Guest blogging is currently a popular tactic for content marketers and SEOs, which involves contributing an article to an external website’s blog with some kind of promotional goal in mind.
In Silkstream’s very first podcast, shown below, we discuss the practice of guest blogging and provide some guidance on the best approach to adopt and what to look out for when engaging in this type of promotional online activity.
We have also provided a transcript of the video below, just in case you can’t access our YouTube-hosted podcast. Please feel free to share, like and comment on the video as well as subscribe to Silkstream’s Channel.
Video Transcript
[Randal] Welcome to this YouTube video of ours, it’s 2014, the first one we’re doing for the year and today we’re going to discuss guest blogging for links, which there’s been a bit of recent controversy over because of Matt Cutts, as usual.
So, to get the ball rolling I’d like to talk about guest blogging in general. It’s not just a way to gain links, its also a way to raise awareness of your brand or yourself as an established writer. Its a great way to communicate with related sites’ audiences to promote yourself and it can also be leveraged to build links, as a kind of bonus, so you can give your site votes as it were and help improve its ranking in the way that link building can but it is also a great promotional tool.
So, there’s been recent controversy because of Matt Cutts and his blog article, which, what was it titled again?
[Ria] Stick a fork in it?
[Randal] Stick a fork in it yes. So he stated stick a fork in it, guest blogging is done and I think Hayley had quite a few interesting insights into that on our blog.
So I think we’re just going to have a bit of an open discussion today regarding guest blogging for links and what our general perspective is on it and what we reckon the best practices should be if you are going to use that technique for link building.
Being both a blog owner and a guest blogger myself, I’d have to say that there is a bit of an issue at the moment with people writing low-quality articles for quick links, which are not of any use to anyone, which is probably the problem that Matt Cutts is aiming to address.
When I write a guest post for someone, I don’t go in with the intention of: “I’m going to build a link”, I go in with the intention of: “I need to add value to that blog” because without that the whole quality of the article is pants, its of use to no one and I think Google can quite easily tell the difference between a quality article and one that is not.
So for me, guest blogging is a way for me to write quality articles that contribute something to the audiences of related blogs, not just as a way to gain a link but also as a way to raise awareness of my own area of writing, my own area of expertise and my own site’s general content.
For you Hayley, how do you see it as a practice? I mean what kind of goal do you go in with whenever you guest blog?
[Hayley] First of all I like to look for, if you’re going to write a guest blog, is that the site that you’re writing for needs to be relevant to your industry because there’ll be no point writing on a fitness blog about SEO or anything that’s completely irrelevant so that the first thing.
Secondly, I would then have a look at the site and make sure that it is a valuable site and going to bring valuable visitors back to our site as well. So for instance, if you were a small local garage and you had a blog and you were going to guest post for somebody like Auto Trader for instance, that would be a good way of guest blogging. Obviously, Auto Trader is an authority in what they do, its relevant to a garage so…
[Randal] …yeh that is a good point, there’s no point writing for something that’s completely irrelevant because it doesn’t look natural at the end of the day if you know, like you said, SEO writing for a garage blog for example is unrelated fields.
[Hayley] I think another good thing to do would be if you’re unsure about the quality of the blog that you’re going to be guest posting on, is just go through and have a look at other articles that they’ve posted. Do they seem to be posting a lot of guest articles – that’s a bad sign.
Do they seem to be posting articles that are linking out with really heavy keyword anchor text – that’s another bad sign.
[Randal] I think other bad signs, for example, that I look for: if they don’t have any kind of social media followers or any subscribers.
[Leigh] There’s a good way, to just jump in there, you can look on places like Feedburner to actually look up a particular blog and that would generally tell you the number of subscribers to a particular blog just so you can ascertain, as Randal was saying, the popularity of those blogs and there are other various tools, which can tell you the same kind of thing.
It’s just generally a feel good factor isn’t it really.
[Randal] Yeh you can always spot if a blog has just been set up for the purpose of generating guest post articles, build links, and you know based on the quality of the content, for example, if they’re all kind of 300 words, broken English that doesn’t make any sense, and of course exact match anchor text links that will be completely irrelevant to whatever the site is talking about, that’s kind of a signal to stay away. You wouldn’t really even bother contacting the site owner.
You’ve been approached before haven’t you Leigh? You wrote for Smashing Magazine was it?
[Leigh] Yeh and that’s one of those things when the majority of articles that are written on there are from guest authors or authors that are invited to write for them once they’ve established some kind of expertise in that field, rather than just unleash it to anybody who can just submit content that could be, potentially, inaccurate and damaging.
[Hayley] That’s another thing, stay away from sites that put out user-generated content that’s too easy to just sign up and have your content there because it might look fine when you look at it but who’s to say that the next person that comes along won’t take advantage of the site and spam the hell out of it?
[Leigh] As an outsider looking in to Matt Cutts’ comment is its the same thing thats happened over the years, there are tactics that have been abused and rightly or wrongly not its deemed not to be such a great thing to do but when you compare the actual process of what’s going on with guest blogging, its almost exactly the same as how newspapers have worked for hundreds of years.
They have in-house journalists that write content and they have guest publishers that are invited in for features and so on and so forth and its exactly the same thing, the difference being that maybe a newspaper has a kind of standards and procedures in place to curate their content and if there are blogs that are doing exactly the same thing then by the virtue of somebody guest blogging that shouldn’t be a bad thing if its done, as you say, on a good blog and they are experts within their field – that’s only surely enriching the content on the blog.
So just taking it and putting it into context here, I think its just a bit of a scare-mongering phrase, which is tarring everybody with the same brush but generally if you’ve got a good quality blog and you’re inviting experts in to write for you then that can only enhance the feel.
[Randal] I think you’re right, and if you do read the article that Matt Cutts published, he had an edit on the end of it, kind of like an added thing after he’d pretty much thrashed the whole link building by guest blogging thing.
He then added: well after he’d said that you should only really guest blog for people you know, which is ridiculous, well you can guest blog but just be careful, as a site owner, who you accept guest articles from. Because the problem ultimately isn’t down to people who have abused the system, like you said, as a way to just get loads of links. But the other half of it is the site owners themselves who are allowing these links to be published.
And I know I’ve said that some people have just set up blogs with the sole aim to build guest posts for link building but you can easily identify those blogs and just stay away from them because there’s no value in them whatsoever if that site then gets penalised and you’ve written an article for them.
So, for example, with that Smashing Mag article that you did. How long, roughly, did it take you to create that to give people an idea of how much work should go into an article?
[Leigh] Well with research and writing, first draft and edits and so on, probably a week. It wasn’t a five minute thing. And then it’s sent to review as well, there’s a panel of experts that would review that article so they can give their impartial opinion on various aspects of the article such as style, content, how useful would it be to beginners, intermediates, advanced. How accurate is it? Could it do with any kind of enhancing in any way, shape or form? And I think those experts as well are built up over time.
You build up a pool of these experts that you can rely on. You may get guest bloggers that are writing on subjects that we may not necessarily be expert in. So then to put all your faith in someone is a very dicey thing to do so if you build up a panel of experts that can validate that content for you then that’s a good thing.
[Hayley] On that topic, did they ask you to validate your sources if you referenced anything within the article?
[Leigh] I believe they do, and its a standard thing obviously whenever you’re writing anything, much the same as you do in any kind of white paper, university paper, any kind of reference has to be cited when you state a fact. Or any kind of press release even, on behalf of a company, any kind of quotes from a client’s customers should be verified and checked that they actually did say what you’re stating that they said. I think its just these procedures in place.
[Hayley] That’s some ideas that will help people understand how a highly valuable blog works when using guest posters. They’re the kind of good quality signs that you should look out for.
[Randal] As a blog owner, I get approached quite a lot by people who are looking to write and you can always tell if somebody is writing just for the purpose of gaining a link and then you’ll never hear from them again or somebody who is clearly not an industry expert in their field. Also anyone who admits to the fact that they’ve got this team of writers who can provide something that is unique and quality to your industry, etc tells you that they won’t provide as much quality to your blog.
I won’t say that completely because sometimes they can produce a bit of content that is valuable.
[Hayley] It’s handy to ask for links to other articles that they’ve already written just so you can have a look and see what their style of writing is like first before you agree to accept something from them.
[Randal] So if you’re vetting those kind of requests that you’re getting as a blog owner, you’ll find that your site may be slightly safer from all the future updates.
[Hayley] I think with the introduction of Google Authorship as well, its kind of made it more transparent so if someone’s using Google+ and Google Authorship you can just pop on and have a look at their profile and see what kinds of things they’re doing on there and what other sites they’re linked as contributors to and things like that.
[Leigh] It’s a key point really isn’t it, that is the author ultimately. The author itself gives you faith in what they’re writing if that author establishes credibility.
[Randal] That actually takes me onto a point that I did want to raise, which is there’s a theory that SEOs are currently discussing on Authorship and whether Google will release some sort of algorithm that can crawl your authorship and see if you’re publishing on just PR5 sites, for example, which are high quality, high authority sites and with no range. Or if you’re publishing to possibly even a range of different topics areas that have no special niche, a much broader topic area than your own special expertise.
[Leigh] Publishing on University sites: .ac’s .edu’s or maybe, as you say, certain types of domains or certain countries or demographic.
[Randal] I’ll be honest, its something I’ve been curious of for quite a while now, since Authorship first came out, people are saying it can improve the ranking of your article because it shows that you’re more trustworthy in the eyes of Google so your position should be better but then I thought hang on, if I’m writing for all these different industries then it looks like I am an SEO or I am a content marketer.
So the point I wanted to raise was that if you are doing it on behalf of someone then I recommend doing what PR agencies initially did and ghostwrite on behalf of a person from that company and any kind of blogging opportunities that come from that, link them to that person’s Authorship profile on Google+ because not only does it give the person that you’re writing on behalf of some authority, even if they didn’t write it themselves. Realistically, like a PR agency they should read the article before it goes out or something along those lines to make sure that you’re not making some false statement on their behalf. But it just builds up their authorship, it doesn’t look spammy and it looks more trustworthy if you’ve got someone…
[Hayley] …like a CEO of a company writing rather than so and so on behalf of.
[Randal] Yeh that’s exactly it. So that’s my view on how Authorship should be used with guest blogging and the way forward I think to avoid any of this Google potential Authorship algorithm release.
[Ria] Well as you were saying earlier, the diversity of subjects of what people are writing on in their Google+ is also, say there’s one specific subject but they’ll have ten articles that are pretty much exactly the same thing on different blogs and perfectly re-worded, I think once Authorship becomes more of a thing then Google will also be able to pick up on the articles you’ve written and compare them with each other. And if some are too similar then you might be manually reviewed.
[Hayley] So you’re not really adding anything new to the internet by rewriting the same article ten times. That’s a perfect example of writing for links.
[Randal] Yes, known as article spinning, which is something that they’ve always said don’t do it. I think back in 2012, I think they did a video saying don’t spin content because they’ll know.
[Leigh] I would just say to follow the practices of the publishing industry as a whole rather than just the web publishing industry because publishing has been established for hundreds of years, they do a good job in general with newspapers and academic journals, and so on and so forth.
So adhere to those principals and those standards on the web and you won’t go far wrong.
[Randal] Obviously, the slight difference being the whole link thing and getting links back to your site.
[Leigh] Well that can only be in the way of citation offline really, whether its in a bibliography or you’re citing it’s really just the same as a link – you’re referencing someone. I think if that’s done in a sensible way then why not reference somebody else? If its useful and if its to show that in the argument or content that you’ve put across: this is the rationale or evidence behind it that’s helped you come to a conclusion and you provide a resource then that’s a great link.
[Randal] That’s a pretty good way to sum it up I think!
Well that is it for our discussion on guest blogging for links. If you’d like to check out more content, have a look through our YouTube Channel and also check out our blog, which is silsktream.net/blog where you will get some interesting articles from all of us guys related to marketing, web design and all sorts of other things you may be interested in.
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