Should you guest post on a site with no quality links?
-
Suppose a site is related to your industry and has a relatively good domain authority of 49. However when you look at their link profile it is mostly directories and they don't seem to have any natural links from quality sites. Would you still take the link if they offered to publish your guest post?
-
It's not just about getting links to boost your rankings. Think about the potential referral traffic too. A great blog post on a site relevant to your niche can send you well qualified traffic that converts well. At the end of the day, it's not traffic the site needs - it's business. Also think about your positioning - If you visit a bunch of sites about fly fishing and see guest posts from the same person on just about every site you visit, you're going to think that they are more likely to be an authority on the subject. Just make sure the articles are good! Don't just cobble together a low value blog post just to get the link. Think about your positioning, think about the particular audience of the site and create something worth reading. If you've been offered a guest post then it's not unreasonable to ask a couple of questions about the site's visitors. What kind of thing are they looking for and how many readers of the blog are there? Even if you just get your name/brand in front of your customers, that can be a good thing. If you were given the opportunity to talk to a group of potential customers - how big would the group need to be to make it worth your while?
-
Three good answers.
As you know, it is hard to get quality links, so they have experienced the same problem as everyone else. If the directory links are relevant, and there are no egregious ones, it isn't likely to do you harm.
In addition, you can't see all of the links the site has, so you don't know if there are better links or worse links also.
With a DA of 49, it can't be too bad, so if it is in your industry and you already checked out the other content and you didn't find any bad outgoing links, then it looks like a good opportunity.
-
Sure would.
1. Nothing lives or dies by a single link (spam or not).
2. If you have a link profile that doesn't elicit the red flag, those few links from spam-ish sites with descent authority seem to help out in my experience.
3. It's in your industry, so even a cookie-cutter 'directory' has it's place when it is highly relevant. It's still an effective way to build links no matter what the fear-mongering SEOs say
-
If they have good content, unique and not spammy looking content, I will take the link. I would also look at the kind of sites they are linking to and as long as it's all good, closely related and there's no junk in there, it's a good link in my eyes.
I would also make sure that majority of my links are not coming from guest blog posts, that's what I would worry about more. Just making sure the link profile is as natural as possible. And don't always do anchor text links only.
I hope that helps.
-
Directories are not that bad if they are related to the site, I would look deeper into the link profile, to me it sounds like a decent site if their is numerous quality content and they also have a decent amount of traffic and keywords driving traffic to the site I say go for it.
-
Absolutely I would. If your entire link profile was made up of these sites that would be a different situation. But if it has a high DA/PA, and it's in a related niche, then I definitely would.
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
-
Guest Posting Offer
Our company gets pitched on linking to other websites nearly constantly. Recently, we received an offer to guest post on several sites managed by the same person. These sites aren't really relevant to our website, so my instinct is that we should ignore the offer. However, I would really like more backlinks and maybe I shouldn't turn away this offer.
Link Building | | GreatLegalMarketing0 -
Blog post back link
Hi, I am new to SEO and I am planning to hire someone in Fiverr regularly to submit different guest posts on the different related topic on the website with a good domain authority (>60) as a result to have some quality inbound links. As I am writing the guest post myself, May I know how many backlinks should I have per post are best for SEO? and should I only focus on anchor text backlinks? Also, here is my understanding of what I should be careful when hiring someone on Fiverr to do a blog post, please let me know if I am wrong and if there is another thing I need to be careful. It needs to be dofollow link It is permanent I check the website domain authority and spam sore that the person provides before using it. Please let me know if I missed out something. Appreciated Kind regards Chris
Link Building | | KINSHUN0 -
Post index of quality back links; How long should you leave it to see if it's had any impact?
The question is pretty much in the title. We had a link from a Charity site (high PA/ DA) and from Metro online recently. Indexed about 3 weeks ago and 5 days ago respectively. No movement to speak off. (Previously we've seen significant boosts from far lesser links). Should I assume they have had no effect? Or is too early to tell I know it takes up to 2 months for some of our new pages to rank, same with passing authority from links? (Note: I appreciate the competition will play a significant part in this, but my question is specifically about how long one should leave to know one way or another. )
Link Building | | isaac6630 -
Reputable High Quality Link Building Company
Hi We are looking for a reputable high quality link building company. Can anyone recommend any and how much would we expect to pay? Thanks Andrew
Link Building | | Studio330 -
Creating your own blog for back linking to your site
Our competitor seems to be linked to a blog that they have created themselves. From an SEO perspective is it worthwhile creating a blog that is related to your particular industry and then only including links back to your site. Also is there any way to upload ,articles etc automatically to the blog to cut down on the people hours involved in updating content?
Link Building | | Hardley10 -
Linking to sites that link to porn or casinos, my site getting penalized?
I have some link exchanges with some sites to get web traffic but when i ran the bad neighborhood link checker, i found that one site links to some casinos and another site has one link to a porn site. Is this getting me penalized? should i remove the links to these sites? Thanks, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Why does my site only have 4 internal followed links/internal links?
When using Open Site Explorer my site is winning in many categories but lacking in others as compared to competitors. I intend to improve on this but am a little confused by the extremely low number of "internal followed links" and "internal links" at just 4. My competitors have much more than that. Does this mean links to the root domain? Total internal links? I have many internal links so I'm having a hard time figuring this one out. What four internal links are getting noticed? I just went through and changed all the links that went to index.html to link to the root domain at www.njlimocarservice.com as I just found a Q&A that indicates this was better. So as of Wed at 5:45 PM all my links to the homepage went to index.html and not the root which is no longer the case. Not sure if this matters. At the same time I also just put a 301 from index.html to redirect to www.njlimocarservice.com. Any help appreciated! h9QuF.png
Link Building | | kabledesigns0 -
Multiple same domain links on Open Site Explorer
In doing competitor link analysis on Open Site Explorer, I've noticed quite a few links coming from the same domain listed separately. This seems to be especially prevalent with Google directory listings. For example, I'll see a link to the site from google.hu/...., google.am/..., google.kz/..., etc. In some cases, it will be prefixed with an IP address, followed by the subfolder address. Correct me if I am wrong, but these seem to be all counting as separate root domains that are linking to the site. How is this done? Are directory submissions given to each country's google directory? Does an original DMoz listing get re-submitted to all of these? Just looking for some clarification on this and how it's accomplished. Thanks everyone!
Link Building | | NiallTom0