Benefit of Guest Blogging with weak relevancy

[NAHL-1430]

No - not that awful kind of guest blogging Matt Cutts called time on - but legitimate blogging on quality websites. Just thought I'd get that out of the way first

I work for a legal services provider as a Content Marketing and PR Executive, and I have a regular spot guest posting on Search Engine People which I acquired in my previous role at an SEO agency. As I'm still working in the industry (in-house rather than for an agency) I thought I'd carry it on, not only because it's good for me personally, but because it'd also be a nice link building quick win from a good site with a strong DA.

My question is, with next to know relevancy between domain-domain, page-domain, page-page, is there much value in the link? To be clear, I'll be doing it anyway, but the answer might inform whether I do it under the guise of an employee of my company or just as myself.

Thanks all!

[adammason]

Hi, I would say the best way to answer this is to look at a general news site such as the BBC here in the UK. They have a huge domain the covers hundreds of topics. There is no way this site will have an overall relevance on the domain yet the links it provides will still provide a huge benefit. With this in mind, in your situation I wouldn't worry to much about the relevance of the domain. It is more around the relevance of the topic of the content itself.

In your case, I am assuming that the link you are referring to will be the author bio link at the bottom of the page. In this case I wouldn't concern yourself too much on the strength of this link. Ultimately it will be fairly low as in context links tend to get the most benefit if we are talking pure SEO here. By all means I think you should continue writing on the blog as it is in your field of expertise but make sure you are doing it to build your own personal brand and not  just for the sake of the link.

[RyanPurkey]

Rand recently did a WBF on this, and one of the comments by Matt in the post has an interesting back of the napkin result for his tests that were similar to what you're describing above here: http://moz.com/blog/are-on-topic-links-important-whiteboard-friday#comment-325645, mainly, "Category 3 (Off Topic, Strong Links) actually started taking sites DOWN with it. If we had a strong but off topic/spammy link, it hurt the site more than helped. We tested a few "generic PBN" sites that had decent effect on some sites, negative effect on others. It seemed to stem from relevance with what went up & down."

If it's not something that's likely (high percentage chance of interest) to help a user visiting the page, I'd avoid it.  Cheers!

[NAHL-1430]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I guess this is the answer I was expecting to be honest. Somewhat frustrating I can't link back to the company I work for when blogging about something I know about and work with every day - but I suppose I can't expect Google to make that connection, and in reality it's not a "useful" link for anyone.

Interesting to see from the tests Matt-POP conducted that even one strong off-topic link (at least I take it from that comment we're talking about a single link) can cause a negative impact.

John

[RyanPurkey]

Yup. Take it with a pinch of salt though as he hasn't put together the full report on it. Rand's WBF on this very topic though is definitely worth the watch.  Cheers!

[NAHL-1430]

I suppose you could look at it as:

Here's John Rooney writing about Content Marketing -> He works as a Content Marketer for this company -> Here's that company's website.

You could argue MAYBE that in this context the link makes sense from a human perspective. It's whether the algorithm can recognise that I guess.

John

[RyanPurkey]

If the entire page where you're writing is about content marketing, on a site that is related to content marketing, chances are the link would line up fine.