As a small business owner, you may have gotten emails regarding guest posting to boost your SEO. These emails are from someone offering to write blogs and other posts for your website in exchange for them to add a link to your website. It’s the typical, “I scratch your back if you scratch my back” scenario. What exactly does this mean? Does this actually help your website? Is this a scam? What should you do if you receive emails like this?
What is it?
Here’s how it works. A marketer sends out an email to hundreds of people, typically small business owners who own and operate their website. They offer their services of writing content for your website for you to publish. That post contains a backlink to either the marketer’s website or one of their clients’ websites. They promise that the backlink to the website will help you boost SEO rankings and help you have a better ranking with Google. However, some of the time when Google “bots” scan your website and read your pages, that backlink is actually a negative link that goes against Google guidelines causing your Google penalty score to rise.
Does it help my website?
Not really. If you hire a real writer to write a post to get high-quality backlinks, it can help your rankings because link building is important. There are also other ways to build links on your website that do not rely on blog posts.
How to spot a guest posting scam
There are many legit guest post requests, but unfortunately, a vast majority of the requests you’ll get are spam. Here are a few red flags to look out for when sorting through requests:
- Many spammers who request a guest post will include an URL for their site, but they will conveniently forget to mention the actual name of the site.
- The link they want to include in the post is completely irrelevant to the topic they are writing about. For example, they are writing about tires, but they want to include a link that goes to an online college.
- The guest post request is very generic. They offer no information in their request other than their name, that they like writing about different topics, they stumbled across a random website and thought that you might be interested in a blog post. They offer no vital information that would actually help you and your SEO.
- The spammer sends you a random post and asks you to let them know when you publish it on your site.
What should you do if you receive spam guest posting requests?
Delete the email. In this case, ignorance is bliss, and move on. You’re busy as it is, there is no need to pay attention to it. If you do feel like responding, ask them politely to remove you from their list. Or you can simply mark it as junk.
If you receive these emails and are not sure if it is spam, feel free to reach out and we can assist you.