Guest Posts on Established Blogger/Wordpress.com sites

[BedeFahey]

How much value do you put on guest post opportunities on blogspot.com or wordpress.com sites (or similar).

If the blog is established, gets good readership and traffic, do you consider it to be as useful as a privately hosted blog?

I'm not really looking for a definitive answer here, just people's thoughts.

Cheers,

Bede

[jhinchcliffe]

I think it depends more on the quality of the blog, domain age, links pointing to it, etc. If its a wordpress or blogspot blog that was obviously put up a week ago just to make one blogpost for a link then it will have little or no authority. However there are some great, high ranking blogs from blogspot and wordpress that have been around a long time, and a link in a guest post from those would help quite a bit. I would say it matters more how trustworthy the site is, not so much where its hosted.

Having said that, if two sites had the same ranking factors, same domain age, same links, etc. and one was hosted privately and the other on wordpress, I would think they would give the edge to the privately hosted one. I would think otherwise it wouldn't have much of an effect at all.

[irvingw]

I think a personal website is better for SEO than a shared platform such as blogger (which google owns) and wordpress.com.

But if the blog is established, gets good readership and traffic as you said then it's mostly a traffic play anyway, and I would go for it as long as it's a quality site and doesn't allow spammy articles or spam comment posts.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

I usually look at subdomain metrics as reported by OSE to gauge the strength of a particular wordpress or blogspot domain - if it is has legitimate external links, it's definitely something I'll consider.

[BedeFahey]

Cheers for the responses everyone.

What everyone has said is pretty much in agreement with what I was thinking, and it's nice to have it confirmed.

Thanks!