Is it a good idea to create a blog that offers quality content but also passes PageRank to sponsors

[aj613]

I am a part of a business networking group that has lots of members who services home owners (a/c repair, plumber, home inspector, etc.).  I am thinking of starting a blog to help home owners be better informed how to care for their homes.  I would like to ask for sponsorship from the people in my group.  I would also like to invite them to post on the blog as a way to improve their SEO.  Would posting on this kind of blog hurt, help or not affect their SEO?  Would this violate Google's policy of selling links that pass page rank as described here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en.

[MickEdwards]

Sponsorship is paid for so all those links should be no-follow

Having guest posts has, does and will still work if the primary purpose is to add value, be informative and be honestly relevant and not at all promotional - no keyword links spamming the content.  Personally I wouldn't actively promote guest posts on the site, rather let it happen naturally or through your networking.

[WesleySmits]

Hello Adam,

Blogging in order to help home owners be better informed on how they should care for their homes is a great idea which you could benefit a lot from.

Michael already stated that sponsorships are paid and that the sponsered links should be no-followed to avoid penalties. In the question title you mentioned 'passing PageRank to sponsors'. No-follow links pass (almost) no PageRank. So passing PageRank to them is not going to work.

You mention that you would like to invite your sponsors to guest post on your blog to improve their SEO.
Letting them guest post is a tremendous idea but guest posting for SEO reasons only is not a good approach.

There is an excellent post here on Moz that goes deeper into the subject of guest posting.

Conclusion - Blogging is a good idea

• Selling links which pass PageRank is against Google's guidelines
• No-follow links pass (almost) no PageRank
• Guest blogging is awesome if it adds to the quality of the blog

Hope i was of help and if you have any questions, please let me know.

[simon_realbuzz]

By all means provide a link to the sponsor but absolutely make sure you 'nofollow' that link. Here's the relevant link to the Google Webmaster blog where they state why you should avoid selling links that pass page rank.

[aj613]

Hey All,

Thanks for all the responses, but I'm still left a little curious.  I'd like to make a blog to help home owners learn how to take better care of their homes.  I think this is a service that is needed in the world.  However, I still need to eat.  So I can't really afford to do it for nothing.  I'd also like to help my friends and clients who I think have good advice to offer home owners.  How can I do this in a way where we all can benefit from this service?

I get it that I can't have them post articles with follow links to their websites.  How about authorship?  If they are the author of an article on this site, will the article come up with an authorship credential?

Can they write an article and include no-follow links, but have an ad somewhere on the sidebar, also with (rel=no-follow links of course)?

[WesleySmits]

Having advertisements on your website with the no-follow attribute in place is a possible way of earning money indeed.
Other ways could be to use affiliate links or getting leads and sell these to other companies. For example you could have a form on your website where people will fill in their information and request a certain kind of service. You could sell this lead to a company who provides given service.

The blog posts in this case would bring in the traffic and if done well will make you an authority on the subject.
If the article has the rel="author" is in place and their is a link back from the person's Google+ profile contributor to section than the article will be tied to that author.

Not sure if you want to try and make money of Google Authorship though. Google has very strict rules about earning money with links and such and i'm pretty sure they have some rules concerning authorship as well.

Hope i answered your questions If not, please let me know where i can explain further or if i can assist you with any other questions.

[aj613]

Thanks Wesley.

Would you please expound a bit more on the right way to do an authorship tag and where to link it?  I'm not sure I understood from your comment.

All the best
Adam

[WesleySmits]

Hello Adam,

In my eyes there are two ways to approach placing authorship markup for a blog post.

1. A link to the author's google+ profile straight from the blog post's Author Bio. For this you could make the Author's name the link like this:

[rel="author">Author's name](Google+ profile URL)

2. Create an author page on your site for every author. Create a link from the blog post to the author page like this:

[rel="author">Author's name](Author page URL)

From the author page there should be a link to the Google+ profile like this:

[rel="me">Google+ profile](Google+ profile URL)

Hope this helps

[aj613]

Awesome.  Thanks so much Wesley.