Sponsored blog posts

[FSW66]

Hello everyone!

I am constantly receiving offers from content writers looking for blogs to post content for their clients and offering to pay me to add 'relevant' articles to my blog.

My question is: Is this a good idea? And if so, what should I charge?

My main concern is if accepting these posts would damage our reputation in SEO terms.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Stay safe!

Ken - www.naturalfrenchsoap.com

[FSW66]

Bonjour EGOL!

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply.

I suppose I always had niggling doubts which you have just confirmed for me.  I suppose I was wondering if I was missing out somewhere, but clearly, I'm not. I will continue to refuse these people.

Thanks again, much appreciated

Ken

naturalfrenchsoap.com

[EGOL]

We get tons of content offers.  Many offer to pay us.   Some offer free content.   In over 20 years, we have only accepted a few of these offers.    Here are the reasons...

1. First...  99% of the time the content is far below our editorial standards.   Trash.  Prattle.  We would be ashamed to publish it.  It is so bad we are not even interested in working with them.

2. We are not interested in being a platform for link builders.  If they are building links with articles we know that they might be doing enough of that to get in trouble with Google.    Google knows that people use articles, guest posts, etc. to build unnatural links.  Just today at Search Engine RoundTable, Barry had a post about that - saying that links in guest posts should be nofollowed.

I will say that we have received golden content offered to us.   Content of the highest quality.  But, the authors of this content simply wanted to have their content on our website, so they could share their work with our visitors.  These were professors and scholars who are all about writing and publishing.    They did not have links in the content to their personal websites or to employer websites, or to any websites that might be concerned about links.  These authors knew nothing about links.  One gave us three or four articles and we then starting paying him to write about topics that we needed.   His articles have been some of the best performing on our website.

Right now I have a dilema.   A highly qualified author with excellent content repeatedly emailing to get his article published.  But, he is with a website that is hard core linkbuilders and they will get angry if I nofollow their links.  So, I will keep deleting his emails.