Why do you want to guest post? Perhaps, the most common answer to this question will be – to gain the right exposure, traffic and obviously to build high quality backlinks for your website.
But offering guest posts to just every single blog on the internet might not be a good internet marketing strategy. One needs to make a smart decision while selecting a blog to guest post on. In this post, i will be sharing 5 types of blogs that should not be considered to maximize your guest blogging efforts.
1. Blogs that mark author’s link with no-follow tag
Let’s recall, why the nofollow attribute was created? It was created and put into practice to combat the rising link spam in comments. It is the way of telling search engines that you do not trust a particular link and they should skip it while crawling the web-page. A no-follow attribute attached to the author’s website in a guest post always turns me off. What’s the point in assiduously working on a guest contribution and later on being rewarded with a weaker no-follow link? Wouldn’t it be a win-lose situation? In my opinion, one should avoid guest appearance on such a blog and rather shift his/her focus on other quality blogs that do respect the moral ethics of guest blogging!
2. Blogs where comments are do-followed
While do-follow comments definitely attract tons of commentators, but the value of your guest link on such a page gets diluted in proportion to the number of links in the comments. The idea is very simple, the page rank gets distributed amongst all the do-follow links present on the webpage and consequently the amount of link juice passing to your guest link is diminished.
3. Blogs that have nothing to do with your niche
If you are planning to guest post on blogs that are extraneous to your niche, then forget about getting any targeted and high quality traffic back to your website. For instance, on an internet marketing blog, no one is going to be interested enough to check a website related to wedding cards & gifts. Moreover, backlinks from such sources do not equate to high quality. Worse, they can negatively affect your SEO efforts by inviting possible penalties from Google.
4. Blogs with pathetic traffic
This one is pretty obvious. How can you leverage traffic from a blog which itself is struggling to attract decent amount of traffic? I have seen so many blogs with pathetic stats being open to guest submissions. Worse yet, people still do guest posts on such blogs. Please don’t fall into this trap just for the sake of links. They can ruin your initial efforts to get the right exposure and credibility.
5. Blogs having poor social media profile
You are guest blogging not only for building high quality backlinks, but also to enjoy the free targeted traffic that comes as a result of hundreds of tweets, Facebook likes, plus 1s and through various other social media referrals.
So, do look at the social media profile of the website before expressing your interest for guest blogging. The larger the social media base of the website is, the better it will be for your own website.
What’s your approach while evaluating guest post opportunities ? Do share it with us. Wishing you grand success with your guest blogging campaign 🙂
