[Note: As of August 29, 2012, I no longer accept guest articles.]
It’s always been a good idea to accept good, relevant guest articles on niche websites. Even on websites like mine, where it isn’t so subject-specific, decent guest articles can still fill the void for the periods where you can’t or won’t write anything new. Well, I’m going to be much more strict with what I accept from now on.
Non-English or Poor English Writers
I’m acutely aware that many people are outsourcing all of their writing needs, including guest articles, to third parties and there are a websites who advertise they’ll do it for you.
The problem I have with them is that when English is their second or third language, it’s obvious and the articles stick out like a sore thumb. In the past, I went so far as to correct spelling, grammar and even rewrite sentences to make them read properly to someone who reads English.
Well, I won’t be doing that anymore. I have way too many personal writing and programming projects to work on to do someone else’s work for them. You can argue that I’m getting free content for a backlink or two and I can argue that’s all I’m getting. Most of the guest articles don’t rank for anything and I don’t make money from articles that don’t rank well.
Guest Article Solicitations
I get e-mail, via my contact form, on a daily basis where someone’s asking to write an article for me. I guarantee, that if my website was only a year old and with a low PageRank, I wouldn’t be getting those messages.
I used to respond to most of them, but lately they all seem to be cookie-cutter messages with the same stuff on them with only the name being changed. I won’t respond to any, from here on out, if they don’t appear to be English speakers, they don’t address me by name, or it looks like a freaking form letter.
This may sound harsh, but I don’t need guest articles. The idea that publishing articles every day to stay in the good graces of Google is hogwash. I know people who publish once or twice a month and get 10 times the traffic I get, whether they have guest articles on their sites or not.
You know, I hate politics, but I can deal with it when I’m trying to make a point. I’ve actually been holding back on a lot of things, including politics, because I don’t like getting into arguments in the comment section. Well, I have a solution for that too.
It’s called closing the comments form on an article when people get abusive. Listen, I have many friends who run blogs without any comments enabled, ever. Most of the comments I receive are really just thinly-disguised spam comments anyway, so it wouldn’t be any skin off my butt if I received none at all.
What does that have to do with Guest Articles?
The keyword is “abuse”. I guess I’m just plain tired of getting abused by Internet Marketers who try to squeeze as much as they can out of what little they provide in return. In fact, I closed posturown.com to any further articles because of the remaining few authors that were actually submitting something were submitting mostly spun articles, a policy I stated I was against when I started the website — in 2009.
I’m also tired of rejecting articles on gambling, escort services and crap like that. If my regular contributors stop sending me articles because I’m not publishing everything they send me, then so be it. I have plenty of ammunition to write articles once or twice a week anyway.
Your decision is certainly a reasonable one. In fact — no offence to the writers — I wondered how some of those articles passed the radar. A few certainly seemed to be keyword driven and written more for search engines than for interested readers. Sort of dispassionate prose that didn’t really attempt to inform or inspire.
Yes, and when the links become dead links because whoever gave up, the articles will go bye-bye too.
I definitely see where you’re coming from. Some just want it for a quick backlink and don’t even care about the quality of their content whatsoever. I wonder if they know just how bad bad quality content can hurt you and their own site with Google’s penguin update.
I love writing though and I’m proud of the articles I have up on here, it’s one of my favorite sites! :)
I’ll be glad to see ‘you’ back. I always appreciated ‘your’ articles but seldom found an interest in the other stuff that was being written. That was something I stated in a comment a couple of years ago when I started seeing more guest articles.
Of course, now that I’ve learned just a little about SEO, I understand this isn’t to your benefit. Since I am a more likely candidate for your “regular readers” I am also the least likely candidate for clicking on a link.
Oh but I just saw a link to Metro Deals (one of the ads you have very little control over), and whether this helps you in one tiny way or not I’m not sure.
But my wife and I actually use that ! … I ordered a 750 gig external HD off of there last month to replace the 500 gig one that is showing signs of dying. I’ll void the warranty by doing what I am planning on doing, but since it’s about P1200 less than the best price on an internal one that I found, I’m simply going to yank it (gently) out of it’s enclosure.
And my wife likes to keep her eye on the vacation stuff. I have to keep her excursions down to once a year. She would happily wreak havoc on the family budget with three or four vacations a year if I let her :-)