Bloggers: Are you making this common mistake?

Successful content marketing requires great, original content

Most of the content offered is poorly written advertorial blog posts; part advertisement, part editorial.  Successful content marketing is all about producing the best quality content you can, not these thinly disguised attempts to generate links.

The post you get offered is typically sent via email broadcast, to thousands of bloggers.  So, you will usually be using duplicate content.  One of the signals that search engines look for when ranking a site is duplicate content, as it is often used by content scrapers to auto-populate low-grade sites.

Think before you link

When a stranger emails you asking for links to their site, usually with the promise of a return link, (a link exchange) the best advice is to avoid them.   Similarly, when you get someone approach you asking for links to a site in return for a blog post, you should give it a very wide berth. Why?  Because Google is BIG on penalizing sites that link to what it calls bad neighborhoods.

Linking from your site, via a post someone wrote specifically to get link juice to a site you do not know, is a GREAT way to have your own site penalized.  Even if the links they put into the post they write for you point to a regular looking site right now, these are often switched later on, when enough links have been gathered and pointed to a bad neighborhood (see bait and switch.)

Google is always trying to get the most genuinely relevant pages/sites to the top of their results.  The most powerful way to improve a site’s rank in Google’s search results is to attract as many good quality links as possible (links pointing to your site.)  Link’s, according to Google, should be acquired organically.  People see great stuff on your site, so link to it.  That link is treated by Google almost like a vote.  As a result, Google regards link exchanges as a way for people to fool their system and get a better ranking than they deserve.

It can be a great idea to have people you know and trust, writing guest posts on your blog; however, using posts from total strangers is a very dodgy strategy, with little if any actual benefit for all that risk.