Alarming trend in guest post submissions

There is an alarming trend in guest posting that bloggers who are accepting guest posts on their blogs should be aware of.

When guest posting started becoming a popular way of growing blog traffic, the posts were almost always written by individual bloggers who created some great content in hope of attracting some visitors via the link in the signature of the guest post.

The recent trend has seen a growing amount of guest posts no longer written by real bloggers wanting to promote their blogs, but increasingly written by people getting paid to include links to different websites and companies within the guest post content and signature.

In recent few weeks I have received a wide range of guest posts for consideration linking to a wide range of websites, for example email marketing software, security software, financial service websites like loans, and many others.

A recent email from a guest post submitter sheds some light into this:

I’m currently submitting guest posts in an effort to increase the quality of our company’s backlinks. Our website has experienced a downgrade since Google’s update and was hoping to ramp up our ranking back by doing guest posts.

I would think that it is just a question of time before Google and other search engines act on this trend and stop giving valuable Google juice to these links. Nobody knows if/when this will happen or what it may result it, but the logical thinking is that Google will lower the importance of these blog links and that could spell bad for blogs accepting these types of guest posts.

The best advice is to carefully review which links are being submitted in the guest posts. Visit the link, review the site and decide if the link is something you are comfortable about linking from your site or not. If yes, post it, if not, ignore it.