Is Guest Blogging Becoming a Black Hat Tactic?
For the record, let me say that I think guest blogging should be included in any content marketing campaign. Finding relevant industry blogs to become a regular guest author on has many benefits including: increasing your online brand presence, building your brand’s authority, developing quality inbound links, driving targeted traffic to your site and more. But I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in the last few months that is making me nervous.
A few years ago, my inbox would be flooded with emails asking for link exchanges, the “I’ll link to you if you link to me” version of link building. Back then, link exchanges were a viable form of link building until Google decreed that they were black hat. As a strictly white hat SEO professional, I take my cues from Google and stopped getting involved in link exchanges with anyone. For me, a few links is not worth the potential long term damage.
Now I’ve noticed my inbox is slowly filling up with similar emails. Only this time, instead of “I’ll link to you if you link to me,” the main point being driven is “I’ll let you write for my blog if you let me write for yours.” Sounds like the same idea, doesn’t it? The increase of “blog exchange” emails I’m getting has me worried that the search engines might decide guest blogging is getting way out of hand and they will be forced to declare links earned from guest blogging as black hat link building.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with becoming a guest author on a trusted industry blog. Nor do I think there is anything black hat about accepting guest blog posts for your own blog. Where it starts to get a little murky is when bloggers from different industries are swapping posts that don’t impact each others’ audiences. For instance, I would never accept a guest blog post from someone who worked as a dog breeder. What does dog breeding have to do with SEO? Why would the people who read my blog care about dog breeding? Even if they are interested, that’s not the information they have come to expect from my site. On the flip side, why would anyone reading a blog about dog breeding care about SEO or social media marketing? Sure, I may earn a couple links from this blog exchange, but what is the real value of those links?
Link building is about much more than just rounding up as many inbound links as you can. I’m worried that an increase in blog exchanging will force the search engines to undercut a crucial component of content marketing.
I would like to hear from other SEO professionals and bloggers. Do you think I am overreacting with my “blog exchange” fears?
6 Responses to “Is Guest Blogging Becoming a Black Hat Tactic?”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
No I don’t think guest blogging has turned into a black hat seo practice. It still carries lots of value in the form of page rank, search engine rankings, traffic and branding.
People will abuse anything that might be helpful in rankings, so it’s not surprising to see guest blogging become more popular with the abusers.
The bigger threat, however, I think, is bringing attention to guest blogging at all – to the search engines. Give it another year of people talking about guest blogging being useful for rankings, and boom, Panda’s cousin, let’s call it Aardvark, will kill every site that has guest posts on it.
Great post, Nick! I think that guest blogging has the potential to turning into a black-hat practice for sure. I mean, link exchanges and reciprocal linking wasn’t always frowned upon.
In my humble opinion, it’s all about quality and if you are artificially inflating your quality, eventually Google will figure it out and burst your quality bubble.
I have maintained for years that in most cases excess is the only difference between “white hat” and “black hat”. When people fall into the routine of doing more of the same, they abuse the process.
What would help tremendously would be if the SEO community stopped pretending that everyone needs to get as many links as possible. Most links don’t help and it’s been that way for years. But the constant emphasis on links from SEO bloggers has only made this problem worsen.
We need links. We just don’t need a constant flow of links for every little Website that comes along. That’s not SEO, it’s not optimal, and it stopped being sustainable years ago.
Like you mention, the key is that the guest blogger has a useful contribution to make toward the overall goal of the site. I wouldn’t let someone guest blog on my Colorado Sports blog whose was an expert in personal injury law, and vise versa. Relevance for the user is key to remember; you aren’t creating content for Google, your creating content for a human user who needs an answer.
Yes, a little bit afraid about guest blogging. I started guest blogging for many good reasons include create new connection with the owner but today I received few email offering articles, some of them great article.
But after I published the article they never came back to respond any comments I think these guys doing black hat seo since all they need are links from my blog