Guest Posting Campaign For New Site
-
Hi looking at doing a large guest post campaign for a new site (no authority) of mine. In total the plan is to distribute 50 high quality articles to other blogs in the same vertical. The goal is to kick start my link building campaign doing this. However I know that Google has been slamming down on guest posts:
http://searchengineland.com/guest-post-google-penalty-187707 AND https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/
What are some ways of doing guest posting and reducing the risk. Will keeping anchor-text brand based, be the best option?
Kind Regards,
Mark
-
Mark, thanks for the question. My short answer: If you are doing anything that is potentially risky, then don't do it. I mean using guest posts at all -- whenever I see people talk about using this strategy, I die a little inside.
Here's the long answer.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google's anti-spam team, said here that people should stop using guest posts to build links. In response, Jen Lopez of Moz wrote this great essay that I highly suggest you read at least twice:
As with anything, you don't want to be out there trying willy-nilly to get your posts on every blog for the sole purpose of building (probably bad) links. It's important to have this tied to your business and marketing goals, as you would with any other tactic. SEO is only one piece of the larger strategy, and if you focus solely on writing posts for link building purposes, you're missing out on a ton of other possibilities.
Here's why guests posts are usually bad ideas:
- Websites that just publish countless random guest posts on desired topics are rarely authoritative websites in those niches. Does anyone actually visit those sites? Do those sites send legitimate referral traffic? If the answer is "no," then Google likely views them as having little authority. So, a random link on a random post on such a site isn't going to help you that much.
- Any guest-post website that charges for publishing posts is almost certainly violating Google's guidelines. Paying for links directly (or indirectly via paying for posts) is very, very risky.
- You are "building" links, not "earning" them. Why should Google give you credit for a link that you essentially give yourself?
So, what's my answer? Read this Moz essay of mine that was inspired by Lopez's response. The key is to stop thinking about links and to start thinking about marketing. The best links, rankings, traffic and more are actually just good by-products of doing good public relations and publicity. My essay goes into to detail, but I'll summarize here.
First, determine your website's target audience. Second, find out what major news outlets, publications, and blogs are actually read by your target audience. Third, use the methods that I detailed to get news coverage or a quality article or opinion piece (not a few hundred words of fluff) published on those websites.
Yes, it's hard. But nothing good comes easily. ONE of those links is worth 100 or 1,000 random guest post links.
-
Do you also have high-quality content on your site? From a user's perspective, they may only see one of those 50 posts, then come to your site, and not know that there are 49 more quality posts elsewhere on the web about this topic.
-
The best way is to provide high quality, value-added content without spamming keyword rich anchors back to your blog. Guest posting, when done properly, can still be an effective link building strategy if it doesn't minimize the content.
For example, find a highly related niche website and write up an insightful, lengthy article (none of that 300 word crap). In that article, touch briefly on a related topic that you've expanded upon in detail on your own website - like an aside note where a reader can visit to gain deep understanding on a supplemental topic. If both articles (the guest post and your own article) are unique and high quality, the contextual link should be a positive addition to your link portfolio.
You want it to be seen as natural and appropriate - not spammy and an obvious tactic at only receiving a link. Keep the readers' best interest in mind and you should be ok, as long as the quality of the website you're guest blogging on also executes legitimate link building strategies.
What topics are you intending to write about?
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
-
Wordpress pages posts
Say you have a WordPress website with reviews and lists. Would you use "post" or "page" type for them? Is there any SEO advantage in using pages/subpages instead of posts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabx1 -
How to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site
Hello, I've got a new Ecommerce site I'm jumpstarting. It's one of those sites that takes a while to rank for. Here's what we're doing: 1. Creating a beautiful, mobile friendly site. 2. Adding a long detailed home page answering all the questions that people come to our industry keyword results with. 3. Adding detailed, beautiful cateogy pages. 4. Adding detailed, beautiful product pages. 5. Adding beautiful, long About Us & Resource Sites list pages. 6. Offering straight up obvious free shipping and no tax even though that's taking a hit in our industry. 7. We're going after the 2 main informational terms (keyword explorer) in the industry with a vengance - 20X as good as the competition for the main term. 8. We're adding 20-30 pages of articles to help our customers and hit major keyword search terms, although there's not much in our industry. What else would you recommend doing to jumpstart a new Ecommerce site that has difficulty being in the top 50? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Dfferent url of some other site is shown by Google in cace copy of our site's page
Hi, When i check cached copy of url of my site http://goo.gl/BZw2Zz , the url in cache copy shown by Google is of some other third party site. Why is Google showing third party url in our site's cached url. Did any of you guys faced any such issue. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Moving career site to new URL from main site. Will it hurt SEO for main page?
For one of our clients we are building a career site and putting it under a different URL and hosting service (mainly due to security concerns of hosting it under the same host and domain). almost 100% of the incoming traffic to their current career section (which it is in a sub-folder) receives traffic for branded keywords (brand + job/career/employment), that is, there are no job position specific keywords. The client is now worried that after moving the site, the inbound traffic to the main site will be severely affected as well as the SERP results. My questions are, will the non-career related SERPs be affected? I don't see how will they be but I could be wrong If no, how could we reassure her that the SEO to the main site wont be affected? are there any case studies of a similar case (splitting part of the website under a new URL and hosting service?) Thank you for your help. PS: this is my first post so please forgive me if this has been asked before. I could not find a good response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rflores0 -
My site is always in the top 4 on google, and sometimes goes to #2\. But the site at #1 is always at #1 .. how can i beat them?
So i'm sure this is a very generic question.. of course everyone wants to be #1. We are an ecommerce web site. We have all sorts of products, user ratings, and are loved by our customers. We sell over 3 million a year. So let me give you some data.. First of all one of the sites that keeps taking the #2 or #3 spot is amazons category for what we sell.. (i'm not sure if I should say who we are here.. as I don't want the #1 spot to realize we are trying to take them over!) Amazon of course has a domain authority of 100. But they never take the #1 spot. The other site that takes the #2 and #3 spot is not even selling anything. Happens to be a technical term's with the same name wikipedia page! (i wish google would figure out people aren't looking for that!) Anyways.. every day we bouce back and forth between #4 and #2.. but #1 never changes.. Here are the stats of us verse #1 from moz: #1: Page Authority: 56.8, Root Domains Linking to page: 158, Domain Authority: 54.6: root domains linking to the root domain 1.42k my site: Page Authority: 60.6, Root domains linking to the page: 562, Domain Authority: 52.8: root domains linking to the root domain: 1.03k So they beat us in domain authority SLIGHTLY and in root domains linking to the root domain. So SEO masters.. what do I do to fix this? Get better backlinks? But how.... I can't just email GQ and ask them to write about us can I? I'm open to all things.. Maybe i'm not using moz data correctly.. We should at least be #2. We get #2 every other day.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 88mph0 -
Update content or create a new page for a year related blog post?
I have a page called 'video statistics 2013' which ranks really well for video stat searches and drives in a lot of traffic to the site. Am I best to just change the title etc to 2014 and update the content, or create a totally new page? The page has 2013 in the URL as well which may be a problem for just updating?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonWhiting0 -
Noindex Mobile Site?
So I wanted to get everyone's opinion. Have a client in online retail on ASP and their developers built a mobile site a while back before we took the client on. For the sake of this post, just assume, resources are limited anddevelopers are not good (constantly break things we request to get fixed). They never installed analytics on the mobile site, so all I have to go off of is referral data on the main stores GA account for m.example.com However if I look to see what is indexed by doing site:m.example.com am not seeing many pages. The mobile site has a ton of internal links in GWT and am questioning its negative impact as there are no canonicals, no mobile sitemap present. In the ideal world, I would implement proper Mobile SEO practices but given the resources of no dev budget and devs not being good, I was thinking about noindexing the mobile site since I can RDP into the site and access robots. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sean_Dawes0