There are a few things that are important to anyone who runs a web site.
No matter what type of site they own, everyone wants:
- A high position in the search engine results page for their keywords
- Relevant visitors who will stay on their site
- A whole ton of traffic
To do this, web site owners seek what are known as backlinks to their web site (or pages within their web site). Backlinks are incoming links to a web site or web page from another web site.
There was a time that any incoming link was considered good so people would flood bulletin boards, directories and comment sections with links back to their web site in order to reap the benefits.
That is until the search engines, and web visitors, started getting wise to this trick. After a while, just any old backlink was no longer good enough. Links had to come from quality web sites and the content surrounding the link had to be relevant to the site being linked to.
That is when guest blogging hit the web by storm. The trade off is great. Web site publishers get a steady stream of content for their readers and the guest blogger would be able to create quality backlinks for their site. And, if done right, the guest blogger could introduce their site (and/or product) to an entirely new audience. If they could build trust with their guest posts in these new readers then they had the possibility of capturing new, loyal readers/customers.
Taking a Turn for the Worse
Guest blogging has been a solid Internet marketing strategy for a few years now. However, whenever legitimate marketers find a way to reach new customers you can be assured that spammers will soon manipulate that for their own purposes.
Of course this eventually happened in the world of guest blogging.
With so many sites accepting guest posts in hopes of building strong content spammers have begun to saturate the blogosphere with low quality content in hopes that they can capture more visitors.
How They Do It
Nowadays, it is rather easy to get content written rather quickly. It just isn’t always that good.
There are plenty of businesses that offer content for prices as low as five dollars for 500 words. These are usually outsourced to non-native speakers who simply repeat keywords strategically throughout the content.
Others use what is called spinning software to create “unique” content. This software simply replaces certain words in the content with synonyms so that any site using the content gives the appearance to the search engines that the content is unique. In actuality, it is the same article written for one site but simply reused hundreds of times.
Some who rely on guest post spam don’t even bother with unique content. They simply submit the same article with their links to as many blogs as they can in hopes that it gets published.
Even if a hundred different web sites publish the article, they will all be competing with one another for search engine positioning. No matter who wins, the guest poster will receive the benefit.
Stopping This Type of Spam
Unlike other types of spam such as email spam or comment spam, there are no filters that will read the content and determine whether or not it is spam. Publishers instead have to sift through content submitted as a guest post to make sure it is not garbage.
To prevent a site from being spammed with garbage content, a publisher can take some of the following steps:
- Don’t let guest posters register as authors. Make them register for your site and then manually approve those who make a legitimate case as a guest author.
- Don’t allow guest posters to publish content on their own. This may make things easier for you, but until you trust an author you should approve and publish all guest posts by yourself.
- Don’t publish content that is off topic for your blog. This simply attracts spammers.
- Use copyscape or other similar tools. This allows you to search the Internet for any instances of duplicate content. If you find other copies elsewhere online, simply reject it.
- Have standards for publishing. Don’t just throw anything up on your site just to get more content.
One final tip any site owner can take is to put some sort of email spam filtering tool in place as well. Many who practice guest post spamming send out mass emails to web site publishers in order to find new places to spam. Having an email filtering solution in place will help minimize this.
