If my daily emails are anything to go by, all you need to call yourself an SEO expert these days is a Gmail account and cheap email blasting software to spam the crap out of half the internet.
In an average week, I get around 25 emails from “SEO Experts” who want to contribute an article to this blog. That number is increasing every day.
Despite receiving thousands of guest post submissions and guest post requests over the last ten years, I have yet to receive one good guest post.
Not even one.
I will say that again….in the last ten years, I have not had one good article that has been sent to me!
99.9% of the guest posts that have been submitted are garbage. Of the 0.1% that were accepted, I had to spend hours fixing images and correcting spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. With all of these articles, I would have been better, and quicker, just writing the article from scratch myself.
The reality is that most SEO companies have no clue what they’re doing. Their sole strategy is to bombard website owners with requests for publishing cheap content.
Quality Content Should Be Made Priority
The focus of every blog should be to publish high-quality content, regardless of whether you wrote the article yourself or whether it was a guest post or sponsored post.
Good content attracts readers. Poor content drives them away.
Most internet users are aware of this, however marketers have managed to convince website owners that they are doing them a favour by giving them free access to their audience.
Image by Diggity Marketing from Pixabay
I ran multiple blogs throughout the 2000s.
Back then, guest post submissions came from fellow bloggers and writers who were trying to establish themselves. They would therefore contribute their best articles. Frequently, the articles guest posters submitted to top websites were better than the articles on their own website as they understood that the content was an advertisment of their website and their own writing ability.
Obviously, publishing good content on another website and poor content on your own is a poor marketing strategy, but every guest poster recognised that it was a privilege to be able to use someone else’s website as a platform to launch yourself (though I do not believe any writer should be actively offering their services free of charge).
Fast forward to today, guest post submissions are coming from SEO companies and SEO agents, not writers who are looking to establish a reputation. Due to this, the goal of the guest poster has been changed from showcasing writing ability to shoehorning links to client websites into the article.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
As every website owner will tell you, SEO companies are frustrating to deal with. They do not appreciate that publishing content on someone’s website is a privilege, arrogantly assuming that website owners should be grateful for “Free Content” (Remember, it’s not free if the content is stuffed with links to the company’s clients).
Every day, I get an email from an SEO company who is flabbergasted that I have rejected their article or surprised that I thought the articles they published elsewhere were poor quality. They’ll lie to you outright and state that the article has not been paid for, despite the fact its full of irrelevant links.
Their whole mindset about search engine optimisation is wrong.
If they contributed high-quality articles to websites, those articles would receive more social media likes and shares. This would lead to clients having links on pages that are ranked better.
Instead, SEO companies focus on quantity over quality, blasting emails out to thousands of website owners using software and working with cheap writers with a poor grasp of English. All of this is done in order to maximise profits and minimise the time they work themselves.
The whole strategy is short-sighted.
I Need to Change My Policy…Again
The vast majority of emails I receive through this blog are from time-wasters who want something for free.
In the past, I tackled this issue by making my advertising area and contact page crystal clear about how much guest posts cost and what would be accepted.
So what happened?
Nothing.
Most spam I receive still comes from SEO companies and they’re all time wasters. They simply don’t read the information I have published about guest posts and email me directly with their standard cut and paste email template.
I’ve been too accomodating with this and continued to respond to them. That stops now.
From now on, any guest post emails that do not come through my guest post submission or contact forms will be instantly sent to the spam folder.
In the long-term, however, I will probably have to stop accepting guest posts on this website. It just isn’t worth the time I spend administrating them.
Final Thoughts
On paper, guest posts should be mutually beneficial for website owners, advertisers and SEO companies. Website owners receive a good article that readers will enjoy, advertisers improve their search engine presence and SEO agencies get a slice of the pie.
Unfortunately, that is not the case.
The whole strategy of SEO companies is to blast out pre-made impersonal emails to website owners in the hope they will accept poorly written articles that have been stuffed with links.
If SEO companies would invest in better writers, maybe everyone could be a winner in the guest post game.
If they don’t, guest posting is dead.
Thanks for reading.
Kevin