Guest writer for a magazine that is .pdf?
-
I was asked to be a guest contributor to an online bridal magazine, but not sure if there would be any linking value on it, as it is a pdf. Of course, there would be readers who might remember me, and come visit our site.
But for linking purposes, I don't see any seo benefit. But I am a newbie, so I might be missing something.
The magazine's are in a pdf format. Here is a link: http://bridesclub.com/wedding-magazines/Spotlight-NW-Fall-2013.pdf
You can also view it online but they redirect to www.issuu.com/ And the links are no followed.
Anyone have any advice?
Thank in advance!
-
Hi Karl,
The magazine is reputable, but don't think it goes out anywhere except to their online members. I like the idea you mentioned, but seems the tough part of content marketing is the outreach part.
Man there is such a wealth of knowledgeable folks here on moz. Awesome having experts like you help small guys like me. Thanks so much!
ron
-
Hi Moosa,
I appreciate your input! I like the fact about quality traffic you mentioned. And the idea of "co-occurance". I just watched a webinar where Ian Lurie spoke about that. Great point.
Thanks for helping me.
ron
-
Hello Federico,
You are right about the relationship building. I have good info based on 25 years experience in wedding bands/rings that could be useful to them. AND as you mentioned it would be a good reference for my writing!
Thanks for posting!
ron
-
Hey Jeff,
Thanks so much for your helping. Sorry for delay in replying, been buried. Your information helped me a lot, great viewpoint - which I agree with.
ron
-
Hi Ron,
Whilst the pdf would give you minimal SEO benefit, if the magazine is reputable then you could use it as link bait. You could turn your post into a feature on your own website with things you learnt from doing the piece then reach out to blogger/website owners to link to your website.
As has been mentioned, it's not all about SEO and what value a link has. You have to think of the long term effect and what knock on effect guest authoring for the magazine gives you. See if there is anything else you can do with them onsite, that may be something that is worth asking.
-
Ron, honestly speaking SEO is more than just link and Google in order to give rankings use tons of different signals… I mean, if we talk about co occurrence you don’t not need a link, just a brand mention will work!
- Google do crawl and index links from PDF files as well so there just because it’s a PDF you should not write for them is not really a good idea!
- Not all no-follow links are waste… Wikipedia passes a no follow link but I have witnessed people’s ranking goes up after they get a link from Wikipedia.
- Traffic is coming to the website and you can use that traffic ad encourage them to link back to you (somehow!)
So no link that offers quality traffic is a waste! If you think you are getting valuable traffic from that website just keep writing for that magazine.
Hope this helps!
-
I will surely do it. It's not all about SEO, but building relationships. You may not get a link from them directly, but you could indirectly!
There's when guest blogging becomes a spam technique, when you only do it for the link. Change your mind, watch it from another perspective!
Example: I once wrote for a small SEO blog, it had almost no value, then when I applied for a much bigger site, and showed them my work, it was a "Can you please write for us?".
-
Ron -
I took a look at the site and at the PDF, and I agree, there's not a ton of SEO value in writing a guest post for them. While Google can index PDF documents, and even discover links in them, if it's no-followed… not going to help much.
PDFs are not really amazing for reading on a computer. They are great for printing out. Print designers use them quite a bit, because they never quite figured out this "Web" thing where the page looks different to different users based on their computer and browser.
If there's a different reason to guest blog, it would be that your target audience (who wants to hire you) might be reading it and find you online. Or, you might want to do it to prevent a competitor from taking that top spot.
If you're on the fence, I'd check to see their readership, and if there's a way to have your information online and visible to their 1.2 million registered brides.
The US Wedding industry is a bit crazy -- people spend more than $25,000 on weddings.
Hope this helps...
-- Jeff
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Print Button Creating Duplicate PDF URLs set to NoIndex, OK for SEO?
Our real estate website has 400 listings. We have added a button that allows the visitor to print listing pages in the for.m of a PDF. The PDF exists as a URL ending in ?print=17076. This print URL is set to noindex and follow. So our site has 400 additional URLs. Is this a negative for SEO? Or neutral? I have read it using CSS it is possible to set up printing without creating all these extra URLs. Is this method better from an SEO perspective? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
PDF - host, link, recreate?
I want to get as much SEO juice as possible onto my site. Our partner who is the manufacturer has about 5 pdf's per product listed on their website already. What should I do to create content and drive the most traffic to my reseller site? 1. Should I do a direct outbound link to their PDF and Google will crawl that content to boost my keywords? 2. Should I download the pdf and then upload the exact PDF onto our site? Will Google know this is not my content and copied? 3 Should I copy and paste the PDF content and paste it into our sites product page directly? 4. Should I recreate the PDF by copying most of our content and use our branding/contact details? then upload or copy and paste that content onto our site? (obviously alot more work) We have MANY products and different suppliers but want a way to be better at SEO then our manufactures. Option to any more ideas or ways to cut down on as much work as possible while driving the most traffic. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jamesmcd030 -
A PDF with a good quality external link could affect the authority of that domain?
Here I go with a situation: You have an isolated PDF hosted in your domain, the PDF has none internal backlinks (neither links to another page on the domain) but has a really good external backlink from a domain with high authority. Do you think that the backlink has influence on the global domain authority and the domain rankings? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | overalia0 -
Allowing Guest Posts on Website
I am planning to allow Guest posts on my website blog where authors or writers can post articles to my blog. All content will be manually approved by me. But i would like to know if guest posts will cause any harm to my site or is it good way to generate content. Another thing as guest posts will be having do-follow links & author section too will be up. So firstly i would like to know whether its a good step or not? Would even like to know what checks should i do before approving a guest posts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Should we host our magazine on a subdomain of E-com site or its own domain?
We host a online fashion magazine on a subdomain of our e-commerce site. Currently we host the blog which is word press based on a subdomain ex: stylemag.xxxxxxx.com First question is are all the links from our blog considered internal links? They do not show in the back links profile. Also would it be better to host this on its own domain? Second question Is my main URL getting credit for the unique content published to the blog on the subdomain and if so is it helping the overall SEO of my website more then if it and the links were hosted on its own wordpress.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kushvision0 -
My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
I have been optimizing this page for a few weeks now and and have seen our page for up from 23rd to 11th on the serp's. I come to work today and not only have I dropped to 15 but I've also had my relevant product page replaced by this page . Not to mention the second page is a pdf! I am not sure what happened here but any advice on how I could fix this would be great. My site is www.mynaturalmarket.com and the keyword I'm working on is Zyflamend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0 -
PDF on financial site that duplicates ~50% of site content
I have a financial advisor client who has a downloadable PDF on his site that contains about 9 pages of good info. Problem is much of the content can also be found on individual pages of his site. Is it best to noindex/follow the pdf? It would be great to let the few pages of original content be crawlable, but I'm concerned about the duplicate content aspect. Thanks --
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 540SEO0 -
Can PDF be seen as duplicate content? If so, how to prevent it?
I see no reason why PDF couldn't be considered duplicate content but I haven't seen any threads about it. We publish loads of product documentation provided by manufacturers as well as White Papers and Case Studies. These give our customers and prospects a better idea off our solutions and help them along their buying process. However, I'm not sure if it would be better to make them non-indexable to prevent duplicate content issues. Clearly we would prefer a solutions where we benefit from to keywords in the documents. Any one has insight on how to deal with PDF provided by third parties? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gestisoft-Qc1