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LinkedIn Publishing Study: How Top Writers Get Featured on the Pulse

LinkedIn Publishing Study: How Top Writers Get Featured on the Pulse @sbizideasblogIn February of 2014, LinkedIn opened up its publishing platform to it’s members, meaning anyone can apply to publish articles on LinkedIn. I became interested in LinkedIn’s publishing system when I noticed that even first time writers were able to get featured on the Pulse and get ten thousand views or more.

For a 30 day period, I recorded data on about 300 posts that got featured on the Pulse. Then I started experimenting on my own by writing my own posts.

In this post, I’m going to share some of the details of this study and some insights from my own experiments with publishing on LinkedIn.

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SEO Considerations and Tips from Experts for Guest Posts

SEO Considerations for Guest PostsSome SEO experts have provided a few tips for guest posting that may be worth considering. You should weigh out the pros and cons of these tips and decide what actions to take yourself.

 

 

1) Link Location

Some experts say to put your link within the body of the article rather than in the bio box in the end.

One reason for placing links within the article is that a contextual link is more likely to get read and clicked on than a link in the bio. In fact, many people that read blogs regularly might habitually skip over reading the bio box.

Another reason is that some SEO’s fear that Google may someday discount links in the bio box in order to reduce the positive effects of guest posting on search engine rankings. Placing your link within the article body makes the link look more natural.

Some people say that if it makes sense to have the link in the end, then leave it there. In many cases, people will be most likely to click through to your site after reading the article.

If it is permitted by the host blog, the best recommendation may be to have both links within the article and in the bio box. Some people will click on links within the article and others will click on links at the end, so it’s a good idea to have both anyways.

 

2) Links within the content

If possible, include a link within the article itself instead of just in the bio box in the end. There are a couple of reasons to include a link inside the actual article.

#1 – Some SEO’s think that eventually, search engines might discredit or discount links in the bio box. So these SEO’s have suggested using a link within the body of the article so that you will still get full SEO credit for the link.

#2 – Sometimes having link within the article will get more visitors. People who have been reading blogs a lot sometimes ignore bio boxes.

Make sure your most important link appears first in the article. If allowed, some people like to include one link within the article and another in the bio box. The link in the bio box can lead to an email capture page.

 

3) Google Plus Attribution

Google Plus attribution can help in a couple of ways.

First of all, if you are creating high quality content, then Google may reward you by placing your image next to your articles in the search engines. Having your image next to your articles will increase click through rates, which means more search engine traffic to your site.

Secondly, it helps protect you in the event that someone copies your article. By being the first to publish it and attributing credit with authorship, your content should be recognized as the original article.

Note that Google has shown some inconsistencies and errors with attributing credit for articles. Although the system is far from perfect, Google ultimately intends for article writers to receive credit for their work and will likely make improvements on their system over time.

Thirdly, links to your Google plus profile can give your profile more search ranking power. Mark Traphagen provides a good example and explanation in this article.

Using Google authorship does come with some risks, especially if you are posting low quality content on low quality sites. Authorship makes it very easy for Google to find all your guest post articles and discount them.

Generally, most people that are producing high quality content are not worried about this risk. However, enough SEO and online marketing experts that have been trying to do things the right way have gotten penalized by Google. So the risk is certainly worth mentioning especially since the rules can change at any time.

 

4) Link Text

Google doesn’t like people purposely using keyword phrases in their link text to try to rank in the search engines.

Why do we have to be more careful with linking in guest posts versus regular posts? Because these links are not considered “natural” by Google. In other words, since link text still counts for ranking purposes, Google doesn’t want people to try to increase their ranking using keyword rich anchor links in their guest posts.

In a non-guest post, if a blogger links to another site with keywords, then it should be okay because it is a natural link. Theoretically, of course.

Here are some ways to link to your site that should be safe.

#1 – URL links – Linking to your site by URL is probably the safest thing you can do and will probably never incur a penalty. For example, www.smallbusinessideasblog.com.

#2 – Article Title or Name of Site – If you are linking to your home page, then using the name of your site as the link text should be fine. For my site, I would use “Small Business Ideas Blog”.

If you are linking to a blog post or article, then using the name of that article also makes sense and would likely be considered a natural way of linking to it.

#3 – Generic text that you are obviously not trying to rank for – Finally, using generic text that you are not trying to rank for is a third option. For example, “click here” or “read this post”. Generally speaking, if you don’t include keywords in your link text, then you’re probably safe.

 

Should I Look for Guest Post Opportunities on Guest Blog Networks & Communities

My Blog Guest is still under penalty as of today, but a lot of the sites that were penalized have been able to get their penalties lifted. A few people have said that even though they were members of My Blog Guest, their sites were not penalized.

No one knows for sure what Google will do next, although it wouldn’t be surprising if they started cracking down on other guest blogging communities and networks. Some people think it is still okay to find opportunities for guest blogging through guest blog communities.

There’s no definite evidence that finding opportunities through guest blogging communities will hurt your site, but some experts have suggested avoiding them to be safe. If you do decide to use communities, make sure to provide high quality content and evaluate the host site as well to make sure they have high quality standards and are also producing quality content.


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Recent Changes and News Regarding Guest Blogging

Part 2 - Recent Changes and News Regarding Guest BloggingMany SEO’s are surprised that Google decided to crack down on guest blogging. Here are some events that occurred in early 2014.

Matt Cutts Announced that Spammy Guest Blogging Networks Will Be Penalized

In January of 2014, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, mentioned that Google was going to penalize guest blogging. This post caused a lot of buzz and some confusion in the online marketing community.

Some people thought that he meant that all guest blogging was bad. He later clarified that Google only wants to penalized low quality guest posting from webmasters that are just trying to get a link back to their site for SEO purposes.

Google Penalizes My Blog Guest

In March of 2014, Google penalized My Blog Guest, which is a community where publishers and bloggers can network with each other and exchange guest posts.

This penalty has incurred a mixed reaction among online marketing experts. Ann Smarty, the owner of My Blog Guest, is actually against guest posting for links as well as people paying for links. My Blog Guest has also kicked out some people in the past for violating these rules.

However, since it is a community where people can interact freely for the most part, some members have said that a good number of low quality guest post exchanges have occurred. It’s an open forum where people can network, so there’s no way that the moderators can police all activities and prevent these exchanges from occurring.

Asides from penalizing My Blog Guest, a good number of sites that were using My Blog Guest to get guest posts were also penalized. Not all sites using My Blog Guest were low quality and there’s a big gray line when it comes to defining exactly what “low quality” means.

In fact, many sites did have quality standards for their guest posts. But perhaps they were not up to Google’s standards? Some of these website owners that were using My Blog Guest confirmed that they received penalties. Ann Smarty and the My Blog Guest team worked with these sites to get their penalties lifted.

White Hat SEO Firm Portent Penalized

Google also penalized Portent, a popular white hat SEO firm. Chairman Ian Lurie blogged about the experience and how they got the penalty lifted in about 24 hours. They suspected that a recent redesign might have triggered an audit and that keyword rich anchor text in guest posts might have been the reason for the penalty. You can read about it here.

Doc Sheldon’s Blog Penalized for One Link to a Hispanic Site

Doc Sheldon, another known SEO, also got penalized. Apparently, the sitewide penalty was for a single guest post link with keyword rich anchor text to a Hispanic network site. This action caused quite a bit of debate within the SEO community. Here’s a good discussion with links to Matt Cutt’s tweet:

http://inbound.org/discussion/view/this-is-insane-period-matt-cutts-on-why-doc-sheldon-s-penalty-was-valid

 

The fact that Google has penalized these sites that were trying to do the right things has left a lot of people confused. Should people continue to use guest blogging to promote their website? Or is guest blogging finished?


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The Problem that Arose with Spammy Guest Posting

Part 1 - The Problem that Arose with Spammy Guest PostingEarly this year, Matt Cutts suggested that Google was going to start penalizing guest blogging networks that encouraged spammy guest posting. The problem is that:

 

1) Many publisher sites are allowing low quality posts on their websites just to get traffic from Google.

Generally, sites with more content get more traffic because there are more possible keyword phrases that the site can show up for in the search engines. Some publisher sites try to create as much content as possible to get more search traffic from the search engines for long tail keywords.

Some publishers will monetize their sites with Adsense or affiliate links to make money. Guest blogging provides a way for publishers to get free content that will ultimately make them money without doing much real work since most of their content is being written by guest authors. By lowering the required quality to be accepted as a guest blogger, these sites make it easy for bloggers to submit content.

 

2) Many bloggers are producing low quality content to go on these sites just to get a link back to their own sites.

Even though these sites probably don’t have much traffic or a highly engaged audience, the link from the site will help with SEO. Links are still a major factor in search engine rankings, so by getting a large quantity of these links, SEO’s can generate search engine traffic to their websites.

High quality content takes much more time or money to produce. So by hiring inexpensive workers or just writing low quality content as quickly as possible, SEO’s and website owners could use guest posting to get links to their own websites.

The publisher wins because they have more content on their site and thus receive more long tail traffic. The guest blogger wins because they get an easy link back to their website. The search engines, however, lose when they send traffic to these low quality sites instead of other higher quality articles that gained their links naturally. People that are using search engines to find content are also frustrated when this low quality content comes up in the search results.

 

3) Since it is not possible for a search engine to distinguish between a guest post and a normal blog post, Google’s algorithm cannot distinguish between a naturally occurring link and a link generated by guest posting.

Blog networks make it easy for bloggers to connect with lots of other publishers and get a significant amount of links back to their site. In other words, a site with lower quality content can get more links than a site with high quality content just because it is participating in a blog network.

Clearly, this makes it more difficult for search engines to rank content using “natural links” as a signal.

 

4) Why not just shift the algorithm’s weight towards trusted higher authority sites?

Putting more weight on trust and authority might reduce the spam problem, but would also reduce the quality of the search results. Sometimes the best result may be on a low authority domain, so search engines still do have to rely on links from low authority sites and pages.

Also, most “natural links” do come from lower authority sites. These websites and blogs link out to content that is useful and relevant to their article and such links are an important signal to the search engines in regards to what should rank for certain queries.

 

5) What is “low quality”?

A big gray area exists when it comes to the question of how “quality” is defined. In other words, when is a blog post considered “low quality” and when is the quality acceptable. Less popular publishers that accept guest posts will often have lower quality standards, but will still reject content that is of very low quality.

Some publishers also implement their own rules, like restricting the number of outbound links, while others have no such guidelines. Since the exact guidelines are not published anywhere, some publishers find themselves confused as to what they can and cannot do.


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Guest Blogging for 2014 and Beyond

Guest Blogging for 2014 and BeyondNo one can accurately predict what Google will do in the future. But Google’s position on guest posting is clear. High quality content on reputable websites is okay, but producing low quality content just to get links is not.

 

Two rules that you should follow:

1) Don’t create low quality guest posts just to get links. Instead write high quality content on sites that are likely to send you relevant traffic

2) Pick websites that have high quality standards. Google doesn’t seem to like websites that will publish just anything.

 

Why You Should Still Guest Post

For bloggers, guest posting is one of the top ways to become influential in your niche and get targeted traffic to your blog. Many influential bloggers will say that they got to where they were by guest posting.

Getting published on sites that get significantly more traffic than yours makes sense. You can get a lot more exposure to that blog’s audience and some of those readers will visit your blog and become your subscribers.

Furthermore, Google is not against all guest posting. Just low quality guest posts and the sites that allow them. So for now, here are some guidelines and precautions to take when guest posting.

 

Which Sites to Guest Post On

Before writing your post, you should select which site you want to write for. Google is going to be looking for sites that are allowing people to write low quality guest posts just to get links back to their own site.

 

So here are some things to look at:

1) Guest post quality –

Examine the quality of the guest posts on the target site. Does it look like the site is just publishing any content, regardless of quality? If so, then you may want to skip this site and look for another site to post on.

 

2) Relevance –

Relevance is a tricky subject and there are many grey areas when defining relevance. But generally, when guest posting, the question you should ask yourself is this – will that blog’s audience be interested in my blog?

Will some of those readers want to visit my blog and subscribe to it? If the answer is yes, then consider guest posting here.

 

3) Traffic –

Another factor to consider is the website’s traffic. Although I wouldn’t necessarily rule out a low traffic site, a high traffic site is usually a better target for guest posting.

Posting on a low traffic site should be okay, as long as they are doing the right things. But don’t post only on low traffic sites. Instead try to create high quality content and get published on popular high traffic sites in your niche also.

 

4) Engagement –

Check the level of engagement on the target blogs posts. Is there a lot of commenting on each post? Do the blog posts get a lot of social shares?

Generally, blogs with higher commenting and social sharing will have more attentive readers. This means more subscribers for your website.

 

5) Blog Post Frequency –

Another important factor is blog post frequency. Blogs that publish less frequently are likely to have a more engaged audience. Plus if you do get a guest post on that site, your post is more likely to be seen by visitors.

 

6) Promotional Strategy of the Target Blog –

How is the target blog promoting their own content? Blogs that do a good job of promoting their own content are a good place to post. Here are some things to check for:

– Blog comments – Take a look at the dates on older blog posts. Are they receiving more recent comments? If so, this could indicate that blog owner is promoting old content.

– Internal links – Does the blogger link to other posts on their site? Linking to old content is a good way to drive new readers to old content as well as improve search engine rankings.

– Social media – Check the blogger’s social media channels, like Twitter. See if they occasionally share or tweet out old content.

– Pagerank – Check the page rank of older posts. A skilled online marketer will link to older posts from other websites as well as internally from their own blog posts.

– SEO rankings – Finally, guess what keywords the site is targeting on older blog posts and see if they are ranking for those keywords in the search engines. Although search engine rankings shouldn’t necessarily be a requirement before you guest post, it’s a nice thing to see.

 

Generally, if a site will send you targeted traffic without Google and has acceptable quality standards, then you should guest post on it.

 

Your Content

The quality of your content and subject matter should match the content on the target website.

 

1) Familiarize Yourself with the Blog

Spend some time checking over the target website to see what type of content they are producing. Make note of their best posts and which posts received the most comments and social shares.

 

2) Check their guest posting guidelines

Some blogs will have guest posting guidelines with their criteria spelled out. Be sure to follow instructions precisely.

 

3) Check Word Count

Do a quick word count to see how long the average article is. An easy way to do this is to copy and paste each article into a Word document and use the Word count feature.

You don’t have to do this for every article. Just do a few so that you can get an idea of the average post length.

 

4) Pay attention to images

Does the blog use images? If so, then you may be expected to include a few of your own.

 

5) Try to Creating Your Best Content

Even if the quality of the site’s content is less than what you can do, try to create something awesome for their audience. High quality content will stand out and increase the odds that their visitors will come back to your site.

It is also a win for the target blog as you have created an excellent piece of content for their blog.

 

6) Don’t Forget Keyword Research

Don’t forget to do your keyword research. If your guest post on their site ranks, then it may get links from other websites, which will help both the host site and your own. You might also get more traffic from that post.

In case you’re not familiar with keyword research, check out these tools.

 

7) Help the Host Site Promote Your Guest Post

Be sure to promote your own guest post, even though it is on another site. Share it with your own audience through social media and consider referencing it in other posts in the future.

If you really want to help out and get a larger number of people to the post, then try out these traffic generating tips.


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All rights reserved © Small Business Ideas Blog, 2014
THANK YOU for SUBSCRIBING
Join the Small Business Ideas Blog Newsletter to stay updated and also get access to member only downloads and content, including special reports, studies and articles I write on other blogs. Some member bonuses include:
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Thanks for signing up for our newsletter. Please check your email and click the confirmation link to confirm your email address and receive your free bonuses.
SUBSCRIBE for ACCESS
All rights reserved © Small Business Ideas Blog, 2014
THANK YOU for SUBSCRIBING
Join the Small Business Ideas Blog Newsletter to stay updated and also get access to member only downloads and content, including special reports, studies and articles I write on other blogs. Some member bonuses include:
  • 50+ Free Tools & Resources for Business Automation
  • Study: How LinkedIn Publishers Get Featured on the Pulse
  • How to Build Relations with Influencers
  • and more!
Thanks for signing up for our newsletter. Please check your email and click the confirmation link to confirm your email address and receive your free bonuses.