Guest Posting At Scale - A Definition!
-
Hi, have just watched the latest Whiteboard Friday entitled 'Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope'. Rand mentions '"guest posting at scale", but what does he actually mean?
For the purpose of building website authority and brand awareness we post around 1-4 blog posts per month for our clients, all on authoirty sites, some of which accept guest posts with little editorial restriction, some we have to jump through hoops for.
We don't use KW specific anchor text, instead we link to the clients site with semantically related, varied anchor text, as well as linking to other useful third party sources. We also publish regular useful content on our clients blogs in the hope of getting natural backlinks.
Would this be classed as 'guest posting at scale'? Do you think we could we be targeted and penalised by the upcoming guest post algorithm?
Many thanks in advance, Lee.
-
Thanks Rand.. have just re-read this response and I totally agree with the SEO tactics you have mentioned.. but in my opinion you are assuming that the client has an endless budget for SEO.
Unfortunately this isn’t the case for a lot of ‘smaller’ clients, they have limited budgets in comparison to their nationwide ‘bigger’ competitors.. Creating videos isn’t cheap, hosting events isn’t cheap etc..
Google favours big brands who have the resources to make them happy.. it’s a lose lose situation for smaller companies.. how can they compete?
-
Thanks kerry, appreciate the feedback.
Do you not think that links within an author bio may be a target for upcoming google updates? They seem too easy to get, and therefore could be classed as spam!
Thanks in advance, Lee.
-
This won't work on YouMoz. We will remove links to your own company in the body of the post if they are not related to the post, and ask you to put them in your author bio area. These types of links really stand out to readers, and if the links are left in, readers comment about it and also downvote the post.
-
Many thanks for this Rand.. certainly makes sense!
Can't wait for the upcoming Whiteboard Friday you mentioned.. the sooner the better
-
Lee - I believe the best way to think about this is to ask whether, if you worked on Google's search quality team, you'd want those guest post links to help the site rank better. Nothing you're describing sounds awful (although posting on sites that don't have much editorial filtering/discretion could be more dangerous), but it also doesn't strike me as the type of practice that I'd want to reward if I were Google.
I liked what Patrick McKenzie said:
Google will eventually define any tactic which scalably allows ranking for arbitrary keywords as "black hat."
That strikes me as being correct. If there's a singular tactic you're using to get rankings (like link building through repeated guest blogging) that is exclusively or primarily for that purpose (manipulating the rankings), then it's probably in the danger zone, if not today, then at some point in the future.
This begs the question - what tactics should you be doing for clients to help move the needle on their SEO? I'm going to try to tackle that in an upcoming Whiteboard Friday, but for now, I'd think about things that help build their brand, get publicity, drive traffic, and show value that also happen to earn links. For example, hosting events, creating viral content, becoming a resource for data that others cite in their work, creating partnerships with others in your field or geography, earning press, etc. http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building has tons more good stuff, but all of them take serious elbow grease and are bigger than just "getting a link" (which is the whole point).
-
Hello Lee,
Are you using Google+ Authorship? If you aren't then I think you should be.
Are you sourcing the sites manually, and maintaining a direct relationship with the site owners (as in you don't go via a 3rd party)? Are you adding value to the sites you guest blog on? If you are doing this things then I would have thought you'd be OK.
I think the slippery slope is when the link matters more than the content, the site it's published on, the audience who read it and something Rand didn't mention: if you paid for it or not. So long as your content is good and it is being published on sites that send you relevant (converting) traffic then it ticks more boxes than just being there for the links. I try and think of all links like this: If Google stopped counting this link, would it still provide value? If it's on a high-traffic site and is relevant to that site's audience then it doesn't matter whether Google gives credit for it or not because it still brings in traffic, hopefully my site does it's job properly and turns that traffic into customers. Because it's customers that make a difference to my business NOT rankings!!
I hope this is helpful.
Best wishes,
Amelia
-
Hi Lee,,
I think We just need to be smart in guest blogging.
You don't need to Post your Links in the author area going forward and just add links in the body of Articles and If We add links to some other sources then It will be even Good.
Just Make it Look Natural with images, links to other creditable sources thats all.
Thanks
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
-
Is image SEO worth it for e-commerce?
I have been trying to find any case studies of people who have optimized images for SEO for their e-commerce website, but haven't been able to find any case study, indicating obtained results. I am wondering how much increase in Google Image search traffic others have been able to obtain when optimizing their e-commerce images for image SEO. I need this information to justify development resources needed for for example an image sitemap, changes to file names and alt texts, title tags and possibly EXIF data. File size is already ok. Hope someone has experience with this and can share some results. Also, would be great if Moz would do a Whiteboard Friday about this 🙂 (hint!).
Whiteboard Friday | | DocdataCommerce0 -
Who is gonna rank better in this case?
site:a has 1500 linking domains and 20000 backlinks site:b has 1500 linking domains and 5000 backlinks does good ratio between linking domains and backlinks works? i am asking only in terms of backlink profile, i know there are more things than backlink.
Whiteboard Friday | | calvinkj0 -
Domain and Sub-Domain Question
Hi, My company owns the domains www.NYSTATEMLS.COM and www.MYSTATEMLS.COM both of these sites are already on there way with a lot going on. I did just review video 5 on technical SEO and Rand was talking about how much harder it is to rank two websites. So i'm wondering what could be done in this area? Should something be done? The website nystatemls.com is necessary because it's dedicated to the state of new york & has been around for a long time. mystatemls.com came later because the business grew and we opened up to the national market. Looking for some insight. Thanks so much, Chris Farcher
Whiteboard Friday | | Cfarcher0 -
Sentences RDF Format
Why do we need to write sentences in RDF format (subject, object predicate) is there a reason for that ? Thank you,
Whiteboard Friday | | seoanalytics0 -
Internal linking: Global Nav Bar obscuring link authority?
I was watching Rand's whiteboard on how links in the headers/footers can impact SEO: moz.com/blog/links-headers-footers-navigation-impact-seo If I understood correctly: 1) Google will use the first link in the html that it sees for a given page. Additional links will not be considered for passing weight. 2) Text links in body (carry more weight than) > image links > nav links > footer links If we want to use a global nav bar, is there a simple solution for not obscuring the links in the body content? (It seems very awkward to load the header nav last (and bring it up via css after the page loads), and this also goes against Google wanting people to load above-the-fold content quickly.) If I internally link to a page that was not important enough to get a spot in the global nav, but I include this link in the body as a text link (for example, an accessory specific to that item), is this internal link really getting more weight in Google's eyes because it wasn't in the nav? This seems strange to me. Thanks!
Whiteboard Friday | | HalfPriceBanners0 -
Should this site be using Rel=Canonical VS No Index
I'm currently working on this site https://www.visitliverpool.com/accommodation I've been watching this video by Rand - https://moz.com/blog/rel-canonical but it's still unclear in this scenario. if you use the search facility "check availability" half way down the page the results page (urlparams) are no indexed. Would it be better to index and canonicalise? There is no similar content but I'm concerned that no index will remove the ability for semantic content to be visible to google. LADkajY
Whiteboard Friday | | Andrew-SEO0 -
Looking for Video Production Setup Guide post
Hi Guys, I'm looking for a specific video post I recall watching, i thought it was on moz.com, all about creating a decent set up for video production. It discussed things like lighting setup, sound, hardware on a budget etc. I have searched the moz.com blog video tag archive, as well as the Q&A, but haven't been able to find what I'm looking for. Can anyone help? Thanks!
Whiteboard Friday | | David_ODonnell1 -
Search engines preferred content posting schedule?
Hello Moz members. I am working on a newly redesigned site, www.servicechampions.com and I would like to have your input on a preferred posting schedule of content. I am sitting on near hundred pages of content to add. What would be the best approach to upload content to our site that would maximize the amount of pages indexed by google/search engines? I have been under the practice that a consistent posting schedule would be favored by search engines. I too do not want to be a victim of my own success if search engines start expecting from me x amount of pages a week. What are your thoughts? ps. any feedback on the new site would be greatly appreciated (launched 11.1.13) Thank you,
Whiteboard Friday | | CamiloSC0