reasons.  One, it builds links, and two, it allows me to add content to a lot of blogs that are really interested in growing a lot of good content.  But I often read articles that give credit to another article, that give credit to another article.

I have been offered plenty of documents for client blogs, but I am worried that at some point in the future Google will decide all this guest blogging is similar to link trading and selling.

What does everyone else think of guest blogging?

[gcdtechnologies]

Hi Christopher, that's a great question. I was actually thinking about this earlier in the week. I think there's a lot of guest blogging that is spammy, low quality and manipulative, but I don't see Google imposing some sort of penalisation on all guest blogging.

That's because a lot of guest blogging is high quality, heavily shared and of high value. I think that done correctly, everyone can be a winner with guest blogging - the writer gets a new potential audience (and inbound link), the blog owner gets a quality piece of content and the readers get valuable information.

Low quality articles and articles with unnatural links will get hit by other algorithms. I would say that as long as the post is good, on a good website and goes easy on links, Google won't mind. A lot of journalists were using guest writing as a way to expand their readership before SEO existed, so it would seem a little unfair if Google decided that this was bad practice.

What's your opinion?

[Audiohype]

I think Alice is right, it has the potential to become manipulated as with most link building methods. I have often considered whether it's even worth trying to avoid using the term "guest post" for this very reason.

If you are selective about which sites you post on you shouldn't worry too much. You will find targeting higher quality sites will not only improve the value of the link and the size of the audience, but it will also ensure you are creating top quality content which is worthy of being published.

[matbennett]

What worries me is that the easiest way to apply such a penalty is probably to devalue links that appear to be part of an author box (one of several easy to spot footprints of most guest blogging). This isn't the best way, but it would be incredibly easy to do.  If that happens then it would really be a case of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", but we've already seen this year that Google is happy to do this if it discourages manipulation.

I've always assumed that when the spammier end of guest blogging is addressed it would be through a wider algorithm. As Alice suggests, value could be removed from this as a result of a wider effort to tackle low quality sources - and this would be fair.

This year though I suspect that "fairness" in the algorithm has gone down a couple of places in Google's priorities and that the idea of "the greater good" has become a higher priority. If that is true then anything that is a link building strategy becomes a fair target - even if it causes wider damage.

As always - time will tell !