Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
-
Hi,
I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website.
I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site.
That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website.
What would you advise?
-
Thanks EGOL, Brent and Irving. Some good advice there.
It's not really traditional Guest Blogging Irving in that content providers get fee instead of a link - and are pointing links in from their external sites, so a little loss of control there, though without any anchor text guidelines and so forth.
-
It's called guest blogging.A guest blogger provides you with good content and you in turn give them a link. A lot of SEO link builders started doing guest posting exclusively and it is starting to get overdone.
Whether or not it is relatively safe is dependent on a few things, such as the type of site that you are linking to (and who they are linking to), type of linking (rteprative anchor text, img signature), number of different sites you are linking to and their niche (hopefully the same), number of links (recommend only one per blog post) and quality and length of content.
Everything comes with risk when link building, but if you are the one with the blog if you get penalized (all bets are off) and you have the power to instantly remove all of the links and you at least have a ton of content to show for it at the end of the day.
pretty good article here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/guest-blogging-enough-is-enough
-
Agreed. I've run into a small group of bloggers who are all members of a community.. writers associations, blogger groups, pr groups, etc. Even when they have similiar link profiles to their actual domains, you don't really see problems unless it's aggressive interlinking between the sites. Very aggressive, with only one purpose in mind.
-
I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website.
I don't have a site that is working with this model but as long as the content was really really high I don't think that it would be a problem. It's not that many articles or that many linking domains. If the authors are simply linking with "hey, I wrote this" instead of heavy keyword anchors... I think that it is OK.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can a duplicate page referencing the original page on another domain in another country using the 'canonical link' still get indexed locally?
Hi I wonder if anyone could help me on a canonical link query/indexing issue. I have given an overview, intended solution and question below. Any advice on this query will be much appreciated. Overview: I have a client who has a .com domain that includes blog content intended for the US market using the correct lang tags. The client also has a .co.uk site without a blog but looking at creating one. As the target keywords and content are relevant across both UK and US markets and not to duplicate work the client has asked would it be worthwhile centralising the blog or provide any other efficient blog site structure recommendations. Suggested solution: As the domain authority (DA) on the .com/.co.uk sites are in the 60+ it would risky moving domains/subdomain at this stage and would be a waste not to utilise the DAs that have built up on both sites. I have suggested they keep both sites and share the same content between them using a content curated WP plugin and using the 'canonical link' to reference the original source (US or UK) - so not to get duplicate content issues. My question: Let's say I'm a potential customer in the UK and i'm searching using a keyword phrase that the content that answers my query is on both the UK and US site although the US content is the original source.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonRayner
Will the US or UK version blog appear in UK SERPs? My gut is the UK blog will as Google will try and serve me the most appropriate version of the content and as I'm in the UK it will be this version, even though I have identified the US source using the canonical link?2 -
Content Strategy/Duplicate Content Issue, rel=canonical question
Hi Mozzers: We have a client who regularly pays to have high-quality content produced for their company blog. When I say 'high quality' I mean 1000 - 2000 word posts written to a technical audience by a lawyer. We recently found out that, prior to the content going on their blog, they're shipping it off to two syndication sites, both of which slap rel=canonical on them. By the time the content makes it to the blog, it has probably appeared in two other places. What are some thoughts about how 'awful' a practice this is? Of course, I'm arguing to them that the ranking of the content on their blog is bound to be suffering and that, at least, they should post to their own site first and, if at all, only post to other sites several weeks out. Does anyone have deeper thinking about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Not sure how we're blocking homepage in robots.txt; meta description not shown
Hi folks! We had a question come in from a client who needs assistance with their robots.txt file. Metadata for their homepage and select other pages isn't appearing in SERPs. Instead they get the usual message "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more". At first glance, we're not seeing the homepage or these other pages as being blocked by their robots.txt file: http://www.t2tea.com/robots.txt. Does anyone see what we can't? Any thoughts are massively appreciated! P.S. They used wildcards to ensure the rules were applied for all locale subdirectories, e.g. /en/au/, /en/us/, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchDeploy0 -
Bigcommerce & Blog Tags causing Duplicate Content?
Curious why moz would pick up our blog tags as causing duplicate content, when each blog has a rel canonical tag pointing to either the blog post itself and on the tag pages points to the blog as a whole. Kinda want to get rid of the tags in general now, but also feel they can add some extra value to UX later on when we have many more blog posts. Curious if anyone knows a way around this or even a best solution practice when faced with such odd issues? I can see why the duplicate content would happen, but when grouping content into categories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
How to do Spam Link Analysis before posting a link?
OSE provides Spam analysis for website link profile, Do Moz have a tool to check the link quality before placing a link? How to do Spam Link Analysis before posting a link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward1 -
How much risk would there be with this 'repeating of a sentence' situation?
Hello, A business owner and design decision was made on a published article page to have a summary sentence/paragraph placed prominently with a unique font treatment in the article header along with the article's main imagery. Historical content that does not have this summary migrated with "the first sentence of the article" used for this introduction/summary sentence/paragraph. In both cases, where there is a unique summary and where the first sentence is used, the article text normally begins below a graphical element below the summary element. Thus, when the first sentence was used for the summary, the first sentence will repeat, relatively close together on each page where this happens. The question is: How much risk would i be taking on in allowing the first sentence of these articles to get repeated in close proximity on the page. I wanted to get some other perspectives on this unique situation. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JennyTTGT0 -
Anyone managed to change 'At a glance:' in local search results
On Google's local search results, i.e when the 'Google places' data is displayed along with the map on the right hand side of the search results, there is also an element 'At a glance:'
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DeanAndrews
The data that if being displayed is from some years ago and the client would if possible like it to reflect there current services, which they have been providing for some five years. According to Google support here - http://support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1344353 this cannot be changed, they say 'Can I edit a listing’s descriptive terms or suggest a new one?
No; the terms are not reviewed, curated, or edited. They come from an algorithm, and we do not help that algorithm figure it out. ' My question is has anyone successfully influenced this data and if so how.0 -
Competitior 'scraped' entire site - pretty much - what to do?
I just discovered a competitor in the insurance lead generation space has completely copied my client's site's architecture, page names, titles, even the form, tweaking a word or two here or there to prevent 100% 'scraping'. We put a lot of time into the site, only to have everything 'stolen'. What can we do about this? My client is very upset. I looked into filing a 'scraper' report through Google but the slight modifications to content technically don't make it a 'scraped' site. Please advise to what course of action we can take, if any. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen
Greg0