We at Jungle Associates Ltd are pleased to read the latest announcement from Matt Cutts with regard to Google view on guest blogging practices for SEO.
We have been advising and helping our clients for some time on how to create a spokesperson selected from within their business, preferably at director level, who will become the Google verified author for articles and press releases related to the business activity. We then make sure when publishing an article on a blog it is placed only once, also ensuring the blog is a quality site that is relevant to the topic.
Matt Cutts himself said in his announcement:
“It seems like most people are getting the spirit of what I was trying to say, but I’ll add a bit more context. I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.”
What he is referring to in the last sentence are those agencies who continue to do volume guest blogging, and there are still quite a few around. These are the agencies that offer low price SEO that often fails after a few months.
Our process is simple:
- A spokesperson to be created for the client business.
- Create a Google verified author profile for the above.
- Quality relevant copy writing.
- One blog/website per article placement.
- Only quality blog/websites selected for article placement.
Below is an overview of our company values related to article publication and guest blogging:
Value Adding Content
A good piece of information on the web brings value to a topic, sheds new light on a subject, or brings a new opinion or review about something. This means the readership of the content learns something, or develops a new opinion about something. Proper sharing of information should take on traditional characteristics that media typically does (i.e. Being editorial in nature, clearly displaying who wrote the piece, and using proper referencing characteristics in the piece).
Proper Reference Usage
When writing content, it’s important to reference information that is relevant on the web for the topic at hand, whether that’s cnn.com or otherwise, and to do it the right way. The best example of this is most of the pages of content posted on Wikipedia. These pages reference collected information about the topic and show clearly where the source was derived from.
Editorially Procured Content
A good SEO strategy shouldn’t include purchasing links on the web. As I discussed before, the content and information that is published about the topic should add value to the readership of that particular publication. The editorial process should be in place with the publication to make sure references are checked, and content is objective. When these systems are in place, content is trusted by the publication to be released.
Intent of The Author
There’s no doubt that newspaper articles, magazines articles and outlets like these all are written by someone who wants to get a message out. A good guest blogging strategy is written by an author with the intent of growing the piece’s readership, and sharing new information to its user base. Hence our call to use a spokesperson from within. As long as this is followed, all search engines’ best practices are being followed.
Good Neighbourhood
Make sure you or your provider is posting content in a good area of the web. By this I mean not allowing posts on blogs that accept any author, topic or quality of content. Low standards in content acceptance typically mean the website is low quality. There are numerous factors that make up a good site’s guest blog posting process; a good indicator is Domain Authority and Page Rank. These give good signals that the site is influential these are just indicators, but don’t ignore a site just because it doesn’t have a high page rank. There are numerous scenarios where a website can be extremely valuable or relevant but does not yet high page rank.
A good blog is built around quality authors contributing content about a particular topic that readers are interested in, and bringing value to the topic. We are excited to see Google being strict on low quality content on the web.
Jungle Associates Ltd
HQ,
Clippers Quay,
Salford Quays,
M50 3XP
Ph: 0333 300 1299
