Guest Posting is no longer a mysterious word. If you are in the field of blogging, then you must be familiar with it. Guest posting is one of the proven methods to improve the Search Engine Optimization performance by improving the Page Rank. We all know that incoming back links are really helpful in increasing the Page rank, while there are lot of other factors also that build the Page Rank.
Page Rank is actually named after the founder of Google, Larry Page. It’s basically an algorithm that ranks the page out of 10. The concept of Page Rank was introduced in 1996 in the Stanford University by Page and Sergey Bin. The concept of guest posting didn’t exist at that time because blogging was not popular and the internet was not available to everyone. This meant that big firms didn’t use the internet to grow their businesses.
Nowadays, the trend is totally different. Almost all the big firms are online. Blogging has grown very much. You can well imagine that 99% of internet is built on blogs. Blogging was introduced around 12-13 years ago and now days it’s a billion dollar business. As the competition among the bloggers and e-commerce firms increased, Google introduced many restrictions in showing the page in search results and therefore made the Page Rank for the purpose of ranking a page. To improve the Page rank, everyone started doing different practices and then guest blogging came in to existence. Afterwards, guest blogging gained much popularity and became the proven method to build the page rank. It has also shown its importance in building relationships between bloggers.
A few months ago, Matt Cutts, Head of Search Quality Team at Google, released a statement that hosting guest posts can be harmful for your blog. Even I think that hosting too many guest posts can be harmful and can threaten your blog.
After the introduction of Panda and Penguin Update, Guest Blogging started being considered as the best way to build back links to improve the Page rank. But over the past few months I have seen many bloggers who stopped accepting guest posts on their blogs. There should be some reasons for this cause.
Reasons why accepting too many guest posts could be a threat -
Guest Posting may degrade your page rank -
Yeah, hosting guest posts may degrade your Page Rank. How? Take a look. Suppose you did lots of link building. We know that all that Google data (Back links, Site Links, Page Rank etc.) constitute, what is known, as Google Juice. Now consider an example, you have a glass full of that juice, now someone came and asked you to share your juice, you gave him juice. What happened here? You lost your juice. If you continue to do this, how much juice will you have left?
May lead to lot of broken links -
If you are hosting guest posts then you are going to have some outbound links in your blog. What is the guarantee that all those links are going to direct to a proper domain? Suppose you hosted 500 guest posts on your blog and for example 100 guest posters deleted the link from the internet which they have posted on your blog through guest posting, Boom! You just got 100 broken links on your blog that may lead to degradation in your SEO performance because Google hates it if you have a lot of broken links.
Guest posting can affect your blogging relations -
Here comes the major problem. Although guest posting is one of the tools used to build relations with other bloggers, it is also one of the major issues that affect the relations bloggers have. It’s pretty common that everyone wants to contribute a guest post to the popular blogs, but it’s not possible to host every post because not every blogger produces high quality content. Getting a guest post rejected creates a sentiment towards that site. If you lose a writer, then you most likely lose their readership as well.
Guest Posting may lead to lose your blogging identity -
It’s true that hosting too many guest posts may cause you to lose your identity in your community and your blog’s voice. Almost all bloggers have their own format publishing their posts. If you are publishing only the guest posts, then when you are going to publish your own creations. Don’t you think it’s going to decay your blogging identity?
Guest posting may lead to spamming -
The most hated thing in the virtual world is spamming. Many guestposters are spamming by using links that are irrelevant to the site. By doing this, you may lose important readers.
What you can do -
- Allow guest post only for limited days.
- Publish only high quality content.
- Write very strict guidelines for the guest bloggers to follow.
That’s what I think about hosting guest posts on your blog. I would like to hear from you. Please share your valuable feedback in the comment section below. Keep Blogging!