Should you make your blog guest-post friendly? It will certainly add variety and maybe even some valuable information. Right? Surely, experts and other writers will add expertise, strategies as well as knowledge to your blog. Allowing others to write for you will certainly give you more time to work on other aspects of your blog. Guest posts may increase traffic to your blog. Sounds like a good idea. Right? Well, read on to learn what the guest blogging drawbacks are before you make your blog guest-post friendly.
1. Guest Posts are Often Poor in Quality
You most likely will find that guest posts simply do not have the quality that you would expect. If you expect guest posts to be constructed well and well written as well, you may be sourly disappointed.
A quality article should offer a different perspective or angle and should not only find problems but also solve them. They should surge with valuable information and data to back up opinions. They should exemplify the best with useful videos, infographics, images, statistics, slides and at least 1000 words in length. How many posts will you get that boast of that quality? Not many is my guess! Poor quality posts is certainly one of the guest blogging drawbacks to consider before deciding to make your blog guest post friendly.
If you do decide to accept guest posts, you should be sure to set forth your expectations clearly in your submission guidelines.
2. You May Lose Readers to Backlinks
All too often, a guest post will come with a backlink to another site. This means that the reader of your blog will be drawn away from your site and to another website. Therefore, the unfortunate result of guest posts can be your loss of readers to other sites. Furthermore, the guest post really didn’t add much to your site. This sounds like a losing scenario to me and is definitely one of the biggest guest blogging drawbacks.
In addition, backlinks by guest authors may get your blog downgraded by the search engines. If too many of your guest posts have backlinks implanted in them, your search engine rankings may be downgraded. Additionally, if your guest author is also targeting a specific keyword, things can get really dangerous for your search engine rankings. For that reason, you should be careful not to allow a large number of guest posts. In that way, you will remain safe from getting downgraded by the search engines.
3. Regurgitated Content or Spun Out Posts Have No Value
Having your visitors read watered down versions of Internet publications submitted to your blog by a guest author can not only ruin your reputation but can also do harm to your search engine ranking.
This is because guest bloggers who are only interested in a quick and temporary way to earn money use tools that allow a guest blogger to easily spin articles from their online originals. Since search engines are capable of detecting these spun articles, any site that publishes spun articles will, without a doubt, be penalized for using them.
When and if you find this is true of any guest blogger’s post, you most certainly should remove the post. Fortunately, there are tools online that you can use to check for plagiarism such as CopyScape.
4. Checking for Spammers Can Take Time
Whether it is e-mails or blogging, spammers are always around to bug you. It is rather common for guest bloggers to only be after backlinks to get visitors to follow. Sometimes, their blogs are only copied articles or content. However, the real problem is guest bloggers’ backlinks leading your visitors to a dangerous or illegal website. This can happen without their knowing if their content is copied.
This is why you are forced to spend your time checking the guest posts. If you care about the quality of your blog, you must check whether they are fresh or copied, that the links are genuine, and whether the links lead to dangerous and illegal websites. This is the only way you can avoid the danger of being penalized by the search engines.
5. Guest Writers Who Blog and Run Cause You Follow-Up Problems
It all begins with a good post submitted to you by a guest blogger, and then he or she simply disappears never to be seen or heard from again. You publish the guest post, but you never hear from them again. Why? Who knows?
You may try to pursue them by email, but there is no response. Your readers will certainly be turned off to your blog when a guest poster doesn’t take the time to respond to their comments or write a thoughtful remark. Now it’s up to you to respond to the comments on their guest post. However, there are most likely times when you are unable to answer specific questions because you simply do not know the answers. Now what do you do?
That’s when I remove the links to the bio of the guest blogger.
In conclusion
Before you decide to allow guest bloggers, remember your reputation and credibility are at stake. If don’t want your readers to question the validity of the content you publish or whether you care at all about the quality of your blog, you should be careful to insist your submission guidelines are followed.
Leave a Reply