Is it a good idea to create a blog that offers quality content but also passes PageRank to sponsors
-
I am a part of a business networking group that has lots of members who services home owners (a/c repair, plumber, home inspector, etc.). I am thinking of starting a blog to help home owners be better informed how to care for their homes. I would like to ask for sponsorship from the people in my group. I would also like to invite them to post on the blog as a way to improve their SEO. Would posting on this kind of blog hurt, help or not affect their SEO? Would this violate Google's policy of selling links that pass page rank as described here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en.
-
Awesome. Thanks so much Wesley.
-
Hello Adam,
In my eyes there are two ways to approach placing authorship markup for a blog post.
1. A link to the author's google+ profile straight from the blog post's Author Bio. For this you could make the Author's name the link like this:
[rel="author">Author's name](Google+ profile URL)
2. Create an author page on your site for every author. Create a link from the blog post to the author page like this:
[rel="author">Author's name](Author page URL)
From the author page there should be a link to the Google+ profile like this:
[rel="me">Google+ profile](Google+ profile URL)
Hope this helps
-
Thanks Wesley.
Would you please expound a bit more on the right way to do an authorship tag and where to link it? I'm not sure I understood from your comment.
All the best
Adam -
Having advertisements on your website with the no-follow attribute in place is a possible way of earning money indeed.
Other ways could be to use affiliate links or getting leads and sell these to other companies. For example you could have a form on your website where people will fill in their information and request a certain kind of service. You could sell this lead to a company who provides given service.The blog posts in this case would bring in the traffic and if done well will make you an authority on the subject.
If the article has the rel="author" is in place and their is a link back from the person's Google+ profile contributor to section than the article will be tied to that author.Not sure if you want to try and make money of Google Authorship though. Google has very strict rules about earning money with links and such and i'm pretty sure they have some rules concerning authorship as well.
Hope i answered your questions
If not, please let me know where i can explain further or if i can assist you with any other questions. -
Hey All,
Thanks for all the responses, but I'm still left a little curious. I'd like to make a blog to help home owners learn how to take better care of their homes. I think this is a service that is needed in the world. However, I still need to eat. So I can't really afford to do it for nothing. I'd also like to help my friends and clients who I think have good advice to offer home owners. How can I do this in a way where we all can benefit from this service?
I get it that I can't have them post articles with follow links to their websites. How about authorship? If they are the author of an article on this site, will the article come up with an authorship credential?
Can they write an article and include no-follow links, but have an ad somewhere on the sidebar, also with (rel=no-follow links of course)?
-
By all means provide a link to the sponsor but absolutely make sure you 'nofollow' that link. Here's the relevant link to the Google Webmaster blog where they state why you should avoid selling links that pass page rank.
-
Hello Adam,
Blogging in order to help home owners be better informed on how they should care for their homes is a great idea which you could benefit a lot from.
Michael already stated that sponsorships are paid and that the sponsered links should be no-followed to avoid penalties. In the question title you mentioned 'passing PageRank to sponsors'. No-follow links pass (almost) no PageRank. So passing PageRank to them is not going to work.
You mention that you would like to invite your sponsors to guest post on your blog to improve their SEO.
Letting them guest post is a tremendous idea but guest posting for SEO reasons only is not a good approach.There is an excellent post here on Moz that goes deeper into the subject of guest posting.
Conclusion - Blogging is a good idea
- Selling links which pass PageRank is against Google's guidelines
- No-follow links pass (almost) no PageRank
- Guest blogging is awesome if it adds to the quality of the blog
Hope i was of help and if you have any questions, please let me know.
-
Sponsorship is paid for so all those links should be no-follow
Having guest posts has, does and will still work if the primary purpose is to add value, be informative and be honestly relevant and not at all promotional - no keyword links spamming the content. Personally I wouldn't actively promote guest posts on the site, rather let it happen naturally or through your networking.
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
-
Does domain authority to pass between countries?
When building dofollow links if the two websites are in different countries is the main authority still passed from the linking site to the destination?
Link Building | | seoman100 -
Good or Bad Backlinks
Hi All We are trying to go through all of our backlinks to see which links are good and which are bad. We are using two paid for tools to find our backlinks and sort them out, either good or bad. I have found that both tools have returned links as being good even though the links are not indexed by Google and have no page rank. Also we have found that both tools returns some links as good even though the links are pointing to a 404 page. Any advice on how to proceed would be appreciated.
Link Building | | Palmbourne0 -
Linkbait Ideas
Hi, I currently am trying to obtain links to build up the authority of my website. I am outsourcing content to be created by professionals as I am not the best when it comes putting together a piece of content worth linking to. My business build and design garden buildings that are used for a number of uses such as garden offices,gyms,therapy rooms, playrooms the list goes on. I have already had a piece of content created called '3 ways a garden office can boost productivity'. We also put a swimming pool in one of our rooms which is quite innovative in our industry, I am going to create a blog post about it. I have identified garden design, gardening & home improvement as relevant topics and this is who I will be targeting to link to my contact. In this case I have identified a home improvement blog I would like to obtain a link from 'http://www.ukhomeimprovement.co.uk/'. The question is how do obtain this link? What is the best way to approach them? Kind Regards, Tom p.s. my website is www.ecobode.co.uk
Link Building | | Tmgale0 -
Pr4 domain backlink from a blog post
I'm about to do a guest blog post on a pr4 domain. Will I be getting an actual pr4 backlink? I'm thinking since it's technically not going to be on the homepage forever since it's just a blog post and also a blog post has it's on page once you click on it I'm not going to get a pr4 backlink. Correct?
Link Building | | fbbcseo0 -
Should I link from my blog back to my product pages?
Hello... I just installed a blog on my Magento site. My question is whether or not i should be linking within posts on the blog back to the product or category pages that i am talking about...from an SEO perspective. If in my post i am talking about flashlights being important when preparing for a storm, should i link the word flashlights to the flashlight category on my site? I know I can do this, the question is should i, from google's perspective. A) should i link the word (flashlights) to that category on my page B) should i put a line at the bottom of every post that says something like "if you are interested in purchasing flashlights, visit this link" and hyperlink that whole sentence... THANKS!
Link Building | | Prime850 -
Few questions regarding onsite content?
1. How important is having the keywords you are targeting on the page? Lets say you rank position 10 for 'Plumbing Services London' but you don't actually use the word 'London' at all in the page copy, what kind of effect could you expect if you added the word in the content? Bit of a silly question really, I know it would have some effect but how important is it really? 2. What kind of effect would adding a blog with lets say 500 words of great content twice a week have on rankings? If you anchor text linked out of the copy would this alone help with ranking or is the reason for adding a blog to just use it as link bait to pull in more links, thus rankings are only effected when the blog starts to gain links?
Link Building | | activitysuper0 -
Free link on a Paid Link Blog
Hi there, I have been doing some outreaching, and managed to have a blog post accepted on a authority blog. They included links to my website, and I was very pleased with the placement. However, having browsed through the site, I was worried to see that they openly admit they allow 'reviews' of websites, with backlinks included, for $50 per review. I am worried I might be penalised without actually doing anything wrong. I did not pay for my link, but the link has been placed on a site which openly admits they accept payment for links. Should I be worried? Should I ask them to take it down? To date I have been told countless times by bloggers I am outreaching that if I pay $10, $50, $100 etc I can write a blog post. I have never accepted because of the risk of penalization. Now, unwittingly, I am linked to from a paid link site with a blog post that would look like I have paid for it because of the placement and style of back link. What do you think? Thanks,
Link Building | | giveacar0
