We Have Told You Not To Accept Guest Posts. However, There Are Exceptions And Sometimes You Should Accept Them Anyway.
We have written about the growing number of emails that you’re probably receiving, offering to provide you with content that you can utilize as blog posts, written by someone outside your company. In these “guest post” offers, the reason for their offer is that they want to include a link in their guest post that links to some other website. The reason they do this is to gain that link, which may help that other site gain ranking in search engine results.
In that earlier article we recommended that you generally NOT accept guest post offers. In this article, though, we’ll talk about the exception cases where you SHOULD accept them, and under what terms.
Incidentally, we don’t necessarily recommend that home care companies have a blog at all anymore. However, even if you don’t have a blog, you probably should be adding new content pages to your main site on a regular basis, instead of adding blog posts to a blog. For that reason, we’ll use the term “guest-authored content” instead of “guest post” in the remainder of this article.
The most important thing to know about is how to optimize the utilization of new content on your website, whether or not it is guest-authored content.
When To Consider Accepting Guest-Authored Content
Content written by others can be useful and helpful in some cases.
- If it is well-written and relevant and helpful for your site visitors it may be a useful addition to your website.
- If you are trying to be thrifty, getting content “for free’ might be appealing to you.
- One other reason for accepting guest-authored content is in order to receive a reciprocal link back to your website, from an equally relevant website. While Google can almost certainly detect reciprocal links, it may not always discount them if they are from sites that are clearly relevant and authoritative.
How To Decide Which Guest-Authored Content To Accept
The main criteria that we recommend for making the selection assessment are these: Does the link that they want to include in the guest-authored content point to a site that is:
- Appropriate
- Relevant and helpful to your audience?
Appropriateness
If the link that is embedded in the guest-authored content points to a site that would be offensive or provocative, you should reject the offer. Why? Because not only will it not be relevant or helpful to your visitor, it might damage your reputation in their eyes when they see it on your website.
Here are some examples of such linked sites, for guest-authored content on a home care website:
- “Adult” topics
- Dating sites
- Payday loans
- Sites that are full of pay per click ads
- Sites that promote competing home care providers
Relevance and Helpfulness To Your Site Visitors
One significant problem that we see with many guest-authored content offers is that they are for topics that are not relevant and helpful to your site visitors, even though they may not be objectionable or offensive. Also, many times they are for topics that are already adequately addressed by other content on your site.
For example, these topics might be appropriate for a home care website:
- Tips for helping dementia patients with meal time.
- What “sundowning” is and how to help when it occurs.
- Transferring techniques that are safe and effective.
On the other hand, these topics may be ones that you already have adequately covered on your website, and therefore equally not useful to you:
- How to select a home care company.
- Why home care can be helpful for your parents.
- The difference between home health care and home care.
And, these topics are probably not relevant or helpful for your home care website visitors:
- Bathroom décor supplies.
- What to do when you are in an auto accident.
- How to get a payday loan.
What Should You Require In Return For Accepting Guest-Authored Content
When accepting guest-authored content for your site, you should require that the arrangement meet all these criteria:
- The party offering the guest-authored content must be willing to provide a link back to your site from an equally appropriate and relevant website, in return for your allowing the ink on your site back to theirs.
- The guest-authored content that they offer must be unique and exclusive to your site.
Link Back To Your Site
Without this, you have gained very little, while the other party has gained much. The value of the guest-authored content on your site is not very high for you, at least from an SEO standpoint, even if it is good content. However, the link from your site to theirs has a very high SEO value to them, so it’s only fair that they should offer you the same value in return.
Unique, Exclusive Content
If the guest-authored content that you place on your site is content that already appears elsewhere on the web, then it will have no value for you from an SEO standpoint. Of course, it might benefit your site visitors if they needed that information.
However, if the information is not unique to your site, there is a possibility that they have already seen it on another website, in which case it might look like you copied or plagiarized it from the other website, which could create a bad impression.
Of course, if the person offering the guest-authored content is willing to give you a link back to your site and all the other considerations are all right, you might decide to overlook the issue of this being “duplicate content”, as long as you are certain that the person offering the content had the right to do so in the first place.
How Else Can You Get Great Content For Your Site
Perhaps by now you are wondering why you should bother to accept guest-authored content, with all these complications to consider. That’s a very good question.
From our perspective, the only really compelling reason to accept guest-authored content is to gain the link back to your site that you will require from the person that is offering the content. That will provide more SEO benefit to you than the value of their content appearing on your site.
And if you just need great content for your home care website, we can help you with that!
Photo by Skley 
