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?
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
-
Open Site Explorer - Spam analysis: need help with inbound links... from my site!
hallo, reading my spam analysis report from open explorer, I found somenthing I don't understand (please see attached image): The long list of links inside the red rectangle are inbound links with a spam score of 5 coming from my same site. How is that possible? Should I remove those links? Also , I see that many of those links are links present in the top navigation bar (about page, home page, service description etc.) or in the sidebar section of the website (categories, recent posts, recent comments). Should I treat them differently? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micvitale0 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Possible problem with new site (GWT no queries/very low index vs. submitted)
Hi everyone, I recently launched a new website for a small business loan company in the Dallas area. The site has been live for roughly a month and a half. I submitted everything to GWT as usual, including my sitemap. I am not sure what's going on with the site, as there is no activity from GWT in the impressions or queries. The submit vs. index is 24/3 (and hasn't moved). Also the queries graph on the overview stops at 3/18/2015... On another note, when I go to Crawl > Sitemaps, it shows that there were pages indexed during the month of march and then on April 3 it drops from 17 to 2 and never increases. Google says there are no errors or issues found, but I feel like there's something wrong. When I do site:, my URLs do pop up which makes me believe there's just a problem with my GWT. With that being said, I'm not happy THINKING there's something wrong. I need to actually know what the problem is. The only thing I can think of that I have done is purchase SSL for the site, but when I search what pages are indexed using www. it shows all the HTTPS URLS, so that would tell me that the site is getting indexed without a problem? Does anyone have a clue as to what might be happening? I will attach some screen shots so that you can get a better idea... KQ2366i D5xBNZf mF7kkgW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameswesleyhunt0 -
Why isnt this site ranking?
I just took over for a site and noticed they have no presence for any keywords...not even low ranks. Their backlink profile is not the best, but webmaster tools says they have no manual actions. vonderhaar.com Thoughts on the matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Any Suggestions For My Site?
I've recently started a website that is based on movie posters. The site has fundamentally been built for users and not SEO but I'm wondering if anyone can see any problems or just general advice that may help with our SEO efforts? The "content" on the website are the movie posters. I know Google likes text content, but I don't see what else we could add that wouldn't be purely for SEO. My site is: http://www.bit.ly/ZSPbTA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | whispertera0 -
Please help on this penalized site!
OK, this is slowly frying my brain and would like some clarification from someone in the know, we have posted multiple reconsideration requests the regular "site violates googles quality guidelines" .."look for unnatural links etc" email back in March 2012, I came aboard the business in August 2012 to overcome bad SEO companies work. So far i have filled several disavow requests by domain and cleared over 90% of our backlink profile which where all directory, multiple forum spam links etc from WMT, OSE and Ahrefs and compiled this to the disavow tool, as well as sending a google docs shared file in our reconsideration request of all the links we have been able to remove and the disavow tool, since most where built in 2009/2010 a lot where impossible to remove. We managed to shift about 12 - 15% of our backlink profile by working very very hard too remove them. The only links that where left where quality links and forum posts created by genuine users and relevant non spam links As well as this we now have a high quality link profile which has also counteracted a lot of the bad "seo" work done by these previous companies, i have explained this fully in our reconsideration request as well as a massive apology on behalf of the work those companies did, and we are STILL getting generic "site violates" messages, so far we have spent in excess of 150 hours to get this penalty removed and so far Google hasn't even batted an eyelid. We have worked SO hard to combat this issue it almost feels almost very personal, if Google read the reconsideration request they would see how much work we have done too remove this issue. If anyone can give any updates or help on anything we have missed i would appreciate it, i feel like we have covered every base!! Chris www.palicomp.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | palicomp0 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
SEO for Log in Sites
Hello, I just lunched a website where you have to sign up and to log in in order to use it. So I have the home, also a blog but then the rest of the pages are let's say it "hidden".How would you do the seo for it? I have been cheking facebook, foursquare and some others and they use different approaches. Facebook uses the same description in every single page for example. My site is similar to foursquare users have profile, stats, history, ranking. Well, what is your advice?? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | antorome0