Legit Editorial Placement vs Penalized Guest Posting
-
I'm planning to begin contributing to several different media outlets and blogs on the net, and hoping that I can get some decent placements for me and a few of my colleagues. Looking specifically at legit media outlets and corporate blogs with a structured and considered editorial process where we can contribute thought leadership pieces.
In light of all of the Google algorithm changes surrounding guest blogging, I am curious if this would be viewed as legit editorial placements, or as guest posts that would either carry no weight or be penalized?
Secondly, what are the considerations and value of including a high quality in-article link back to our site vs. a byline link, or both.
Does anyone have any data or experience with this? Thanks in advance! Andrew
and wondering if anyone has any experience or insights
-
To continue this discussion, here is an interesting thing that happened today. It might be a little egotistical but I have a Google Alert set up for my name. I was thrilled to get an alert today that I was mentioned in Forbes. Woohooo. The article mentions my name and an article I wrote and then links to:
So, if I had published that content on my own site I could have had a link from Forbes. But...is that true? Most likely if I had published that content on my own site it wouldn't have had the authority to rise to the top of the SERPS and it wouldn't have had nearly as much exposure as it got on the Moz blog. So, I am guessing that I would not have gotten a link from Forbes and I would not have been mentioned by them either.
I think that as I get more authority there are some articles that I want to publish on my own site, but there are others that I want to publish elsewhere for the exposure. One thing that I find does well on my own site is if I do a study with unique information, or if I write an article on a very specific topic. But, if I am writing about a broad subject, at this point an article on my own site is not likely to outrank Moz and SEW.
-
If one or two clients is an adequate reward for writing an article then you might benefit from sharing some content with another site.
But, here is where to be careful... Let's say that I sell green widgets and each sale generates $5,000 in profit. One sale. If I write an article about green widgets and publish it on my website I will start to get some traffic for that topic. Then if I write another, entirely different article on that topic and give it to another website, it is possible that they will outrank me for my own keywords. Then, are the people who read that article on the other guy's website going to come to me to make a purchase after reading that article. Perhaps people interested in buying green widgets will click an ad on that website instead of coming to my website. They might not even recognize that I was the author and also a seller depending upon how obvious that is made to the reader.
Rarely, I publish articles given to me by other people who are experts in a topic area related to my website's industry. My site is more powerful than all but a few in its industry. So, when these folks give me an article it often goes straight to the top of the SERPs for the keywords that it targets. I have received complaints from the "guest authors" about that and about me not wanting to remove their articles after my site ranks above theirs. When they offered the article I told them that I was going to produce photos and graphics that will illustrate it better than any other website. They agreed and thought that was a good idea. Now that my site outranks theirs they change their mind about wanting their article published. They wanted to be #1 for this topic but they are not.
-
Good perspective. I can see you have a very different economic reason for keeping your content on site and it would have to really make sense to give it to another publisher so that they can monazite it.
We're probably along the same lines as Marie in terms of what we're looking for. We're a marketing company - traffic is great and would love to have tons of it, but ultimately we're looking to attract a moderate amount of high quality middle/bottom of the funnel traffic and gain one or two clients from our effort.
-
If you are searching for information on Penguin or manual penalties, you're certain to see a lot of stuff written by me on several different sites.
Flooding the SERPs ?
-
Exactly.
When I post on SEW and Moz, here are the benefits for me:
-People who have a specific problem and are reading this article might recognize me as someone they could hire to help them solve that problem. That's worth a lot to me if that happens.
-I get name recognition. If you are searching for information on Penguin or manual penalties, you're certain to see a lot of stuff written by me on several different sites. I'm trying to build up authority as a person who knows her stuff in these areas.
But do the links in those posts actually help? I don't really know. I think I probably do get some benefit from having a link from high authority sites like that. Sure, my rankings have increased over time, but is that because of those links? I've attracted links too and perhaps some of those came about because people discovered my content after I shared it on Moz or SEW. It's a hard metric to measure.
-
I think that Marie's situation is quite different from mine. I think that one client for her is worth a lot more than the value of one article on my website. Pageviews on my website generate pennies, often less. One client from her shared article can be worth millions of pageviews on my website.
The economics are different.
-
**If you had the capacity to do both,..... **
That is an interesting question... I do all of the writing for my site with the exception of a few articles per year from paid authors who have expertise in subjects where I do not.
If I was able to double my productivity I would continue to place all of that content on my current site.
I am fortunate to have lots of topics where evergreen an article on my site can bring in dozens to hundreds of visitors per day. These are not commercial topics where sales can be made, they are informational topics monetized by ads - which makes a difference in the value of the traffic.
But, considering the value of the traffic and the return. If the return was a lot lower for publishing on my own site compared to getting "fresh blood' traffic from another website then I would write articles for other websites. I have some knowledge of what kind of traffic would be produced on these other websites because I often receive very visible links from their prominent articles. Although they can send an immediate and massive amount of traffic for a short period of time that does not compare with the traffic that an evergreen article on my own site can produce with year-after-year of dozens to hundreds of visitors per day. New articles on my site can also get a blast of traffic as my own visitors share them on social sites and blogs.
So, for my site, I think that I have made an informed decision about sharing articles with other websites. How this works on my site, with my content, in my industry and with my visitors could be very different from what you will see on your site. So, don't assume that I have the "right answer". I think that I have the "right answer" for my situation. Your's might be very different.
-
Hi, Marie. Thanks for your response and agree with everything you wrote here. I am not looking at this exclusively as a link building campaign - I see a lot of potential benefits. Our focus has always been more inbound oriented, with a focus on quality content, value, etc.
That being said, it is one of my goals to increase our site authority and I am looking at different ways to do that. As Egol said, if we develop great content, it will eventually get shared, linked to, etc. We have seen some of that over time, but I am wondering if the strategy of publishing some content externally might accelerate our efforts, and if so, I am really curious to see to what degree.
Do you see a correlation between your posts on Moz and SEW and your site authority over time? Very curious to hear your perspective on if/how it's helped.
Thanks much! Andrew
-
Hi, Egol. Thanks for your perspective and totally agree with what you're saying in terms of giving away content for free and investing on your own site versus others. In my mind there is some return for gaining exposure to larger audiences as well as building authority for my site through off page links. If you had the capacity to do both, do you think that external posting would help accelerate the development of your site authority and ultimately traffic/following or do you just keep the content all internal and let it build?
-
In my opinion, it's all about scale and intent. You won't get penalized by having a couple of guest posts. But, if it becomes clear that you are using guest posting primarily as a means to manipulate Google then you can run into trouble.
A while back there was a situation where someone got a manual penalty and one of the links that Google gave them as an example link was from a byline in a YouMoz post. A lot of people freaked out saying that links from Moz were no longer good. But, in reality, this link was a keyword anchored link that went along with a whole whack of other keyword anchored links from other guest posts.
I guest post on Moz and Search Engine Watch and a few other places and I'll occasionally link to my site where appropriate. Because Moz and SEW are authoritative publications they have strict editorial rules. For example, if I tried to link to my site with the keywords, "Google penalty expert", I'm betting that my editor would either question this or perhaps nofollow this.
My purpose in writing for these publications though extends far beyond getting a link. My purpose is to improve my brand recognition (with my brand being me). The more I write, the more people recognize me.
If there is no purpose beyond SEO, for these guest posts, then they're probably not a good idea.
-
I just thought of another situation where you might give your content away.... content that is time sensitive.
If you have an idea for an article that will only be valuable for a short period of time, that might be a good one to publish on another site.
Keep the evergreen content for your own domain. That is the content that will pull in visitors over time. Something that pulls 50 visitors per day, day-after-day, year-after-year, is worth a lot more than content that will pull in a quick 20,000 visits and then go stale.
I have some content that brings in hundreds, even thousands of visitors per day. If I would have given that away, I would have given away .... I am not going to say how much money.
(It is really rare for me to say anything to anybody about giving content away. If certain people read this they will think that I have abandoned my principles.)
-
I write on SEO forums as a hobby but my serious work goes exclusively to a couple of websites that I own.
I don't give any of that work away. It's too valuable.
If you think that you have what it takes to be a "thought leader" then that stuff should remain on your own website unless the place where you publish it has an absolutely enormous audience, and then you still have even better content on your domain for anyone who goes there.
Work to build your own audience instead of feeding the audience of another website. It will be really slow going at first but as you gain momentum things will start chugging along at a faster rate.
Going back to that "thought leadership".... if you truly have that a lot of other people will want it and they will come to your webssite to get it. If it is really that good and a few people find it they will tweet about it, share it, like it, link to it.... if you really have that just publishing it can be like throwing gasoline on a fire.
Lots of people think that they gotta give their content away. They need to have the courage not to do that... or at least only do that in rare situations where they can get enormous bang in front of just the right people - and then only do that with a small fraction of their treasure.
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
-
SEMrush vs GA rankings drop since February and December 2018?
I am wondering if someone can help me understand what's going on with our site. We had a 50% drop in the number of keywords ranking from February 2018 to October in SEMrush. Looking at SEMrush, I am actually seeing a drop after 2/208 with many competitor's sites as well. We saw moderate improvement in November, but around December 6th, we started seeing a decline the number of keywords ranking again. In Google Analytics, there was a 10-15% drop in traffic after February 2018, which recovered September to December, but since early December, there is a drop again. In GWT, I am seeing something similar to analytics with impressions and clicks. We have done some SEO the past couple of years, but we have taken care to do things white-hat so as not to incur a penalty. We have also invested in writing content for our blog on a regular basis. Any thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kekepeche0 -
Bad backlinks is it possible that Google is penalizing me?
Hi guys, since December I'm receiving thousands of bad backlinks from websites that copy my content and content from other websites. I also noticed a drop in the organic visits each month. Is it possible that Google is penalizing me for those backlinks? I know that I can ask the webmaster to remove the links but I don't believe that they will do. Look like it's a robot that does all this automatically. Should I use the Google disavow tool? Any other ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
Check images below please.
Thanks! OjAFwgT mni5lke UPVp9bW0 -
Real Vs. Virtual Directory Question
Hi everyone. Thanks in advance for the assistance. We are reformatting the URL structure of our very content rich website (thousands of pages) into a cleaner stovepipe model. So our pages will have a URL structure something like http://oursite.com/topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html etc. My question is… is there any additional benefit to having the path /topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html literally exist on our server as a real directory? Our plan was to just use HTACCESS to point that URL to a single script that parses the URL structure and makes the page appropriately. Do search engine spiders know the difference between these two models and prefer one over the other? From our standpoint, managing a single HTACCESS file and a handful of page building scripts would be infinitely easier than a huge, complicated directory structure of real files. And while this makes sense to us, the HTACCESS model wouldn't be considered some kind of black hat scheme, would it? Thank you again for the help and looking forward to your thoughts!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ClayPotCreative0 -
How should I use the 2nd link if a site allows 2 in the body of a guest post?
I've been doing some guest posting, and some sites allow one link, others allow more. I'm worried I might be getting too many guest posts with multiple links. I'd appreciate your thoughts on the following: 1. If there are 50+ guest posts going to my website (posted over the span of several months), each with 2 links pointing back only to my site is that too much of a pattern? How would you use the 2nd link in a guest post if not to link to your own site? 2. Does linking to .edu or .gov in the guest post make the post more valuable in terms of SEO? Some people recommend using the 2nd link to do this. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pbhatt0 -
Separate Servers for Humans vs. Bots with Same Content Considered Cloaking?
Hi, We are considering using separate servers for when a Bot vs. a Human lands on our site to prevent overloading our servers. Just wondering if this is considered cloaking if the content remains exactly the same to both the Bot & Human, but on different servers. And if this isn't considered cloaking, will this affect the way our site is crawled? Or hurt rankings? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Desiree-CP0 -
Competitor using "unatural inbound links" not penalized??!
Since Google's latest updates, I think it would be safe to say that building links is harder. But i also read that Google applies their latest guidelines retro-actively. In other words, if you have built your ilnking profile on a lot of unnatural links, with spammy anchor text, you will get noticed and penalized. In the past, I used to use SEO friendly directories and "suggest URL's" to build back links, with keyword/phrase anchor text. But I thought that this technique was frowned upon by Google these days. So, what is safe to do? Why is Google not penalizing the competitor? And bottom line what is considered to be "unnatural link building" ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20101 -
Branded Anchor Text, Exact vs. Non-exact Match Domain
Hello, For NLPCA.com, when you search for "NLP California" in Google,the letters "nlp" are bolded in the SERP URL and so is "ca". See here. This is because "ca" is an abbreviation for "California" Thus, this is not an exact match domain but it is close. What should our branded anchor text be? I want to change the anchor text profile to 98% branded anchor text. The 3 names our company goes by are NLP California NLP Institute of California NLP and Coaching Institute Let me know if we should not use one or more of these names for branded anchor text.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Need clarification on what is a landing page vs. doorway page
Hello everyone - I just became a PRO member today and wanted to say hello and ask this question... I am launching a new product, but 6 months before I created 4 different domains with landing pages to "prime" my SEO for the keywords I am trying to pursue. Now that I have launched my new product, it resides on the main domain name (let's call it "MainDomain.com"). Here's my dilemma... I want to create landing pages on each of the different domains for my PPC and optimized organic search traffic. For example, on one of the other domains (let's call it "LandingDomain1.com"), I have created a page to optimize for the keyword "event planning software" and sending my PPC traffic for "event planning software" there as well as my email campaigns. This page has original content that I have written for it (it's not duplicate content used elsewhere), but it also has navigation and links pointing to MainDomain.com, which is where we convert and collect registrations. My question is, will this activity be considered a doorway page even though I'm using it for a landing page for a particular audience? And, if it could be considered a doorway page, would I be better off moving all these optimized landing pages to my MainDomain.com and then doing a 301 redirect from those other domains to the MainDomain.com. Your input is much appreciated ... thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DenverDude1