20 Apr Why We Stopped Accepting Guest Posts

Guest blogging has become a huge marketing strategy for a lot of brands both big and small. It also has become a tactic employed by SEO companies everywhere and this has lead to its demise. Since article marketing started destroying companies rankings everyone seemed to just move into “guest blogging” although there was no difference.

Junk content with spammy anchor text links has always been a problem and now it has plagued blogs around the world. We’ve had over 250 requests to write for our site and out of all those we’ve only published 3 articles…those are terrible numbers. We’re picky here and 99% of the requests to write for us were obviously automated and nowhere near worthy.

While I imagine we’d reconsider our stance if a well known brand had something that fit, especially in the statistics and trends category of the luxury industry. But for now we’re going to be turning off the guest blogging aspect of the site and continue our focus on writing all of our great content.

Do We Guest Blog For Clients?

Recently Matt Cutts(Head of Webspam at Google) came out against guest blogging for links quite strongly and a lot of people got pissed off. I won’t lie either, we do encourage some guest blogging for our clients but only in strict cases. We don’t do it for links, we only suggest it on industry leading sites and we don’t ghost write the content. We help our clients build relationships that matter and get them to provide great content that fits the website’s audience.

Why I think it’s ok to do in strict situations stems from Google’s own guidelines as they’ve left us all a clue in the first word of their rule.

Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links

Anyone doing marketing online worth a grain of salt should know to not get the same types of links over and over, and certainly should not “build” them much. While the volunteers on Google’s Webmaster Forum would call you a spammer, I think you will be fine with some guest blogging.

I said we will get a few writing opportunities for clients but only if;

1) The host website is a leader in the luxury industry and provides nothing but quality content.
2) Our client provides exceptional content that is worth being linked to and shared socially. The content is not written just for a link but to add value to their industry.
3) Keyword rich anchor text is never ever used, instead just a branded site link with links to their social profiles as well. Most of the time we’ll just opt for a nofollow link as well to play it safe.

We have never had a problem for our clients and if we did, I’m confident that we can easily get the offending link removed and or nofollowed. Since we’re building relationships with bloggers and media within the industry, we can contact them at anytime with ease. We’re also not doing this on a grand scale so there’s not a hundred hours worth of link cleanup waiting for us.