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Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Why Guest Posting and Blogging is
a Slippery Slope - Whiteboard Friday'

Posted by randfish
While guest posting can be a wonderful way to build your authority and earn
links, it takes a huge amount of effort, and it's easy for marketers to start
slipping down the "Guest Posting Slope of Madness." One of Rand's predictions
for marketing in 2014 is that Google will begin to crack down on low-quality
guest posts, and in today's Whiteboard Friday, he clears up some of the
misconceptions that can lead to a downhill slide.







Whiteboard Friday - Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope












For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!



Video Transcription


Sarah: Howdy Moz fans. This is Sarah Bird, and I am the new CEO and that's
why I am doing Whiteboard Friday. Today, we're going to talk about guest blog
posting because that's SEO. Okay, so the first thing you have to do is think of
something [Rand guides Sarah aside] ...


Sarah to Rand: But I'm the new CEO, and that means I do the ...


Rand: Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday,
which I will still be doing for, well for a very, very, very long time to come I
hope. Today I wanted to tackle a tricky topic. I know it's going to be a
controversial one because a lot of folks in the SEO space do a lot of guest
posting and guest blogging, but there's a challenge here. So I made some
predictions last week, a couple weeks ago now, in the new year about what 2014
will bring.


One of those is that I predicted that Google will be taking some webspam
action, essentially the Webspam Team will be building an algorithm to target
guest posters, people who do a lot of guest posting and a lot of guest blogging
at scale to get links back to their site in order to rank. This is a very common
strategy that many, many folks use, and here's why it's a slippery slope.


So oftentimes we start up, up here. You're sort of super white hat, and "Oh,
yeah you know I've got some great stuff to share, but my site doesn't get all
that much traffic so maybe I should go and see if Huffington Post or Mashable or
maybe the Moz Blog or any of these sources will take it because I have a great
post."


Hey, what do you know? A lot of the time if you have something relevant and
useful and great to say and you have some great ideas to share, some great
visuals, some data, fantastic. You can get those guest posts on those big sites.
Then you start to slide down the slope a little. You think, "Oh, yeah, that Huff
Post piece went really well, and hey, I got a link. I got a live link out of it.
Maybe that link will help me rank a little better, boost my authority, and I
don't know, that's kind of nice. I should do some more guest posts and get more
links. Maybe I'll find some sites that can send me some traffic and boost my
profile and authority out in the sphere and get a few more links."


This is still totally, pretty much fine, pretty much okay. But then you slide
down this little slope. There's this devious little part right here, between the
I'm doing this for kind of authority boosting and traffic sending reasons and
I'm just doing this for the link.


So you slide down the slope, and then you get, "Oh, man, finding decent sites
that will take my guests posts is really hard, and I keep having to write really
good stuff and come up with new ideas because they all want unique content. You
know what? Maybe I'll just start going to any places that I can go where I'll
get a link. Then eventually you slide down into this sort of total black hat
territory where you are, "You know, I bet I could scale this and even automate
it. I'm going to use a team of outsourced writers, and I'm going to use a team
of outsourced placement specialists. I'm going to write some little thing to
scrape through the links I download from OSC from my competitors and scrape
through the Google results and find any place that'll take a guest post, who've
taken five or more with spammy anchor text before, because that's what I want."


Oh, brother. That's why I call this the guest posting slope of madness.
Madness! It is madness, because think about what happens here. Essentially
you're going down this slope, and maybe you're seeing results, more and more
results, but you don't know whether these links and these links that you've slid
down into are actually really helping you or whether the authority and the
profile that you've built from these good ones and all the other good marketing
activities and the things your product is doing and your brand is doing are
helping you, and you might think these are. So you keep doing them and then bam!
You get smacked by a Penguin or the guest posting algo or whatever it is that
comes next, and you have to go and try and get these folks to remove all these
links, you have to disavow them, you've got to send your reconsideration
requests, you're out of the search results for weeks or months at a time,
usually months, sometimes years.


What have you done to your site? What have you done to your SEO? What if you
had taken all this effort and energy and put it into just doing this stuff and
then once you built up this authority doing most of the posting on your own site
where people would be linking to you?


One of the frustrating things about guest posting that people forget all the
time is that when you are putting content somewhere else, especially if that's
good content, especially if it's stuff that's really earning traffic and
visibility, that means all the links are going to somebody else's site. Somebody
else is earning most of the attention awareness, and granted some of that is
transferring on to you and that's why we do guest posting. But you have to be
aware of that, and that leads me into some flawed assumptions.


Flawed assumption number one: More links are always better. This is not the
case. This is not the case. I have seen many, many sites with just a few, a
handful, a few dozen to a few hundred great links far outranking their brethren
with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of links. All links are
not created equal.


Less editorial restriction is better. When you're guest posting you're like,
"Oh, they're so picky, these editors. Man, they want me to jump through all
these hoops. Let me find some place that'll just take whatever I'll throw them."
Guess what? If they take whatever you're throwing them, they're taking whatever
the rest of the Internet is throwing them, and we all know what the rest of the
Internet looks like.


Number three: The link matters more than other factors, other factors like
traffic and influence and credibility. Also not the case. I'll be totally
honest. I will take a great guest post that refuses to link to me or that only
no follow links to me if I know that 5,000 or 10,000 people are going to read
that piece and a few hundred people are going to re-tweet it and a few hundred
people are going to like it on Facebook, because that is boosting my influence
and my authority, and that is creating all kinds of things that will have second
order effects that impact my SEO and my broad web marketing far better than just
a link.


When should you guest post and blog? Well, like I said, if you're trying to
reach that new audience, that new audience that another site or page or blog has
captured, great. Guest posting is a wonderful choice. For example, let's say
here at Moz we're trying to reach into the design community. We might go to some
wonderful web design sites, Smashing Magazine, for example, and say, "Hey. Would
you guys want maybe a good resource on SEO for designers?" They might say,
"Yeah, great we'd love you." Perfect. That's a perfect marriage there.


In addition to creating a relationship with another organization through
content, I also love this. This is a great way to build some early stages of
relationship with another company before you do a formal partnership, and it
helps to see whether there's kind of an overlap between your two organizations'
audiences, such that you might want to do a deeper kind of relationship, maybe a
sponsorship or an investment together, project or product together.


Quick note here. For your marquee content, your best stuff, I strongly -- see
how I've underlined strongly -- strongly suggest using your own site. Reason
being, if you're going to put wonderful stuff out there, even if you think it
could do better on somebody else's site, in the long term you want that to live
on your own site.


The last note I'll make is that Google's Webspam Team has been telegraphing
for nearly a year that they are coming after sites that are using guest posting
tactics at scale. You've heard comments from Google's Head of Webspam, that's
Matt Cutts. You've seen comments on the Google Webmaster blog. You've heard them
talk about it at conferences. If you're not getting the message, they are
sending it directly to all of the folks in the SEO world that guest posting and
guest blogging are targets for webspam in the future.


So just be very, very careful please and stay up and don't fall down this
slippery slope. All right everyone, thanks so much. Take care.



Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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