Carmilia C.
In this week’s Q&A section, we have selected the following topic from our subscriber: “Should I Accept Guest Posts on My Website?”
Question From Stefanya Clark
“I have been receiving a lot of emails from marketers that wanted to publish guest post on my site. Should I accept it? Is there any drawbacks of this?”
Are you considering to accept guest posts on your site? Before you do, here is some complete guide on guest posting.
After you read this article, we promise that you’ll have a clear path on whether you should accept guest posts on your site or not!
With that, here are the highlights of this article:
- Advantage of accepting guest post on your site
- Can accepting too many guest postings harm your site?
- When to accept guest posts on your site?
- Discover your end game goals of your site
Guest posting is all about publishing content on other sites, gaining some valuable link from other powerful website and their traffics.
Hence, there is also an opportunity for your own website to allow guest posting proposal from other sites.
Advantage of Accepting Guest Posts
First of all, let’s take a look on what are the benefits of accepting guest posts for your marketing tactic.
1. Allowing Guest Post Save You Ton of Work
For some of the webmaster, accepting guest posts could be beneficial in term of saving time, energy, and even cost.
Producing a content by your own could spend you few hours and even days to make a quality one. And hiring a content writer can be costly.
2. Marketing Tactic
Some of the guest posters will share the content they published on your site such as social medias, newsletter, or even a link to your site.
This is free marketing!
3. Offer Your Readers Different Insight That Not Within Your Expertise
If you own a general niche site, you’ll cover a tons of various niches that is sometimes not within your expertise.
Even though you have a piece of knowledge of each niches topic that you’re going to cover, it is still better to be written by those that are focused on particular niches.
For example, in one of our general site, we have few external contributors that helps us write the topics that not in our expertise such as camping & survival niche.
We might have a knowledge of camping & survival, but definitely not as much as our contributor who are specialized in those fields for a long time.
4. Offer Your Readers a New Dimension to Your Site
If you’re running a blog single-handedly, your websites will expect a particular writing style and approach.
By accepting guest post, you could introduce a new fresh style to your readers and make your site looks more attractive by having more than one contributors.
With all the advantages above, there are also something that you should consider: accepting guest posts has a potential risk to harm your site SEO.
Don’t worry, we’ll explain in details on which type of guest post could harm your SEO, and which type aren’t.
First, let’s understand how accepting guest post in relation of your site SEO.
Can Accepting Too Many Guest Postings Harm Your Site SEO?
When your site or blog has a good rank in SERP or receives good amount of traffics, don’t be surprised to see tons of incoming collaboration proposal emails.
These “collaboration proposal” can be in many form such as guest post, sponsored link, link exchange, and endorsement.
Smell some money?
Yes, and this has happened to tons of webmaster that finally think that they can have additional money maker source.
At least, until the disaster came. After a while, their website spam score increased drastically and in worse case, penalized by Google.
In other word, if you blindly accept all the guest post, here is what will happen to your site:
1. High spam scores
One of the factors of high spam scores on your website is caused by tons of guest post in your site that link to low quality websites.
2. Deteriorate Your Site Authority
We completely understand that high spam scores does not lead to ranking lose since spam score are not being used by Google to determine ranking.
However, these two are different effects of guest post acceptance that are not related to each other.
If your site link to a low quality or authority site, it basically deteriorate your overall website authority on SERP.
This is why big site like Forbes have a strict link placement on their site. You won’t find Forbes place a link to a random blog in any of their content.
To conclude, accepting too many guest post in your site is safe, if you do it properly.
Here’s how you should accept guest posts properly, so that it won’t harm your site SEO.
When to Accept Guest Post on Your Site?
When you received tons of sponsored content proposal, you should be careful and selective in choosing them.
1. Content Quality
The first thing you should do each time you received the guest post proposal is checking the content quality.
Most of the guest posters target is just to have a link building from your site and ignoring the quality of content that they proposed.
Hence, don’t be surprised if you frequently found tons of proposed content that has really bad quality.
Here’s some of the criteria of guest post that you should avoid:
- Content with very low word counts (typically below 1,000 words is bad).
- Rounding content (content that has no direction and keep on repeating the points).
- Poor quality content with keyword stuffing.
- Plagiarism content (always check with plagiarism detector online whether the article has been published elsewhere before).
- Grammar and construction error.
2. Do a Link Audit Before Publish The Guest Post
After checking the content quality, you should also do the link audit of the link that you’re going to target.
As we mentioned, linking to a low authority and quality site will harm your SEO.
Hence, do a background check on the website that you’re going to target.
Check if their site is a good quality content or they’re just a spam site.
Also do a metrics check if the site that you’re going to link has low spam score, high DA, DR, and etc.
Discover Your End-Game Goals
Now, we comeback to the initial question, should you accept guest posts on your site?
To answer this question, you should figure out what is your goals and current condition of your website.
- Are you running the site single handed?
- Are you struggling to produce new contents consistently?
- Do you feel necessary to add a new dimension to your site?
- Is your ultimate goal is to generate short term money over the long term SEO potential?
Just remember, don’t overdo it just because of the money offered from the sponsored content.
In fact, balance it by do some criteria guidelines in accepting guest post in your sites.
With this, you’ll enjoy the benefit of saving you tons of works and in the same time not harming your site’s SEO.