Guest Blogging: Four reasons for its downfall

Guest Blogging was in a rage till a few years back. Website and blog owners used to scour around for high quality and professional guest bloggers. However, lately, their demand has dropped down and guest blogging applications are looked down with suspicions. So, what has changed? What prompted this sudden decline in guest blogging popularity? From being a sought after practice, it has gone to become a hated content marketing strategy.

Four reasons for guest blogging downfall:

1. Spam

Guest bloggers, except a few, have started spamming prospective website owners for space. A few years ago, guest blogging was a respectable profession with expert writers. However, due to the increasing number of mass bloggers, it has been degraded to automated production. Overall quality of guest blogging has greatly reduced in recent times.

2. Violation of guidelines

In recent times, guest bloggers have resorted to paid links just to pass page ranks. This is a blatant violation of Google’s quality guidelines. Resorting to such practices can get your site or blog blacklisted. Spamming links just to get the search robot to notice your site or blog will backfire. There are reports of many guest bloggers who pay money for page rank or depend on automated software for post and link generation. To avoid such spammers and scammers, it is important you put original content related to your industry in your blogs. There are many reputed digital marketing companies who give quality articles of non-spam nature.

3. Outsourcing

There are now many companies that provide guest blogging services. There is no problem if you give your guest blogging work to reputed SEM companies, but third rate content outsourcing firms will only give spammed and irrelevant articles. Most of the outsourcing firms rely on automation or mass production for content creation, which has a serious impact on a site’s page rank. So, unless you can personally vouch for a guest blogger, you should stay away from it.

4. Dofollow vs nofollow

Guest blogging applications were beset with dofollow requests. This is clearly a spam process. In fact, many SEO experts have now suggested the use of nofollow instructions to stem the flow of spammed blog posts. Much low quality writers tags along as guest bloggers to make a quick bag. Beware of such writers and it will just harm your online reputation in a short time.

The above four reasons show why you should stop encouraging guest blogging, at least till the spammers go away. Quality posts given by experienced writers will significantly enhance the overall content quality of your site or blog.