Guest Blogging A Link Building Strategy. Why Google Warns Overdoing It?

By Lucid Softech IT Solutions | Social Networking,  29 Mar 2016

What is Guest Blogging?

Guest blogging as the name suggests refers to writing a piece of content on someone other’s blog. It lends the bloggers an opportunity to share their ideas & expertise with others. A guest post contains an “About the author” section wherein the writer (i.e the guest blogger) can provide back link to his/her site which will help him to attain increased visibility among the blog’s audience; which will be a win-win situation as both the parties get increased traffic.

1. To attain exposure for a small business

The first step for a new small business to succeed is to show your existence to the world. Finding out about the already established blogs in your niche that your target customers visit regularly & guest blogging on them would be the best way to reach this goal.

2. Quality traffic

The internet marketing techniques like SEO and Social Media Marketing can also divert traffic to your site but getting such traffic would not be of much use. Through guest blogging you can route a loyal community of visitors who are actually interested in the services provided by you towards your own blog.

The traffic attracted by guest blogging would be more likely to take action on your website rather than traffic from any other source.

3. Help establish credibility

When you manage to guest blog on the reputed blogs in your niche your brand automatically gets a very strong endorsement; which will increase your credibility in front of your target audience & which in turn would increase the chances of converting your audience into leads.

4. Great Networking Channel

A major benefit of guest blogging is that it connects you with the most influential people in your niche including the industry experts & entrepreneurs.

Since most influencers are connected with each other. The moment any one endorses a new service, product or individual, it immediately comes in everyone’s notice ; which would flood traffic to your business.

5. Help you to get more guest post offers

If you get to post as a guest on any of the leading blogs in your niche, there are chances you might be approached by other leading blogs for a guest posts as well, especially in case your post gets many comments & gets highly shared in social media.

This can lead a chain reaction for your business since every guest post done by you would return the same benefits as the first one.

Pros :

• Help to maintain consistency: In case you are not able to post blogs on regular basis because of lack of time / resources , guest posts can help you bridge that gap.
• Get the benefit of new expertise : There might be some particular areas in your niche where you lack information ; a guest blogger can bring in his / her expertise in those areas & also your readers get to have new ideas or a different perspective that you might not think by yourself.
• Increased number of readers : Some blogs allows guest posting in the hope that the new writer will increase your blog readers. For instance, if you can bring a highly popular blogger to place a post on your blog you will get to route all his audiences towards your blog.

Cons:

• Not your voice : Since your audiences are attracted to your tone, writing style etc. ; guest bloggers may not deliver the same standards which would reduce your audience’s interest in your blog & hence decrease in popularity.
• Time consuming task : Before posting any guest post on your blog you will be required to go through the content properly, edit it & format it accordingly which requires a considerable amount of time that might be as long as producing a post by yourself.

Overdoing Guest Blogging :

One major drawback of guest blogging is overdoing it or publishing poor quality content on your blog. If you have lots of guest writers on your blog your readers might start thinking why are they reading your blog rather it would be better if they start reading the blog of the guest writers.

In case the content written by the guest bloggers does not reach the required standards it would change your audience’s perception about your whole website.

Maintaining back links to your own website is a good SEO policy, but having too many back links can act as alarm to Google making you a suspect of using massive black hat SEO strategy which runs against the Google Webmaster guidelines and would eventually result in getting your website penalized.

Conclusion

Guest blogging can certainly give you an edge in the industry as it has countless benefits. If the objective set by you is very clear & you are targeting the right blogs with quality content then it will definitely lead you to boost the overall business growth but in case it is overdone, then you will get opposite results which might highly affect your business & lower your productivity.