Guest blogs are a new area of content creation becoming more prevalent in the blogsphere nowadays.  Is this something that is good for SEO?  Or is it worthless for link building?

It’s a form of SEO that can work, to a degree.  The main issue is that there are several blogs out there that will accept “guest blogger”s that produce any level of quality information, including bad posts.

This reduces the level of quality for that particular blog, and will usually have a bad result in general.  Quality posts are respected and tend to be spread (and linked) more.  In this way blogs that only accept quality posts will get more traffic, get more attention, and the search engines will notice this.  Because of this these are the blogs that will rise in rankings, and those that accept any sort of riff-raff as content will fall behind.

So yes, guest blogging can be good SEO – as long as the content produced is quality content.  Anything else will not work as well.  But this is a standard rule for any type of link building in SEO.  Only quality content will build links.  The rule still applies here.

So keep this in mind – if you want to do good SEO, produce good content, and you’ll see more results than you would otherwise.  Outsourcing content creation to “writers” who do not know the material (or even the proper language, fully) will not help you in the long run.

My good friend Ann Smarty had more to say on guest blogging on a post she wrote at the Blog Herald.

Related Posts

1. SEO and the 80-20 Rule
2. Using PPC to Help With SEO and Link Building
3. SEO for Huge E-Commerce Sites

As many blogs that get decent traffic know, you often get a lot of spammy comments on your posts, even when you have a decent anti-spam plugin or two.  Well, there are other routes to go when you STILL get spam comments.  And I’ve found a nice one.Any good web designer knows what the htaccess file is and what it’s used for.  What a lot of people don’t realize is how powerful this file can be, when used right.

The htaccess file is a file that works properly from the root directory of your domain.  Usually it’s used to handle issues like canonicalization, but can also adjust the traffic you get in different ways.

In my case, I had found a few individuals from China that seemed to like trying to comment on my blog about luxury shoes.  Now I understand the general misunderstanding from people trying to do SEO on blogs with comments, but really – commenting on internet marketing blog entries about shoes?  That was enough to make me go ahead and take action.

So what I did is collected the IP addresses from all of these spammers (easily findable through any of my multiple log tracing tools, in addition to being blatantly visible through the blog back end comment tab).  I took these addresses and then created two lines on my htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} 222\.79\.17\.112
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/spammer.php [R=301,L]

Once these lines were entered, what it will do is take any visitors from the specified IPs and redirected them to a lovely page I made, just for them.  And no, the IP address has NOT been hidden to protect the guilty.  To make this work properly, all you need to do is make sure you put these first two lines in your htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

After that, just change out the IP address for the one you want to redirect, and then make that page one which you want to point them to (can be another domain entirely, if that’s your choice).  Then they can spam no more!  Or cease to bug your site, with whichever way they have offended you.  Have fun with it!

Related Posts

1. PageRank Sculpting, NoFollow Tag Updates
2. What Email Marketing Is and How It Works
3. Is Guest Blogging Good SEO?

I’m updating the blog.  It’s been too long, but I thought it might be good to start adding more than ONE new post a month.  So what I’m going to do is put some posts to link to other pages I find interesting and relevant.  I’ll still add informative posts of my own, although probably not quite as often.

To distinguish between me and my linking love, I’ll keep my name on the posts that are all me, and then for the posts that are linking out to a cool piece of SEO news or something, I’m using George.  So if you see George, he’s here to tell you about some cool new post on SEO news, something Matt Cutts might have mentioned, or an adjustment to one of the algorithms in the search engines.

I’ll be posting quite a bit more (well, George will), so keep watch.

Related Posts

1. Welcome to the Tulsa Marketing Online Blog!
2. Search Engine Optimization is a Changing Animal