Four Things Blog Owners Should Avoid Doing With Guest Authors

Guest posting is one of the very few remaining ways of building one way quality links for your website. No wonder, more and more websites are now turning towards this method, which is a good nevertheless. Blog owners are quite choosy when it comes to publishing content on their blogs, which means only the above average content can pass, unlike the poor quality, spun content often seen on article directories and content farms.

Any good blog that accepts guest contributions get dozens of articles on monthly basis, and even though majority of them are spam, there are many which are good enough to keep their blog going even if they aren’t contributing anything on their own. People are running entire networks of blogs, powered solely by the content coming from guest authors (free blogging), and there’s nothing wrong in it as long as they are maintaining strict quality standards.

It’s true that allowing others to contribute a post on your blog is a kind of favor; however some blog owners get a little puffed-up and end up ruining the experience for guest contributors. Given below are four distasteful experiences you might have faced as a guest blogger, and hope that blog owners will steer clear of such practices.

Changing the links in author’s Bio without permission:

You can devise any strategy for linking to guest blogger’s websites from the Author’s Bio, and reject any link that you don’t deem as appropriate. You can also ask the authors to cut down the number of links, change anchor texts, or even change the links altogether. What you cannot and shouldn’t do is to make these changes yourself without asking the authors for permission, and then publishing the article with the modified Bio.

Many a times, guest authors will have no issues with the kind of changes you were looking for, but still doing those changes without asking for their approval is unprofessional and must be avoided. In case the author is not happy with the changes, and you decide to remove the article after 1 – 2 days of publishing, they will be left with an article that no other blog is ready to take because Google has already indexed the article and it might be considered duplicate content.

Rejecting the article without notifying:

You wouldn’t like to use some of those posts for many reasons, it might be low quality, not unique, out dated, recently covered at your blog, or simply off topic. In fact you can reject a post without giving any reason for all you like, but one thing you must do is to inform the contributor. Just let them know as soon as you’ve gone through the article and you don’t find it a good fit for your blog, don’t make them wait for weeks, and send half a dozen follow up emails before giving them the news.

Publishing the post without notifying:

At times, it happens that you send a guest post to a blog, and the owner doesn’t respond for weeks, even when you’ve sent a couple of follow up emails, and you decide to offer it to another blog. Only to get the answer that the post is already published elsewhere, after searching at Google, you find it live on the blog you’ve first offered, because blog owner was on vacations or simply not able to go through your article earlier. Again, that’s quite understandable, except that you must confirm from the authors if you are about to publish the article after weeks.

Publishing on another one of your blog:

Many blog owners have more than one blogs and often they’ll deem an article to be more suitable for another blog instead of the one where guest author is looking to get it published. It’s fine if you get back to them with your decision to use it on another blog, and ask for their permission. Just because they’ve sent you an article for a particular blog, doesn’t mean you’re free to use it on any other website, especially if the second blog is lesser than the original one in one way or another.

Author’s Bio:
[note]Arba is an SEO expert, and writes on topics related to Internet Marketing.[/note]