June 18th, 2010 by Susie

When it comes to looking at improving our link building strategies, a lot of companies look at guest blogging to get their links into more places, and increase both awareness of the website, and the number of click throughs to their web pages. The benefits of guest blogging on other sites are fairly obvious. However, how would you feel if the shoe was on the other foot, and other companies wanted to guest blog within your news pages?

The topic of guest blogging is a little controversial in the world of SEO. Many companies highlight the benefits of it, but at the same time contradict themselves by advising against letting others guest blog on your site. Granted, there are substantial arguments for guest blogging not being the most effective move, but where this is an argument against, there is always an argument for, so looking at both sides is a good place to start.

One of the initial criticisms is that allowing people to guest blog on your site is just a little lazy. It is basically a way of getting content on your site without having to do the work yourself. From a SEO point of view, perhaps this could be frowned upon, as you should be managing and monitoring your own content. However, from a business point of view, this is a fantastic idea. Getting work for free means you are getting more out than you are putting in, which gives you top marks in the business sense.

Standard and successful blog pages usually have a set number of regular bloggers, who know the business inside out. They know what is relevant to the company, and they know what keywords and links to include to get the best from their blog content. However, a guest blogger will not be as clued up on your business, and will use the opportunity to promote their own website and knowledge, as opposed to those of the site they are blogging on. Whilst there is a strong element of truth behind this, it should also be noted that no guest blogger is going to post on a completely irrelevant site, so there will be some link between the two sites, even if it is not a direct one.

There is also a concern that guest bloggers will not always write fresh content, and will just post one of their favourite or most relevant blogs from their own pages. From a SEO point of view, this could be seen as plagiarism or duplicate copy. Duplicate copy is bad when it is frequent and done in a deceitful way. However, if it is a rare occurrence for a guest blog, and is not claimed to be the work of a blogger on your site, then there is unlikely to be any harm done.

All in all, allowing guest bloggers on your site now and again can open up new audiences for you. It also shows solidarity and trust amongst sites, which will reflect on your company.

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