Let me say before I make everyone angry, I am generally an advocate of guest posts. I see value in them for the following things:
- Sending link juice to my friends’ sites
- Exchanging posts with colleagues
- Posting valuable information from experts
- Directing my traffic to sites they would genuinely find valuable
What I do NOT like are people who pretend to be fellow mom bloggers who are actually just SEO specialists generating fake profiles to get keywords dropped into my site. Think it doesn’t happen? Guess again.
Twice in the last month I was approached by people I didn’t know with the following pitch: “Hi, Tricia, love your site, I’m a fellow mom blogger, coupon cutter, blah blah blah, just like you. I see that you take guest posts and would love to do one about X topic. Here are a list of some others that I have done. All that I request is a link back to my bio.”
So I check out their Guest Posts on other mom blogs and every one of them has a keyword stuffed link back to another site that has nothing to do with the mom or blogging. It’s either cosmetic dentistry or some kind of lead generation site. I decide to check out the “blogger” and Google their name. No LinkedIn profile, Twitter account, Facebook account, or personal information comes up. Nothing but this “profile” of theirs on a commercial website.
This is a cute profile picture, right? If the “profile” has a picture of a woman who looks like a blogger, it’s probably legit? Wrong, I got the picture on the left from www.freedigitalphotos.net. I could easily make up a whole profile about that woman and convince other bloggers that it is me and get them to link to my “profile” page or site in general stuffed with great keywords.
Another clue that I shouldn’t have missed is that I have been getting search results for “dentist guest post.” Obviously people looking to drop guest posts on every blog that they can to get links back. I have absolutely not problem with that if the person is actually a dentist and genuinely wants to provide content in exchange for links. When that person is actually an SEO specialist pretending to be a mom blogger, I consider that sneaky. In addition, I question whether the information in the blog post is even accurate.
So beware the guest blog post requests that you receive. If you don’t mind giving away links to liars, by all means accept all of them that come your way. But if you value your traffic and want to encourage REAL blog post exchanges, do some research on your “blogger” before you blindly give them link love and exposure.