How to Avoid Getting Un-Guest Posted

Nofollowed

Recently we’ve had the experience of submitting, good, clean, honest guest posts for our clients to “respectable” sites. Little did we know that a few days after they published our guest post, they would put nofollow tags in the link(s) or they would remove the link(s) altogether. How do you avoid this?

Insurance Policy

There is no real way for you to force the webmaster to do anything. He’s the webmaster. You’re the poor, powerless nofollowed linkbuilder who had one link taken out of your quota because of a dishonest webmaster. Has this ever happened to you?

I removed your link

You either paid for that article or worse, toiled to write it yourself – and you get a crap link or no link at all. That’s unacceptable! So you go ahead and email the webmaster asking him to take out the nofollow or to put the link back because that was part of your agreement. He doesn’t reply.

You follow up after a few days – to no avail. It seems like your article will be link-less.

Forever.

Tough luck!

The Twist

Let me give you one nice, juicy piece of advise. Before you submit an article to a webmaster here’s what you should do. Make sure to have an in-house blog for your client or for one of your projects. We have Freshmilk as a project where we can publish all sorts of topics.

Publish the supposed ‘guest post’ there but make sure to have it noindexed by search crawlers. This will disable search crawlers from indexing your content – so it won’t pop up in the search results. But your blog will have recorded the date when it was published and stuff.

When the webmaster publishes your guest post with an honest to goodness link and removes it after a few days or a few weeks, take off the noindex from your in-house blog and make sure to ping Google about it. That way, you have a fighting chance of making use of the article you’ve paid for or you’ve written.

Make sure that the article you’ve submitted to the webmaster has your Google+ Profile as an author link. Even if it was nofollowed (hopefully it doesn’t get removed), it would still tell Google who owns that article. That way, if your link(s) gets nofollowed, point your Google+ Profile’s “Contributor to” to your internal blog’s version of the article.

G+ Contributor to

This gives it better chance of becoming the canonical version even if the article was published weeks before at the worthless webmaster’s website.

And since it’s an in-house blog, it still does pass on considerable link equity to your client’ website – rather than passing nothing at all because of the good-for-nothing webmaster who didn’t keep his word about your guest post’s link.

Keep your links in check.

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Sean Si

About Sean

is a Filipino motivational speaker and a Leadership Speaker in the Philippines. He is the head honcho and editor-in-chief of SEO Hacker. He does SEO Services for companies in the Philippines and Abroad. Connect with him at Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Check out his new project, Aquascape Philippines.