4 signs that your guest blogging is spam
In this week’s video I take a look at Matt Cutts post about the decay and fall of guest blogging. Read the post (after you’ve read this one of course!) and you will see he is not saying all guest blogging is bad. Just the stuff that is blatantly looking for backlinks. So how do you tell the difference?
1. You get an email with the subject “Hello My Friend”
I’ve had a few of these in my time and I always expect to find a Persian rug as an email attachment. Usually they will go on to layer you with sycophantical platitudes about your blog that really have nothing to do with your site and the email has actually been generated by a robot sent to a generic email address like “admin” or Info” . Mark these as spam and get on with your life.
2. You get an email that starts with “We have a client..”
Then they go on with the similar bulk generated nonsense designed to appeal to your ego. You have to ask yourself, why doesn’t the client approach me directly or why won’t they tell me who the client is? These are usually more targeted than the first type and there is actually a human sending the email.. that works for the “client’s” SEO company. These guys are usually more clandestine, hiding their tracks in a way that would make the Dread Pirate Roberts envious. You may find this surprising but a lot of corporates employ this tactic believing that this is a legitimate strategy. More than once I have had an argument with a client about pursuing this technique.
3. You sample their work.
And it reads like it was written by a dyslexic monkey on lithium. Or you google just one sentence and you find another 50 duplicate posts on other sites. Or you look at the Author name they want to use and you Google the individual and they don’t exist.
4. They tell you how many links they want.
This is clearly a backlinking exercise if you are asked for this. If you do want to have someone guest blog on your site or you want to guest blog somewhere else, just use Google authorship for the links. Unfortunately guest blogging has become so spammy this is the only way you can get a very safe backlink if you want to guest blog or have a guest blogger.
Disclaimer: I have nothing against dyslexics.. or monkey’s.. or lithium for that matter
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
