Guest blogging is often ultimately regarded as a controversial technique due to abuse by both bloggers and webmasters. Although many bloggers do take it seriously and many far-reaching relationships have been established thanks to the joy of guest blogging, it is widely known that a dark side also exists (as with pretty much anything). However, in most cases, we talk a lot about the pitfalls for bloggers without stopping to consider how these can also affect webmasters. Thankfully, this article does just that, as it outlines how the act of opening one’s blog to guest writers can often backfire.
The first thing that pops to mind is that guest blogging needs a hefty dose of moderation. Due to the number of people trying to build links en masse with absolutely no regard for the webmaster’s feelings, simply announcing that you are open to guest submissions and allowing posts to be automatically published to your blog is bound to lead to many people adding your blog to their automatic link building software. Unfortunately, automatic link building software is labeled as such for a reason, which means that any articles obtained through these will be of extremely poor quality.
As such, as the webmaster you will find yourself dedicating a lot of time to deleting garbage submissions that relentlessly advertise those high suspicious Viagra and pornographic websites. This may sound manageable for a little website but as the news get out among the black hat community that there is no screening process for a submission, you may suddenly find yourself inundated with guest posts that eventually turn your once cherish blog into an A-level link farm.
Of course, the act of moderating each post before publication can prevent this but as your blog becomes more important and thus more visited, you may find yourself dealing with unmanageable levels of spam submissions. Obviously, there are anti-spam functions to deal with these but spammers are also becoming cleverer, and the ease with which they can change IPs or submit spun versions of the same article 15 times within 10 sections is becoming absurd. Many blogs that used to accept guest authors and were great places to reach out to a new audience have had to shut down their guest blogging option for these simple reasons.
The problem of spam and garbage guest post submissions is still only the one (albeit the biggest) problem from the webmaster’s point of view. There are other pitfalls that most webmasters will need to learn to successfully navigate through once they start accepting guest articles. The first is that they will need to learn how to handle with people from different backgrounds. For example, you may find yourself getting submissions from people who are actually trying to make acceptable submissions but for whom English is not their first language.
Once this happens, you may feel like lashing out, especially after having to wade through two dozen of horrible guest posts on a single day. This would of course be quite unfair on the blogger who is only trying his best and is a far cry from the hordes of spammers you are usually dealing with, and something like this can tarnish your reputation with your existing audience. The bottom line is that once you open your blog to guest authors, you need to be able to cope with several situations that you have probably never encountered before.
Ashvin writes on behalf of the New Emerald Cove Hotel, a Seychelles private island hotel located in Praslin. To find out more, visit the Emerald Cove website at http://www.emerald.sc.