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Do you allow guest posts in your blog? Are you aware of any risks involved? For a long time, guest posting has been known to be a great way of generating top quality backlinks to your website. Additionally, it also allows the guest poster to get a lot of free traffic, a new readership and a new audience. In the online field, most good things start innocent but soon the bad guys get in, and Google has to inevitably slap a penalty.

The Risk

Guest blogs normally offer a great win-win solution to both the guest bloggers and the blogs they are submitting to. The guest bloggers get the free traffic while the blogs are able to get free content. Slowly, many blogs are starting to have more guest posts than original posts. This eventually has led to a whole new industry of guest bloggers.

Google has been pushing frequent updates cracking down on any unorthodox link building and SEO practices. Therefore, despite the fact that guest blogging started as something innocent, you should beware of the disadvantages below that could be risky to your blog:

1. Guest blogging allows for dofollow links from your blog to your guest bloggers’ websites. These links mean that you trust the websites you link to. In case you have a dofollow link that links to spammy pages, your site may get penalized by Google.

2. There are guest posters who may provide content that is not related to the niche of your blog. This could mess up with both your readers and Google.

3. Are you careful about the length of your guest posts? Very short posts or thin content could reduce your blog’s overall quality. This will also affect your rankings with both search engine bots and your blog readers.

4. While allowing for guest posts, be careful of duplicate content. Some guest bloggers may actually end up using their guest post content elsewhere on the internet. This will end up annoying any of your readers who will have had access to both contents. Remember that search engines also have low tolerance to duplicate content.

5. Your guest bloggers may not take your blog as seriously as you would. For this reason, they may end up submitting posts with an uncaring attitude and lack of attention to detail. Additionally, some writers may submit content that has either inaccurate or outdated information. In case such content gets past your editorial team, it will heavily lower the value of your blog.

6. There are guest bloggers who will write for you incomplete content in order to drive traffic to their blogs. This will force readers to go to their websites to get more information. This also ends up being a nuisance to your readers and lowers the quality of your pages.

Google’s Keen Eye

Google respects quality links in your articles. Recently, Google cracked down on paid text links and this resulted in some websites being heavily penalized or even being de-indexed in Google.

Sadly, guest blogging is heading in a similar direction; link buyers are now able to buy trusted links on top-ranking websites. Therefore, any website that is accepting guest posts has to be careful of the links they are accepting. Unfortunately, choosing to add nofollow links will only turn away guest posters and beat the purpose. Remember that Google is keenly watching and looking for ways to differentiate suspicious guest posting links from true editorial links.

Bottom Line

One big question that remains is whether you should accept guest posting on your blog or you shouldn’t. It is okay to accept them but first take your time to check out the author’s website. If it is not worth the link, then don’t accept it. Additionally, only accept posts that are accurate and likeable to both you and your readers.