The profile of guest blogging is changing across the blogosphere. It’s not uncommon to find more and more blogs denying guest posts and switching to publish their own content. QOT was one of the earliest guest blogging blogs and it was saddening to see the changing profile of guest blogging – it is no longer an attempt of new bloggers to showcase their writing skills on big blogs for extra site traffic and community building – it got converted into a way to get free links.
Changing Profile of Guest Blogging
Have you wondered why some of your other favorite sites like Problogger and DailyBlogTips stopped accepting guest posts in 2013? Over the years guest blogging has emerged into a big business to hire freelance writers and SEO agencies to post guest blogs on big reputed sites and get free backlinks.
Unsuspecting bloggers allowed guest post content encouraged by free content and more search engine traffic … But Google has to penalize this free links market someday. We restricted guest posts drastically with tighter guidelines and warned guest blogs about the risks of guest blogging and why Google will penalize guest blogs someday.
Google Might Penalize Guest Blogs
Google recognized the growing market of guest blogging and how good blogs were being converted into guest blogging article depots, linking out to bad neighborhoods and sites engaged in spammy Internet marketing. Google pointed out several times about its official word on guest blogging.
While they encouraged reputed authors to guest blog, they advised blogs accepting guest posts to be cautious of the content they publish and be aware of good linking practices for Webmasters, because Google will penalize guest blogging blogs that violate search engine guidelines.
While many sites continue to propagate that guest blogging is the best way to get backlinks, it may no longer be so now as sites accepting guest posts will realize that free content is only being offered in the garb of published dofollow backlinks to unrelated sites. Webmasters should have strong editorial guidelines and accept only quality content, as free content with bad links comes with a high price of losing search engine traffic.
Though we accept guest posts with stringent guidelines, we still get at least five guest blogging posts every day, and none of them contains links which genuinely pointed to the author’s personal website!
So next time you accept a guest post on your blog, be careful about scrapped content (use CopyScape), and also the kind of links you are linking out to … A bad link neighbourhood is not worth the best guest post. Guest blogging is changing rapidly and keep your eyes open. Accept only high quality content from reputed authors with strict link policies.