Avoid SEO companies offering guest-blogging services

The term ‘Guest Blogging’ is where a person (typically an SEO company promising you amazing search engine results) writes an article about your business on a blogsite and puts one or two links to your website to try and improve your Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP).

Of course, it’s a chargeable service. After all, they are selling links.

The process is a (veiled) attempt to undermine Google displaying higher quality informative websites.

These so-called ‘articles’ are nearly always low quality and do not offer anything original or useful. Google, quite rightly, does not want these articles appearing high in its search results (or the sites they link to). The practice is known as ‘webspam’.

To stamp out the practice, Google will penalise businesses which are using ‘Guest blogging’ services. This is by lowering their websites in Search rankings (technically, by imparting negative SEO from the links from the guest blogs).

Matt Cutts, from Google, stated “if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop

…  guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Likewise, I wouldn’t recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging SEO as a linkbuilding strategy.”

The upshot is AVOID companies who offer to write content marketing for you.