Guest Posting and Blogging At Your Own Risk

Over the last 10 years, the history of blogging has gained popularity and has been validated as a major resource to implement for people and businesses alike to rank well in search engines.

Blogging has allowed for many people and businesses to become credible sources and voices in their industry.

It’s been a great tool to gauge customer satisfaction, both good and bad.

In recent years, blogging has become the option for those looking to boost their SEO efforts.

More specifically speaking, guest posting and blogging has really caught on fire and gone viral.

If you’re not familiar with guest posting and blogging, you’ll definitely want to become and get intimately familiar with both and why are the talk of SEO content marketing.

What is guest posting and blogging?

In short, guest posting is where you allow for guest writers within your given industry to submit content to be posted on your website.

Guest blogging is where you submit content to other industry websites or bloggers to be posted.

Typically, both posting options allow for 600 or more word content and a few external links within the content, allowing readers to click and find out more about the business and author.

Most content pieces posted will allow for a quick author blurb, which falls in line with the use of Google Authorship.

Guest posts and blogs have given the SEO efforts of some businesses new life and a huge boost in search rankings.

No longer do they have to buy links although they never should have doing so in the first place.

Now it’s all about a simple exchange of writing content.

Simply put, those participating in guest posting and blogging just have to write content and include a few links to their own website.

And seeing you follow the same strategy, then wash, rinse, and repeat and you’re well on your way to boosting search rankings and seeing exponential traffic.

It’s just that easy, right?  Well, not exactly!

The slippery slope of guest posting and blogging

Here’s to a big dose of reality when it comes to guest blogging and posting, and for what is to come in the near future for it.

As with anything in life, the motive of why you do something is just as important as the expected outcome or benefit to be gained.

So why guest post and blog in the first place, right?

And so it goes with guest posting and blogging that individuals and businesses looking to one or both must have a white-hat approach not black-hat.

And before you begin guest posting and blogging, remember that premier content should always be posted on your website or blog as a rule of thumb.

But I digress.

Guest posting and blogging attempts that are successful find that accepting and generating uniquely written content to showcase solving customer problems is well received.

Reader audiences are engaged with fresh and unique content from a variety of perspectives.

In return, the hope is the reader audience will share content via social networks, email and other sharing strategies that can lead to increased website traffic and search rankings for all guest posting and blogging parties involved.

For those that find great guest posting and blogging success and want to scale their success, this is where the guest posting and blogging slope gets very slippery.

Why, you ask?

The perils of scaling and automating guest posting and blogging

Well, individuals think scaling their guest posting and blogging strategy to generate and submit content to as many websites as humanly possible is the key to increasing their website’s backlink profile, page and domain authority, and, last but not least, search ranking results in search engines.

The problem with this approach is that scaling and automating the creation of content can lead to the lack of quality in content and content being posted to non industry-related websites.

For example, you could guest blog for a website that held high posting standards and domain authority.

But if that guest blog host lowers posting standards to post duplicate content or low-quality content, this could damage your website, and it’s page and domain authority as well as search rankings.

Now think about if you were to scale guest blogging or posting and this happened to you.

There would be a multitude of websites to try to contact to have content and links removed, or using the disavow tool.

Either way, you will have damaged your website’s authority and search rankings, and this may take weeks, months or even years to rehab.

When falling prey to this slippery slope, websites are left wide open to succumb to the consequences of penguins, pandas, hummingbirds and any new algorithm updates.

And this is just a simple view of the reality we are currently living in when it comes to guest blogging and posting to increasing search rankings.

Should you or your business guest post or blog?

In closing, this is not to say that you should not guest post or blog.

What I am saying is that you must guest post and blog at your own risk, and always remain true to using white-hat strategies.

You have to weigh the pros and cons of guest posting and blogging as it relates to your industry.

If the content looks shady or suspect, then don’t post it as a guest blog. If the website contains low-quality content or is non industry related, then don’t submit your content.

Remember that guest posting and blogging should be more than just getting content in place for the sake of garnering links to increase your website’s backlinking profile and search rankings.

Why, you ask? Well, one will never know what the next algorithm will address nor when it could be released.

You don’t want to be on the wrong side of the fence should search engines target certain activities that were once white or gray hate SEO to be deceptive, black-hat SEO tactic and strategies.

If you don’t believe my stance that guest posting and blogging is a slippery slope, then I encourage you to read Rand Fishkin’s latest Whiteboard Friday post, Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope.

And then watch this video from Matt Cutts, head of Google Webspam Team, answering the following question: How can I guest blog without it appearing as if I paid for links?

What are your thoughts about guest posting and blogging, and have you found success in doing either?