Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
-
Hi,
I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website.
I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site.
That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website.
What would you advise?
-
Thanks EGOL, Brent and Irving. Some good advice there.
It's not really traditional Guest Blogging Irving in that content providers get fee instead of a link - and are pointing links in from their external sites, so a little loss of control there, though without any anchor text guidelines and so forth.
-
It's called guest blogging.A guest blogger provides you with good content and you in turn give them a link. A lot of SEO link builders started doing guest posting exclusively and it is starting to get overdone.
Whether or not it is relatively safe is dependent on a few things, such as the type of site that you are linking to (and who they are linking to), type of linking (rteprative anchor text, img signature), number of different sites you are linking to and their niche (hopefully the same), number of links (recommend only one per blog post) and quality and length of content.
Everything comes with risk when link building, but if you are the one with the blog if you get penalized (all bets are off) and you have the power to instantly remove all of the links and you at least have a ton of content to show for it at the end of the day.
pretty good article here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/guest-blogging-enough-is-enough
-
Agreed. I've run into a small group of bloggers who are all members of a community.. writers associations, blogger groups, pr groups, etc. Even when they have similiar link profiles to their actual domains, you don't really see problems unless it's aggressive interlinking between the sites. Very aggressive, with only one purpose in mind.
-
I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website.
I don't have a site that is working with this model but as long as the content was really really high I don't think that it would be a problem. It's not that many articles or that many linking domains. If the authors are simply linking with "hey, I wrote this" instead of heavy keyword anchors... I think that it is OK.
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
-
Google Indexed Site A's Content On Site B, Site C etc
Hi All, I have an issue where the content (pages and images) of Site A (www.ericreynolds.photography) are showing up in Google under different domains Site B (www.fastphonerepair.com), Site C (www.quarryhillvet.com), Site D (www.spacasey.com). I believe this happened because I installed an SSL cert on Site A but didn't have the default SSL domain set on the server. You were able to access Site B and any page from Site A and it would pull up properly. I have since fixed that SSL issue and am now doing a 301 redirect from Sites B, C and D to Site A for anything https since Sites B, C, D are not using an SSL cert. My question is, how can I trigger google to re-index all of the sites to remove the wrong listings in the index. I have a screen shot attached so you can see the issue clearer. I have resubmitted my site map but I'm not seeing much of a change in the index for my site. Any help on what I could do would be great. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cwscontent
Eric TeVM49b.png qPtXvME.png1 -
How does putting a trial sign up code mid-blog post effect SEO? Do you think it will make my content seem less pleasing, therefor decrease the page rank??
I'm working on driving trials for our product - we have a number of blog posts that rank on page #1 of Google, and we get 2-3 trial sign ups per day from them. I'd like to put trial signup boxes about midway down each post to see if I can increase the number of trial signups that come directly from our blog. Do you think I can be "penalized" for this, since it's mid- blog-post content? Do you think Google will view this negatively?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Karibeaulieu0 -
If I put a piece of content on an external site can I syndicate to my site later using a rel=canonical link?
Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please? What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website. Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO1 -
Sidewide footer links to latest blog posts
Dear Friends I hope you can answer my questions. We are launching a new site and on the footer (sidewide) we list all new blog posts (limit 5 links - blog title), do you think we have any problems with that part of the website? I am concerned because all new blog post title will appear on all pages' footer and it will be marked as spammed. We just want visitors to be noticed about new blogs post on our site. Thank you,Tran
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveTran20130 -
What is value in a back-link from article with multiple links pointing to various other sites?
In a standard article with 400-500 words my site got a back-link. However, within the article there are 4 other links pointing to other external content as well (so total 5 links within articles all pointing to external sites, and 1 of the links is to my site). All links are to relevant external content that is. Question: wouldn't it be much more valuable for my site if only my site got a back-link from the article, as less link juice is now passed to my site, since there are 4 other links pointing to various sites from this same article? Or, is the case that given the other links are pointing to quality material it actually makes the link to my site look more credible and at the end of the day have more value. Conclusion: is it that on one hand less links in same article is better from a link juice perspective, however, from a credibility perspective it looks more convincing there are other links pointing to quality content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Any idea why I can't add a Panoramio image link to my Google Places page?
Hey guys & gals! Last week, I watched one of the Pro Webinars on here related to Google Places. Since then, I have begun to help one of my friends with his GP page to get my feet wet. One of the tips from the webinar was to geotag images in Panoramio to use for your images on the Places page. However, when I try to do this, I just get an error that says they can't upload it at this time. I tried searching online for answers, but the G support pages that I have found where someone asks the same question, there is no resolution. Can anyone help? PS - I would prefer not to post publicly the business name, URL, etc. So, if that info is needed, I can PM. Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | strong11 -
Domain Links or SubDomain Links, which is better?
Hi, I only now found out that www.domain.com and www.domain.com/ are different. Most of my external links are directed to www.domain.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Which I understand is considered the subdomain and not the domain. Should I redirect? (and if so how?)
Should I post new links only to my domain?0 -
OOPS!! My website links the most to me, I can't get it??
Today, I have checked Google webmaster tools to get answer of following question. Who links the most to my website? I was assumed that Google webmaster tools provide me list of external website where I have created my text links. But, I can't get it when see my own website links the most to me. (4652??) I checked my other websites which are integrated in Google webmaster tools. They also developed on same platform as well as same internal linking structure. But, I am not able to find out similar issue over there. That's why I am quite confuse with Vista Store. How can I solve it? Does it really matter? "Open Site Explorer is my favorite one and always using that to get it done. But, Google webmaster tools is also active & free so why should I not jump in to... 🙂 "
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0