Let’s imagine a typical day in your life (yes I have conveniently taken the authority to say your) since every blogger has pretty much the same time table, more or less. You wake up, check your mail on your blackberry, login to all your accounts and open at least ten browser windows to surf the net! You go to your favorite site, you see someone has made a guest post there.

Alright, you read it, move on to the next one, see the same person there and so on, after a week of surfing you see the same people all over the blogosphere! Be it their own blog or their guest posts on your other favorite blogs. You immediately Google and read up every article that leads to ‘benefits of guest blogging’ and with all those inspirational articles out there you feel all charged up and decide to make your own guest post on your favorite blog.

You are about to write the first word but wait…..

Guest Blogging Is not For you!

Oopss! that sounds harsh! But yes, after having read so many benefits of guest blogging you may already have loaded your shotgun to come and hunt me for providing this ‘misleading’ information! But wait, I never said guest blogging is bad for all of them out there, I said it’s just bad for you, if… :

1) You Treat It as a Link Building Strategy

First of all, let me tell you it is hardly a strategy and if you still think otherwise then you make yourself look like the caveman in the image above! while you may be impressed with the awesome PR and Alexa of your favorite blog you can’t beat these PR 6 and Alexa 97, yes that’s right, I didn’t forget any decimals, it’s 97! In layman’s terms, it is called ezinearticles.com! You might consider submitting to article directories if the prime reason of your guest post is link building and traffic.

Cons – this is more of an ethical point of view than the logic mentioned above. You will ultimately end up looking like the blogger mentioned at the beginning of the article who has written for different blogs but the content still means the same even without the spinning! Would you like to be abused by millions of bloggers early morning? I dont think so!

2) You Spin Articles

No matter how efficiently you spin and twist your words, it’s still counted as copied content. If you can’t invest some time in producing good content then you should not be blogging, leave alone thinking of guest blogging. Half-baked content not only dilutes the quality of the internet but also kills the hard work of the original blog writer.

Cons – DAll content, spun by any human or bot can be spotted by the search engines with respect to any synonyms used with closed (bot) eyes. So before you try to spin content, think again! It may look clean to the human eyes and pass copyscape but it’s all the same for the search engines!

3) Submit….Wait….. Submit

Honestly tell me, how many of you have thought of this? or rather how many have not!!

You think you will submit to one blog first, then when it is accepted then you can submit to another blog or article directories for more backlinks, or use it in your own blog.

Cons – It will hurt your SEO very bad! Since the blogs, you submit to, has authority, their version gets indexed first and gains more visibility in the search engines automatically and if the same content is syndicated across a wide range of URLs with all of them pointing to your URL, then it will surely raise a red flag from the search engines for plagiarism and spam. In this case you will end up losing even the link juice you earned from the original article you wrote on the first blog!

Conclusion

Like all things on the Internet, there is an ethical and an otherwise way of doing it! Your guest post on someone else’s blog is your face on their blog, if caught indulging in these cheap tricks you would need a hell lot of soap to wash that face! You will lose trust, authority and any little respect you had in the bloggers’ community! The whole point of guest blogging is not for selfish gains. There are massive benefits of guest blogging but they should be your secondary concern.

The whole point of writing on someone else’s blog is to contribute to the information and that is what it is all about. Blogging is a community thing, and guest blogging gives you a chance to build relations that are more valuable to excel in blogging as opposed to just sustaining with those few links. And still if the search engines change the algorithm tomorrow and your links get devalued then what do you have to bank upon?

A web entrepreneur and a social media evangelist, Rohan is a blogger who loves to write about advanced link building and SEO tips business blog owners and pretty much everyone who blogs!

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15 Responses to “Guest Blogging : Why It’s Not For You”

  1. Eren Mckay

    Yeah some people are unethical and submit duplicate articles as guest posts. That`s just really dumb in my book as this is easily discovered and the person`s reputation is quickly spread as not being trust worthy. Guest blogging has several benefits. I have a list of places to guest blog on.. now I just need to find the time to do all of that writing :o)

    Reply
  2. Rohan

    Thats right Eren ! These linkbuilders forget that there is something called reputation marketing and this mostly happens when the person is either inexperienced or he/she is a hired freelancer who go on hammering all the sites just with a hope that they could present their boss with an excel sheet of approved links. Least do they realize that it is making a bad impression about the company and will doom the product they are promoting !

    Reply
  3. Brad Harmon

    Had this happen to me this week, Rohan. This person had written over 100 guest posts in 90 days, and I quickly found out how he did it. He had a handful of posts that he reworded and submitted as new original content to another blog. All it took was a quick Google search on key word phrases along with his name and "guest post." Excellent advice in this post, Rohan. I wish more people would follow it.

    Reply
    • Rohan

      That's right !
      With the Google panda update more internet marketers are ditching article directories and turning to blogs … This is bound to happen with so much competition out there , they hardly care for the ethics . It is upto the blog owner to be vigilant because this is just going to increase ….

      Reply
  4. Roy @ Work from Home

    Seems there is a fine balance required here, we need more and more content, without diluting the quality of the content. Should a blogger spend a month working on the best article he can produce, or produce one adequate article per day?

    Reply
    • Rohan

      This has something to do with ethics , no one could possibly decide a time frame for it . Still if we had to frame it then I would say , the ideal time and effort spent on a guest post must be approximately equal to the time an individual spends on writing a post for his own blog . Now depending on which side of approximation the guest bloggers effort lies , that decides whether he is 'just another guest blogger' or a 'good guest blogger '

      Reply
  5. Karen @ Change

    Great Post
    Another thing to consider if you are guest blogging.. Please remain aware that people will often add comment to your guest post and often directly mentioning your name. eg "Hi Roger (guest author)have you thought about…."
    The guest author is "the authority" on the topic and so ideally should be responding to comments on their posts. Of course the site owner should play a part in keeping conversation going but I recently had experince of not being able to answer a comment and had to go and search for the guest author to let her know that someone had commented by asking her a direct question.
    In summary …guest authoring carries a good degree of responsibiliy in engaging with readers and commenters which in turn raises the profile of guest author.

    Reply
    • Rohan

      Yes , there are two sides to this problem you have pointed out – There are few guest authors who don't take interest in answering the comments that the post receives (I have no idea why they write a guest post if they don't want to gain exposure in the blog's community ) and there is a second kind of impulsive blog owner who wants to reply the questions directed at the guest blogger there by clogging all communication between the author and the community . I have had experience of both …. well maybe guest blogging has its ups and downs 😉 It is still an interesting thing to engage in , don't you think ?

      Reply
  6. adhinatalia

    Thanks for sharing this, Rohan and Karen too. It's very helpful as I want to know the etiquette better as a new blog guest author …

    Reply
    • Rohan

      I am certain you will feel more confident about guest blogging and love it when you take part in the community forum where you will meet many awesome people who are in love with the concept of guest blogging 🙂

      Reply
  7. Davina K. Brewer

    Excellent post, ended up writing much of the same in my own "How to NOT suck at guest blogging" post. I am reluctant to link back to my posts in my own blog, much less someone else's. If it's very on point, then maybe. Other things I'll add about knowing guest blogging isn't for you: if you've never really read the host blog, just want the face time and if you're not really going to be social, discuss in comments, just expect to attract new readers to your blog.. then yeah, may want to rethink it. FWIW.

    Reply
    • Rohan

      That is very true ! Guest bloggers not responding to comments on their posts is a real pain because it gives an 'someone slapped an article , fetched a link and ran away forever' kind of feeling which kills credibility of the blog . It would be interesting to see people make rules for social interaction , something like a warning that their links from the bio would be removed if they did not acknowledge the comments . Sounds radical but not more than what the ignorant guest blogger subjects the blog to , by not taking user feedback seriously …

      Reply

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