Yesterday Darren Rowse was annoyed with guest blogging spammers.
To recap, Darren Rowse (@problogger) is the founder of Problogger and Digital Photography School. He’s one of the most respected individuals and professionals in the online world. When he talks people listen.
Darren was frustrated the other day with SEO spammers sending him requests for guest blogging. Darren said he turns these down since the spammers are only after links. We expanded on the issue yesterday, but today I want to talk about something else Darren mentioned that is obviously a point of interest for Ghost Blog Writers.
Here is what Darren said:
This morning another company offered to pay me to ghost blog an article for them to appear on my own site. Again I said no.
To add more context here is another thing Darren mentioned on his Twitter stream:
@TonyNoland no I don't offer ghost writing – I can barely keep up with writing under my own name
— Darren Rowse (@problogger) August 14, 2012
And again:
@mctiller no – I don't do ghost writing. The company was an SEO company wanting to promote credit cards.
— Darren Rowse (@problogger) August 14, 2012
I’m doing a little guessing here and if I’m interpreting things wrong please correct me, but I think the company asked Darren if they could write a post for his website, but have him publish it as himself.
Here is what the SEO firm is trying to do.
First, they want a link from Darren’s site. The way the SEO world (used to?) works is by using links as a sign of importance on the Web. A link on Problogger holds some weight in the search engine world because it’s a very popular and very trusted site. A link has traditionally been a way for search engines to see how other sites are viewed by popular sites.
Second, Darren himself is a person of importance on the Web. Any article by him is viewed with authority by people and by search engines. If this SEO company could have convinced Darren to publish the post under his name with a link to their site it would have been powerful in the mind of the current search engines.
But as we know, SEO is less and less about links and blogging is less and less about SEO these days.
Darren also mentioned ghost blogging. I think he mentioned it in two contexts, but I could be wrong. I think he’s saying he doesn’t do ghost blogging where people write stuff for him. That’s fine. Darren is an accomplished blogger so he obviously knows how to blog already. He doesn’t need anyone to help him format posts or do his research.
I’m also not sure, but I think maybe Darren doesn’t offer or believe in ghost writing or ghost blogging. I’m not sure on that one, though.
Here is the GBW stance on ghost writing and ghost blogging.
If you are busy, but want content strategy to be part of your company then it is perfectly fine to hire a blogger to become part of your company and provide content to your audience under your company name. What we do at Ghost Blog Writers is do extensive research about your company, your customer and your industry. We take your expertise and mix it with our own research and our own knowledge of blogging to create what we feel is great content that is useful.
In this sense we believe that ghost writing and ghost blogging is not only fine and Ok, but helpful to the world. Not everybody is a great blogger. Everybody has the potential to become a great blogger, but there is only so much time in the day. If you, as a business owner, want to blog that is great, but if you want to focus on other areas of your business and still want to blog then that’s what Ghost Blog Writers is here for and we work hard to provide great blog posts for your company and your customers. While we do pay attention to search engines I would say that 99% of what we do is for your customer with the idea of earning you sales.
Some of our clients want us to post as their company. Some want us to post as ourselves. Either way works fine.
That’s our stance on ghost blogging.
What is yours?