Blog promotion used to be a common promotion method in English SEO. The method is to publish your own articles to other blogs to gain links and traffic. Google has been working on paid blogs and blog spam today. The following content comes from the translation of Matt Cutts' personal blog by Google Search Research Center, an Internet marketing agency in Jiexin:
I recently received an unsolicited spam email and posted it as an example for your reference.
I am XXX, working as a content marketer in a high-end digital marketing agency in XX city. I've been curating high-quality content for our clients.
We are constantly looking for high-end professional websites to facilitate client website marketing. When I entered your blog, I was impressed by the follower column you have built.
I was hoping to talk to you about publishing some guest articles on your blog. If you agree, we can consider an appropriate contribution, and the submitted article will meet the high standard of service your blog provides to a wide readership. As far as I am concerned, I can guarantee that our articles are of high quality and have the following characteristics:
- 100% original.
-Writing with literacy.
- Relevant to your audience.
- Blog Exclusive Posting.
We can also internally link to related articles on your website, so that your readers can also notice other content on your blog when they read our articles.
All I want is to embed a valid link or two in the body of the article. Of course, the link is relevant to the audience and the article. We also understand if you want to skim through the article first. Our working team has writers with high level and good literary talent, because it can guarantee the content of the article is profound and the writing is professional. We strive to create articles that benefit your loyal readers. We are also happy to create on the topics you provide.
Someone spammed me, paying for a link to gain page rank. This is a clear violation of Google's quality guidelines. Moreover, so far, we have seen more and more about "blog" is indeed "spending money to buy rankings". Worse, "We're going to embed spammy links in your blog without you even realizing it."
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Fundamentally, this is why we can't create a good SEO space: a trend starts with authenticity. After that more and more people flocked, and in the end, there were very few traces of legal behavior left. We're already at the bottom of the vortex where people outsource blogging tasks, write articles on "how to automate blogging", or develop blogging automation software.
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So, stop there, blog promotion is beyond redemption. In general, I don't recommend accepting blog posts unless you're willing to vouch for it personally or you know the person well. Likewise, I do not recommend relying on blog posts, or relying on such sites and optimization as a link building strategy.
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As a historical reference, I will provide some videos and links to review the decline of blog posts. In 2012, I already talked about the difference between high-quality blog posts and spam blog posts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMxC3wQZOyc
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Sadly, many people don't seem to be heeding my advice. For this reason, I made a follow-up video to warn everyone to stay away from spam blogs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpbCKWu0I0A
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In 2013, John Mueller made a good comment about the link without follow in the blog post. I think many people clearly foresaw the trend of blogs being overused by low quality spam before this.
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A few months ago, I also brought up the question of how to be a good blogger without making it look like a blog is serving links (a question that even shows that blog posts are becoming less and less valuable). I'm trying to find some glimmer of light on posting, but if you've read the record, you'll notice that I spend a lot of time talking about low quality or even spam posts and blog posts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGieiNe6RL4
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In the video below, which we posted last month, the issue itself foreshadows that Google will take a tougher approach to blog spam.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qozPhALuQQw
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By now, you should understand that what was once an authentic and effective blog post has waned. I guess just to see how far such blogs have declined is to see what Google's anti-spam team has to say about blogging's path forward.
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It seems like a lot of people get what I'm trying to convey, but I have a little more to add. I'm not generalizing and saying that all factors are dead. There are still many reasons why we should blog, such as exposure, brand benefits, increasing influence, social groups and so on. These approaches existed before Google, and will continue into the future. And, there's definitely a lot of fantastic high-quality blog posts in there too. I've changed the title of this article to highlight the topic I'm trying to convey: Blogging for SEO. I'm also not talking about multi-author blogs. High-quality multi-author blogs, such as Boing, have been around since the dawn of the web, and they're compelling, engaging, and meaningful.
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I just want to stress: There are tons of low quality and even spam sites using blogging as their link building strategy. We're seeing more and more spammy sites trying to get their hands on blogs. So, my personal advice is that you better be skeptical, or at least wary, when someone comes up to you with a blog post.
Note 1:
Public blog: Guest Blogging in English refers to a public blog platform similar to Wordpress, Blogspot, and Sina Blog, and also includes some theme blogs with multiple editors and publishers for a certain topic.