There’s one huge problem with any user-powered platform: quality. The reason is obvious, low-quality always comes in large amounts and it’s just easier to notice.
MyBlogGuest is an established platform: We are more than three years old and we can safely state that we have a well-formed environment inside that has balanced itself. Yet, we don’t want to think we are not ready to change even though a change is never easy. Let’s see what we have been doing to protect you and what we are planning to do now:
Security
To protect you from fake offers we’ve been:
- Verifying the ownership of all blogs which are being added to our system
- Banning offending domains (if the owners are reported for sneaky behavior like adding nofollow or removing the links. Luckily, thanks to our built-in backlink tracker we’ve been very fast to ban any offending behavior).
Speaking of "nofollow" on MBG guest posts… watch out for SEO WordPress plugins that "help" by adding "nofollow" to all links #myblogguest
— Deborah (@socialwebcafe) March 7, 2013
Quality Control
Throughout the past few weeks we were making steps in response to various requests to let you control who offers for your articles. At MyBlogGuest we offer two ways you can control the incoming offers in the gallery:
- Personal blacklist (old feature): If any member keeps making offers you don’t like you can add him/her to a blacklist. The blacklist works in the most non-intrusive way. The blacklisted person is unlikely to ever notice he/she is in the blacklist: That user will just never see your articles in the gallery, thus he/she will never be able to make an offer to your article again.
- Personal quality levels (new feature): We don’t really recommend using these filters because blogs are MUCH more than automatically generated stats but we’ve had so many requests to add this feature that we had to do that: You can set up the minimum requirements for blogs making offers for your articles (min PR, MOZRank and # of indexed pages)
@sanaknightly Great to have metrics, although I always like to have a manual once over of the blog – checking quality and style #myblogguest
— Heather McKay (@Heather_McKay) March 7, 2013
Now we are rolling out another feature aimed at improving the quality of incoming offers:
Sounds like a big announcement for My Blog Guest. #myblogguest
— Don Sturgill (@Don_Sturgill) March 7, 2013
Newest: User Ratings!
There’s one problem we kept facing: There’s much more that can be defined as “low-quality” than an automatic filter can deal with. We’ve been elaborating on this in this past Twitter chat on choosing the blog as well as it’s graphical version.
So the community needed to decide which blogs should make offers – now we have a tool for that. Let’s spring clean!
Leaving your rating is very easy: Just share if you like or dislike a blog: that’s it!
- Ratings are anonymous;
- You can only rate one blog from one user once;
- Each and every rating is reviewed by the moderating team (not because we don’t trust our users’ opinions but because we want to prevent any possible abuse: No one should suffer from this update. We prefer to move forward carefully as this is about real bloggers and real people we are rating).
- You cannot see the overall ratings: This will prevent any abuse and will let you create “layers” of blogs based on their overall grade without anyone to be actually offended for not getting the highest rate.
I was thinking it would be private RT @seosmarty: We don't want users to openly criticize each other blogs. @theconchtech #myblogguest
— The Conch Tech (@theconchtech) March 7, 2013
- You cannot rate your own blogs.
For now we are just collecting your data: Until we have enough opinions shared, we can’t move forward, so help us!
Good. Helps avoid misunderstanding or accidents. MT @seosmarty: u share ur opinion with mods & team will reach out to blogger #myblogguest
— Deborah (@socialwebcafe) March 7, 2013
Now, we are not going to advise you of the criteria to use to rate the blogs: We don’t want you to be biased. For the same reason we don’t need your comment when you rate the blog. Just review the blog making an offer for your article and share your honest opinion. Feel free to check this tool out if you are wondering what Google thinks is spam though (via @rustybrick)…
You can rate when viewing offers or by going to user profile.
Help us match you with the blogs you will love: Rate as many blogs a day as you can! We’ll do the rest as soon as we can.
Joseph
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Gerald Weber
Very cool updates Ann.These updates will clearly benefit the MBG community as a whole. I especially like the ability to rate the blogs.
Keep up the great work! 🙂
Bob Richards
I have a few blogs on the system here and some of them are marked (with a little red funnel) that they dont meet the MBG requirements when I try and make an offer for a guest post. What are the requirements I am missing?
Ann Smarty
That may need your blogs are too new (few backlinks, few pages indexed in Google, no community signals, etc). Authors need some exposure for free articles!