SEO is Dead

Does backlinking bore the pants off you? Are you sick of reading about how important SEO is? You got your wish, SEO is dead.

Penguin Killed SEO

Google does not want its results manipulated. The whole point of its updates has been to improve what searchers get in its results.

Pre-Penguin many of the results in the top page were there because of off-site SEO, namely artificial links. Most of those links have now been recognised as artificial in Google’s current algorithm.

Are SEO Companies Lying Down?

Of course they are not. They have millions invested in persuading website owners that their services are essential.

There are still some fools telling bloggers that link-building is alive and well of course, and some people will believe them. Many of the reputable SEO websites have switched their emphasis towards getting a natural link profile. They tell you to use guest posting, blog commenting and link bait.

All of these techniques are time-consuming, so website owners will still outsource these to low-quality writers who will fill the Internet with barely legible guest posts.

Post-Penguin Guest Posting

I have a day job, working from home, as a moderator at My Blog Guest (MyBlogGuest.com). In recent weeks I have had to hide/delete more and more posts written in Indian and Chinese English.

These have clearly been placed by SEO companies in their increased emphasis on guest posting. The problem is that SEO companies use the cheapest writers available, who are not up to the required standard.

The moderating system at My Blog Guest catches these poor posts, but other SEO companies are increasingly using automated contact systems to offer guest posts directly to bloggers.

I have a box, prominently placed on the front page of my sites with a Contact link. Real guest posters find it easily; bots don’t see it and send their spammy offers to a no-reply default site email address. My no-reply email address gets 20 times more hits than my real Contact one

Is Guest Posting Still Worth It?

Yes, but you have to do it right.

Free members at MyBlogGuest.com can browse the gallery where there are over a thousand guest posts to choose from. These have been checked for quality, originality and worth. Bloggers can find useful articles in the MBG gallery for free.

If you want to write guest posts you can do so for free through the MBG forums, contacting writers without any charge.

Using Guest Posts

If you are struggling to write enough articles to update your site as frequently as you would like then using highly selected guest posts can help.

I use guest posts every day at my 21CWoman.com site. Every post has something to say, something that I think is useful to my users.

Other SEO Company Tactics

Blog Commenting

I am getting more and more human-written blog comments, rather than the spun and generic software generated ones. Unfortunately 95% of these comments are obviously written to get a link back to the originator. They appear to have been outsourced to poorly-paid writers in the developing world.

Twitter

Twitter tweets are easy to automate. You can buy software that will bring you thousands of ‘followers’.

SEO companies are like cockroaches, contaminating everything they touch. Twitter might have developed into something worthwhile, but with the proliferation of automated systems is effectively worthless.

If this is obvious to you and me, do you really think that the people at Google haven’t realised yet?

Twitter is easy to outsource even if SEO companies recognise that automated systems are a waste of money and time.

I bought TweetAdder3 for my sins, so I know how it is done. In my opinion Twitter is now a  bunch of automated tweets and poorly paid third world human tweeters jabbering away meaninglessly to each other.

I acknowledge that real world businesses can use Twitter effectively, but for website owners it is a  total waste of time.

How Do You Feel?

Do you agree?

Is Twitter really that bad?

Have you tried guest posting (from either side)?

Written by Phil Turner, an ex-teacher from Ireland. Phil believes that to succeed in anything you have to help others and share your own knowledge. He makes a living mostly by writing on his own sites, which include KeywordsDelivered.com and 21CWoman.com.

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• Why You Ought to Build an Online Brand Through Guest Blogging and Not Just Chase SEO Tricks (quicksprout.com)

Tagged as: Backlink, Facebook, Google, My Blog Guest, MyBlogGuest.com, Online Communities, Search engine optimization, Twitter