Is it a good idea to create a blog that offers quality content but also passes PageRank to sponsors
-
I am a part of a business networking group that has lots of members who services home owners (a/c repair, plumber, home inspector, etc.). I am thinking of starting a blog to help home owners be better informed how to care for their homes. I would like to ask for sponsorship from the people in my group. I would also like to invite them to post on the blog as a way to improve their SEO. Would posting on this kind of blog hurt, help or not affect their SEO? Would this violate Google's policy of selling links that pass page rank as described here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en.
-
Awesome. Thanks so much Wesley.
-
Hello Adam,
In my eyes there are two ways to approach placing authorship markup for a blog post.
1. A link to the author's google+ profile straight from the blog post's Author Bio. For this you could make the Author's name the link like this:
[rel="author">Author's name](Google+ profile URL)
2. Create an author page on your site for every author. Create a link from the blog post to the author page like this:
[rel="author">Author's name](Author page URL)
From the author page there should be a link to the Google+ profile like this:
[rel="me">Google+ profile](Google+ profile URL)
Hope this helps
-
Thanks Wesley.
Would you please expound a bit more on the right way to do an authorship tag and where to link it? I'm not sure I understood from your comment.
All the best
Adam -
Having advertisements on your website with the no-follow attribute in place is a possible way of earning money indeed.
Other ways could be to use affiliate links or getting leads and sell these to other companies. For example you could have a form on your website where people will fill in their information and request a certain kind of service. You could sell this lead to a company who provides given service.The blog posts in this case would bring in the traffic and if done well will make you an authority on the subject.
If the article has the rel="author" is in place and their is a link back from the person's Google+ profile contributor to section than the article will be tied to that author.Not sure if you want to try and make money of Google Authorship though. Google has very strict rules about earning money with links and such and i'm pretty sure they have some rules concerning authorship as well.
Hope i answered your questions If not, please let me know where i can explain further or if i can assist you with any other questions.
-
Hey All,
Thanks for all the responses, but I'm still left a little curious. I'd like to make a blog to help home owners learn how to take better care of their homes. I think this is a service that is needed in the world. However, I still need to eat. So I can't really afford to do it for nothing. I'd also like to help my friends and clients who I think have good advice to offer home owners. How can I do this in a way where we all can benefit from this service?
I get it that I can't have them post articles with follow links to their websites. How about authorship? If they are the author of an article on this site, will the article come up with an authorship credential?
Can they write an article and include no-follow links, but have an ad somewhere on the sidebar, also with (rel=no-follow links of course)?
-
By all means provide a link to the sponsor but absolutely make sure you 'nofollow' that link. Here's the relevant link to the Google Webmaster blog where they state why you should avoid selling links that pass page rank.
-
Hello Adam,
Blogging in order to help home owners be better informed on how they should care for their homes is a great idea which you could benefit a lot from.
Michael already stated that sponsorships are paid and that the sponsered links should be no-followed to avoid penalties. In the question title you mentioned 'passing PageRank to sponsors'. No-follow links pass (almost) no PageRank. So passing PageRank to them is not going to work.
You mention that you would like to invite your sponsors to guest post on your blog to improve their SEO.
Letting them guest post is a tremendous idea but guest posting for SEO reasons only is not a good approach.There is an excellent post here on Moz that goes deeper into the subject of guest posting.
Conclusion - Blogging is a good idea
- Selling links which pass PageRank is against Google's guidelines
- No-follow links pass (almost) no PageRank
- Guest blogging is awesome if it adds to the quality of the blog
Hope i was of help and if you have any questions, please let me know.
-
Sponsorship is paid for so all those links should be no-follow
Having guest posts has, does and will still work if the primary purpose is to add value, be informative and be honestly relevant and not at all promotional - no keyword links spamming the content. Personally I wouldn't actively promote guest posts on the site, rather let it happen naturally or through your networking.
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
-
Blog post back link
Hi, I am new to SEO and I am planning to hire someone in Fiverr regularly to submit different guest posts on the different related topic on the website with a good domain authority (>60) as a result to have some quality inbound links. As I am writing the guest post myself, May I know how many backlinks should I have per post are best for SEO? and should I only focus on anchor text backlinks? Also, here is my understanding of what I should be careful when hiring someone on Fiverr to do a blog post, please let me know if I am wrong and if there is another thing I need to be careful. It needs to be dofollow link It is permanent I check the website domain authority and spam sore that the person provides before using it. Please let me know if I missed out something. Appreciated Kind regards Chris
Link Building | | KINSHUN0 -
Is guest blogging still working?
Hi, Anyone still using guest blog tatics (sush as http://myblogguest.com/) as an effort on seo? Is that still a valid option nowadays. Thanks
Link Building | | LauraHT0 -
Help with blog for linkbuilding location.
I work for a company that has www.widget.com. This is the site we do all our business under. Right now there is no linkbuilding so I would like to create a blog to start linkbuilding. We also own www.widget.info. Can I run the blog under .info and still get the credit on the .com or are they considered completely separate entities that have nothing to do with one another? The reason I would prefer it on the .info is it gives me complete control. By putting it on out .com I have to talk to the developers to install wordpress and mysql, when I would much rather just be able to do it on my own. Any ideas?
Link Building | | EcommerceSite0 -
I have created 5 model specific blog sites which deliver links to my core site.
I post about 500 words of unique relevant content weekly to each model blog site. Each week, seo smartlinks delivers keyword anchor text links to my core site with a 3% keyword density. I have been doing this for 3 months and my core site traffic is stagnant or slightly down. Is this a good practice since its relevant content, or am I writing for nothing? Also, am I in danger of over optimized anchor text?
Link Building | | SEOQuest720 -
Paid Blog Posts getting Deindexed?
Hello, We've used a popular paid blog posts platform to get back links through blog posts. Recently, performed a link audit noticed a very interesting problem. 40% of the 49 sites we purchased paid posts from, have been de-indexed. These blogs are the kinds that would take money from almost anybody in any given niche to write a review and give a paid link to you. So, I assume most of these blogs had a high number of outbound links. Their page rank has also been demoted to 0 (obviously since they're deindexed). Now, our dilemma is that should still go ahead with paid blog posts, after checking for the following: 1. PR 2. Google Penalty The sites at the time of purchasing the posts were not penalized. But 40% of the sites being completely de-indexed is a staggering number. Can someone please suggest whether to go with paid blog posts techniques or not?
Link Building | | globaleyeglasses1 -
New Blog
Hello, We have an online soccer equipment retail store (http://www.soccerstop.com) that we have been working on to get higher ranking results in many different areas of specific product pages, as well as our general homepage for several years. SeoMoz has been an excellent addition for us to learn and analyze, etc. In addition to our current PPC, and SEO efforts, we are going to create a blog as we have many thoughts, opinions and interesting information for what hopefully will be a good sized audience of soccer enthusiasts! We currently have a person who goes on other soccer blogger websites and offers our thoughts and expressions, but we now want to give our own blog. My thought is to create a subdirectory of our domain something like: http://www.soccerstop.com/blog as that seems what is recommended in many posts here in this forum. I am also thinking of using wordpress blog as it also seems recommended. We have a lot of ideas about content, and feel we will bring people to our blog in various ways through our existing and coming customers at the retail online store. However, it seems to get the best backlink performance possible out of our new blog, we need to join blog networks to get our blogs posted on outside third party websites. Is this right, and where would I begin to understand and start this process? I understand the first step is to get our blog started, but I want to foundationally have an idea where we are going with this as we build. This way it is built in a sound way, ready to be as effective as possible! Please understand I am a builder and not the blogger, which is why the structure and initial setup of syndication is so important to me! Thanks for any advice.
Link Building | | SoccerStop
James0 -
A good link builder / link building agency for Spanish content
Hi, I am looking for a good link building agency or freelance to execute a link building strategy for the next months. The content is in Spanish. Could anyone recommend me a good agency or a good link builder for Spanish content? Thank you very much! Jorge
Link Building | | jorgediaz0 -
Do you link out to good content?
I have noticed that there are a bunch of questions in the Q&A about people are concerned about allowing blog post comments or linking out in general. My question is: do you avoid linking out to other websites, even though they have good content? I am not talking about direct competitors here, but just linking to other websites in general.
Link Building | | ThomasHgenhaven0