Comments on: Is Guest Blogging Becoming a Black Hat Tactic?

By: Latief | Blogging Tips

Latief | Blogging Tips — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:32:54 +0000

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

By: Denver SEO Matt

Denver SEO Matt — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:30:38 +0000

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.

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:19:34 +0000

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.

By: Adam Dince

Adam Dince — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:18:16 +0000

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.

By: Donna

Donna — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:46:35 +0000

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.

By: Anil Agarwal

Anil Agarwal — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:22:25 +0000

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.