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
-
A lot of blogs use wordpress or blogspot, are these blogs still useful for SEO in terms of linkbuilding, or should they be avoided?
I am very new to linkbuilding and SEO as a whole, so please forgive my ignorance. Reaching out to bloggers is a common tactic, but I've found a lot of people tend to blog with the assistance of wordpress or blogspot. I was wondering whether these blogs are still useful for SEO or if it is best to avoid them? Thanks in advance, Lewis
Link Building | | Samstore0 -
Shortened URLs Passing Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I was going through a competitor's backlinks, and I noticed they had a number of links from ow.ly and bit.ly that according to Open Site Explorer were passing link equity with PA in the 40 and DA in the 90s. How does that happen? And, how can I duplicate that? I thought those services just shortened your URLs for Twitter feeds mostly, and Twitter no-followed everything. Thanks for any assistance you can provide! Ruben
Link Building | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
India link building - any good ?
Hi Everyone We have clients that have very small budgets. We thought about outsourcing our link building to India to help with costs... Can anyone recommend any good Indian Link building companies that are well priced and that you have seen good results from ?? Any help would be much appreciated Thanks Guys Gareth
Link Building | | GAZ090 -
Blog Commenting, how to start?
Greetings Mozzers, I have read that interacting on blogs in a natural way is good for building relationships as well as earning links. This is what I'd like to do, however what is the best way to find blogs to start doing this for different industries? Google [industry blogs]? Go to competitors and look at their link profiles to see if there are blogs they are on? Whats a good way to start this method? All the advice/clarification would be outstanding!
Link Building | | MonsterWeb281 -
When good domain names go bad
We have created a website to distribute a niche product. About a year ago, another vendor decided to drop the product and did not renew their domain name. We tried to acquire the domain name, but a cyber squatter picked it up. The old domain name had a few decent back links, and there was probably some value to us with a 301, but the cyber squatter was asking $8,000 and we didn't even bother countering such an absurd figure. The old domain continued to rank reasonably well for one or our search terms, even though it was just one page of spammy links. Well, this week it appears that Google Panda may have finally killed it off. Which brings me to a couple of questions. 1. In addition to a simple Google search, is there a way to determine if Google has killed a domain? 2. Assuming that Google has indeed killed the domain, is there any value in trying to 301 the domain should it ever be released? Best,
Link Building | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
Link Building Through Blogs
A client of mine wants to look into new areas of link building after convincing them that their current link building strategies (purchasing multiple links from god knows where) was not working well for them. Essentially I felt they were spinning their wheels. Now, we are looking into content related blogs to get some honest links for their site. They sell sports equipment and we are looking at sports blogs to get links/partnerships. Most of these blogs want sponsorship fees or advertising fees. From an ethical standpoint I understand buying links is not the best idea. But because these are blogs that earn traffic, have relevant content, and can be helpful for the advertisement aspect to link to people who might be interested in their products as well. There shouldn't be a problem in acquiring a few of these links if the budget allows for it, correct? Also are blogs a good source to acquire links from?
Link Building | | USHoleInOne0 -
Content for links - diminishing value?
I'm offering content in return for contextual links to a number of website owners in my niche, and the up-take seems to be there. My concern is that the written piece generally won't be linked to from the homepage (i.e. blog post, featured article, etc), and so over time there's the risk that it will be lost deeper and deeper in the site's hierarchy. Is this a big issue given (I'm assuming) my content's value will diminish over time, etc. Most of the webmasters, are however happy for me to supply content sporadically. Ot is it still definitely worth progressing? Thanks.
Link Building | | newstd1000 -
Does Linkedin still pass link juice?
It looks like LinkedIn's links are using the http://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url= prefix for the external Websites links and is recently using 302 redirects.
Link Building | | explorionary0
