Today's question comes from San Francisco, and the question is, what is Google's view on guest blogging for links?
This is another one of those questions where there's a couple ways to interpret it.
One is really high quality guest blogging, and whether that's worthwhile. And I think it is in some cases, and the other one is, what if it goes to extremes or what if you take it too far?
So let's start with the easy case.
If you're high quality writer, you're give a shout out to Alisa Baron or something like that.
She's at a conference.
She's blogging, and maybe she wants to do a guest blog on some other blog.
That blog should be happy to have her.
Vanessa Fox, Danny Sullivan, these sorts of people who write something on a different blog in general, you should be happy to have them write an article for you because they're bringing a lot of insight.
They're bringing a lot of knowledge to that.
So that can be totally fine.
It can be a good win for the person who hosts that.
And who has that guest blogger come in.
And it can be a great way for maybe someone who isn't quite as well known but writes really, really well to get to be known a little bit better.
That's the short and simple answer.
The longer answer is sometimes it gets taken to extremes.
And you'll see people writing offering the same blog post multiple times or spinning the blog post and offering it to multiple outlets where it almost becomes almost like low quality article bank sort of stuff.
I'm going to send you five unique blog posts or something like that.
So you definitely do see a lot of people where it's like, okay, I'm going to write this blog post.
Well, actually, I'm going to outsource that to somebody else who's not an expert.
And then I'm just going to insert my hyperlinks that I would like to get into your blog post.
So it's a long and to time water tradition to have high quality bloggers jump back and forth or collaborate in different ways. Just be mindful that it can absolutely be taken to extremes. And in the same way that some practices which make a lot of sense when you think about it with high quality people, when you're just doing it as a way to sort of turn the crank and get a massive number of links.
That's something where we're less likely to want to count those links.
So I hope that that clarifies a little bit.
There's definitely a case for the kinds of things where you really think hard about what you want to say.
You have a message that you've sweat over it.
You have some perspective that you really want to get out there, and then there's some where it's just like, okay,
this was 300 words, and it's the bare minimum to get by for better or for worse.
I think in the SEO space.
There is a lot of that two or 3400 words.
What's the bare minimum guest blog post get by?
Whereas the sorts of links that we'd like to be counting more would be the higher quality articles where somebody really put some work into it and they have something really original to say.
Anyway, I hope that gives you a little bit of a feel for the space and which guest blogs might be a little more higher value in which ones might not be as worth the time for you to do.