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It's become quite common to receive offers of blog-posts content for a dynamic website. Some of these offers are unrelated, and of-course shouldn't be published. However, I did get some related offers and wondering about them.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume this tactic is basically an up-to-date black-hat SEO, that is creating real content with links to sites they are trying to improve ranking for.

This makes me wonder, can it hurt my site if I include these blog-posts? Of-course I'm only referring to posts that seem relevant to my audience.

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Its really up to you to accept them or not, 95% of them will be garbage as you correctly said they are all to do with building back links for seo.

Its not 'black hat' seo as nothing sly or shady is happening and its certainly not in violation of Google guidelines* (read below for more info on that).

An awful lot of big national news sites and portals publish guest posts / guest content, and they can be really interesting, but do pre vet the articles as for the most part they are just churned out junk, as a vetting process i would recommend looking into the background of the person asking you to publish there post, if they are from the same industry / niche as your site and the post is interesting, your audience may find the article interesting, on the other hand if the article is from an seo company they usually wont be up to scratch, or relevant, although larger agencys repressing larger companys may still have interesting content.

*What you have to look out for is when they offer money in exchange for the article being published - this in it self is not a problem but if you / they include links in the article and those links pass 'link juice' ie they are not rel="nofollow" this is explicitly banned by Google's guidelines - for more info on that see this article on search engine watch.

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  • There are many cases that they don't offer money, but there are good grounds to believe someone is paying them to persuade me into putting the article, so I'm not sure what Google guidelines will have to say about that. Many times there's a company that is creating these blog-posts.
    – Noam
    Sep 26 '13 at 11:11
  • @Noam - the way i understand it is not that they are being payed to offer the post, its that they are paying you (the publisher) to post the link, as these links pass page rank, and will manipulate the Search results, buying actual links is a huge NO in Google's eyes, they want you to earn them, as they see links as a 'vote of confidence' to a sites credibility, worthiness ect. Hiring an seo agency on the other hand is perfectly acceptable .. just in the same way paying a designer to design your homepage to convert better is ..
    – sam
    Sep 26 '13 at 12:08
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The big thing to watch out for is whether the content is duplicated from another site. If so, and your site becomes one of several to have essentially the same web page, then this may hurt your rankings as Google frowns upon duplicate content.

My advice would be to vet any articles before publishing. Copy and paste a few sentences into Google to see if any other sites come up. If so, politely decline to carry their content.

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