I am going to assume that you used guest blogging to create or publish high quality content, in order to get exposure for your brand. I am also going to assume that you do not to follow the cheap spammy link building methods followed everywhere.
However, guest blogging may deeply hurt your brand and online reputation. Let me tell you how.

Guest blogging for link building or increasing your blog pages

In 2014, Google started to lower the rank of low quality sites specially guest blogging networks. Matt Cutts the head of Google’s Web Spam team has posted several videos during the previous years, educating bloggers to provide high quality contents and cooperate in fighting spam blogs and low quality websites.

Then, he consolidated all this in a new post on his blog, however the guest blogging as a link building strategy to increase page rank became so cheap and spammy.

Accordingly, the team in Google took a stance against this behavior and started to penalize those sites and networks.

What I need to say here is, if you really want to increase your brand online reputation don’t go for guest blogging whether you are the guest blogger or the publisher. It will hurt your name both ways.

Guest blogging to inform or educate with quality content

Let’s make it clear. Google has no right to tell us “bloggers” what to do. We need to stick to high quality and great content because we want to bring value online, not to follow Google’s rules so that they give us a good rank.

If you want your blog readers and social media followers to love you, then you should write or publish good content. Then, Google will have to love you eventually.

So if we take another look at the new guest blogging rules, Google is helping us “Quality Bloggers” to reach more audience and drop other low quality blogs that already have higher search engine ranks. Thanks Google!

Content freelancers as an alternative to guest bloggers

Content freelancers are content writers with different quality levels who can be found online and hired to write content for your site. Unfortunately, they don’t write what you want to say exactly, because they are simply independent contractors who work for hundreds or thousands of other clients.

Why content freelancers may also hurt your brand?

Because they don’t smell and feel your brand the same way you and your employees do, they are distracted with lots of other projects. Although, they are very good to build a great blog with valuable articles, but are not useful if you want to create a unique voice and identity for your brand in all your blog posts.

Our experience with content freelancers highlighted a very important fact, blogging as a paid project will produce tasteless or even meaningless content.

When we started looking for freelancers to write quality content for our blog since 2011, we received “rubbish”, yes I said “rubbish”. Some of those freelancers thought that we wanted to increase page rank by cheating so they delivered articles stuffed with keywords with no point at all. Others thought that we wanted quick content that are a re-write or a re-phrase of similar already published articles. Then, we had to re-write all those posts in our own style and made a decision to write all future articles on our own.

What is the solution?

If you don’t have the time, talent or resources to write quality articles on your own, then you can use guest bloggers or content freelancers only if you follow these simple rules:

• Review, review and review the quality of the content before publishing.
• Make sure there is a tone relevant to your brand voice and personality in the article.
• If a guest blogger is asking to put links in his “High Quality” blog post, then add the “nofollow” attribute in these links and make sure you are not linking to a low quality site. Check google guidelines regarding this here
• Teach yourself and your team writing and blogging skills because eventually you will need to write your blog posts yourself.

I hope this helps getting high quality online reputation for your brand. And cooperates in making the internet a better place for people who search for value.

If you can help us with other tips regarding this topic, please add your comments below.