The Guest Post Scam

Of late, I’ve been receiving variants of the same form email from people wanting to guest post at this blog. Of course, using a standard form email with slight variations in the wording does not bode well for a positive outcome –  and, indeed, that outcome is not. They are all binned. What is interesting is that some of them come back a few weeks later nagging me about a response –  this, despite my contact page making it clear that I am not interested and will delete all such spammy emails anyway. What part of “I do not host guest posts” do these cretins not understand?

It would seem that this scam is the new comment spam and it is seen as a way of gaming Google. There are SEO articles telling people how to do it –  although, it would seem that my correspondents haven’t read them. Not that it would make any difference as I would bin the mails anyway.

Apparently, if the approach is made incorrectly, we poor bloggers will get confused.

Believe it or not, the hardest part of guest blogging isn’t writing the posts. It’s actually convincing a blogger or website owner to allow you to guest post on their site. Many bloggers mistake requests by email to guest post as spam and immediately send them to a separate folder: usually trash or spam.

It’s not a mistake, it is spam. And, yes, it gets binned.

DO NOT SEND OUT A TEMPLATE EMAIL!! I don’t know who thought it would be a great idea to type up one generic email asking someone if they can guest post on their site, but this is why bloggers confuse these emails with spam. Bloggers and site owners can pick these uniform emails out in a second and they will be deleted and/or marked as spam.

I’m not remotely confused. And, yes, I can spot one of these approaches a mile off. It would seem that all of the recent correspondents have not been taking note as they have failed to follow any of the five rules Adam Bruk has spent time and effort putting together. Ah, well, not that it would have altered the outcome if they had.

Sometimes bloggers do fall for it. Although in this case the scammer didn’t get exactly what she was after.

One alteration I made to the work before posting it up, which didn’t register with me as anything significant at the time but which is *central* to the scam, is that I removed a link. Buried in the work was a link to a random horoscope website. I couldn’t see how the link added anything to the work so I removed it.

The scammer wasn’t amused and chased the blogger to put it back in, whereupon the penny finally dropped and this blogger realised what was going on. Better late than never. And, it has to be said, posting the article –  even if it is inane drivel –  without the link is wonderfully wicked.

What we have is the SEO marketing industry looking upon us –  enthusiastic amateurs for the most part –  as a free resource. They see our work as something they can piggy back in order to make their money.

Well, it ain’t happening here. I do not host guest posts –  unless it is from a fellow blogger known to me who has something relevant and of interest to add to my content. I most certainly am not a free resource for the SEO sharks.

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Update: Fuck me, can’t these people read? Received today:

HI, I’m getting in touch with you because I came across your blog during my research on my project relating to Medical Transcription. I contributed to an article on the website about health information security. This project aims to look at the current state of medical transcription as a part of the all-encompassing field of medicine and how specialists and technologies contribute to the field today. Although my resource is specifically about medical transcription, I believe the entirety of the resource is very applicable to the health care field in general. My resource has been referred to by prominent websites such as Mashable and many healthcare-related blogs. I’d be very interested in writing a guest article on your blog relating to the state of health care today not only in terms of medical transcription but other pertinent factors such as cost of care, insurance, and scalability of services. What do you think? Best, Abby Washford

What part of “I do not host guest posts” did you not understand?

4 Comments

  1. I wondered what those Emails were about. I’ve had a few, and the follow-ups, and ignored them. I have enough trouble keeping up with legitimate Emails so they have no chance.

    Sometimes it’s not easy to see what the scam is, but when they send two identical Emails within an hour, with identical text in each, then it’s definitely some sort of scam.

    I wouldn’t have deleted the link. I’d have changed it. 😉

      • The options would be:
        Change it to point to Lolcats or maybe just a recursive link to the top of the same post,
        Change it to add ‘nofollow’ so the link is there when they check, but they get no Google points,
        Take a screenshot of the spammer’s site, make it a .jpg, put that in a blog folder and link to that – or my personal favourite,
        Remove the link, then highlight the previously-linked text and change it to appear underlined in blue. Whenever they contacted me to complain it wasn’t working, I’d respond with ‘Seems to be working fine for me’.

  2. Dearly Beloved – would you like to guestpost on a blog by this character called Julia M? I believe she might be an Orphan but am not sure. Yours from Nigeria and send money.

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