Guest Posts: General vs. Niche-Related Sites

[larcha]

As I review potential guest post opportunities with my provider, I come across some niche-related domains that are closely related to my site with solid organic traffic (25-75k organic monthly traffic) and also have a natural backlink profile with a DA 30-50. I was happy to proceed with a guest post on these sites.

After securing a link on most of those sites (8-10 links total), I now have directed my attention towards more general sites that have a category somewhat related to my niche - those sites have great traffic (100-500k organic monthly traffic) with DAs ranging from 50-80.

However, those sites have 100s of spammed Web 2.0 backlinks from blogspot. You can see some unnatural backlink building was done in the past on the domain but clearly the domain has not been hurt. Some anchor texts are really spammy looking "buy insta followers", "meet singles near you" and "payday loans" for example.

Should I still try to capture a guest post on these general sites? Is it worth getting links from these general/broad-niche sites?

I am eyeing one that have a DA of 77 with 320k organic monthly traffic and ranking for 613k keywords.

Thanks,
Charlie

 

[Ryuzaki]

Yes, I would. What happens is people get or pay for guest posts and then spam the posts to try to power the links up.

If the sites have legitimate backlink profiles (if they're DR50 to 80 then they do), they have enough trust that Google is going to ignore the spam. They're going to do that anyways.

Another thing you can't be sure of is whether or not those sites disavowed that spam.

I know that in my case, the bigger my sites get, the more and more spam they start collecting. I've never had one of my DR50+ sites be damaged by collecting a zillion DR0 to DR10 spam links. They also don't benefit from it either, which tells me Google is doing a decent job ignoring links these days.

I can't even recall the last time I heard of anyone getting a penalty from spam links. Only for building PBNs or for having crappy outbound link profiles (in which case the outbound links are ignored).

How many spam links do you think Wikipedia, Amazon, Walmart, TechCrunch, CNN, Forbes, and so forth have collected? Would you turn down a link from those domains?

The concept of toxic links and all that is from an age that has passed, before Google got us to crowd source a ton of info through the disavow tool. Google knows that you can't control who links to you or spams you, so they worked to figure out how to deal with it on their end.

Of course, the more egregiously bad stuff like building a PBN can get you in trouble if they have the confidence that you built it.