Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content

[McTaggart]

Hi,

I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website.

I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site.

That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website.

What would you advise?

[EGOL]

I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website.

I don't have a site that is working with this model but as long as the content was really really high I don't think that it would be a problem.  It's not that many articles or that many linking domains.  If the authors are simply linking with "hey, I wrote this" instead of heavy keyword anchors...  I think that it is OK.

[Mr.Rangen]

Agreed. I've run into a small group of bloggers who are all members of a community.. writers associations, blogger groups, pr groups, etc. Even when they have similiar link profiles to their actual domains, you don't really see problems unless it's aggressive interlinking between the sites. Very aggressive, with only one purpose in mind.

[irvingw]

It's called guest blogging.A guest blogger provides you with good content and you in turn give them a link. A lot of SEO link builders started doing guest posting exclusively and it is starting to get overdone.

Whether or not it is relatively safe is dependent on a few things, such as the type of site that you are linking to (and who they are linking to), type of linking (rteprative anchor text, img signature), number of different sites you are linking to and their niche (hopefully the same), number of links (recommend only one per blog post) and quality and length of content.

Everything comes with risk when link building, but if you are the one with the blog if you get penalized  (all bets are off) and you have the power to instantly remove all of the links and you at least have a ton of content to show for it at the end of the day.

pretty good article here:  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/guest-blogging-enough-is-enough

[McTaggart]

Thanks EGOL, Brent and Irving. Some good advice there.

It's not really traditional Guest Blogging Irving in that content providers get fee instead of a link - and are pointing links in from their external sites, so a little loss of control there, though without any anchor text guidelines and so forth.