In recent years, the practice of guest posting has become a popular method for businesses to improve their online visibility and increase their website traffic. However, with the rise of guest posting, there has also been a corresponding increase in guest posting spam emails, particularly from freelancers based in India or Pakistan.
Guest Post Spam – What It Is And How Can I Stop It
If you own a blog, you might find yourself waking up to at least ten new, often awkward email pitches from unfamiliar individuals seeking to contribute guest posts. If this hasn’t happened to your blog yet, it’s likely only a matter of time. However, it’s essential not to be deceived.
In the ever-expanding digital landscape of 2023, the internet hosts a staggering array of over 600 million blogs among a grand total of 1.9 billion websites worldwide.
These blogs encompass a diverse spectrum, ranging from personal reflections to data-driven corporate content disseminated across various channels and niches. Notably, blogs collectively constitute nearly one-third of the global online presence, underscoring their pervasive influence.
This proliferation, however, also presents challenges, especially in the form of opportunistic guest post spammers seeking to exploit the vast opportunities within the blogosphere.
As the blog count continues to rise, the risk of these spammers taking advantage of the expansive platform for their promotional endeavors grows commensurately. It becomes imperative for the online community to remain vigilant against such activities, preserving the integrity and authenticity of the valuable content disseminated through this extensive network of digital voices.
Distinguishing between authentic guest post requests and spam can be challenging. Link building, a potent SEO strategy, involves obtaining backlinks from other websites.
A backlink from a highly reputable site can boost your search engine rankings. Guest post spammers typically aim to secure backlinks for their or their client’s websites to enhance their rankings.
Legitimate guest post bloggers share an interest in link building but also seek to enhance credibility and attract new subscribers. The key to differentiation lies in relevance. As an example, if your blog focuses on technology and marketing, any guest post offer that is entirely unrelated is unequivocally spam.
So, what does guest post spam look like? While there are genuine guest post requests that align with your blog’s topic or the product/service you offer, spam often exhibits the following characteristics:
- Represents a blog or website entirely unrelated to yours.
- Sends a generic guest post request.
- Uses a Yahoo or Gmail address for communication.
- Asks for a link but fails to provide their URL.
When faced with a spammy guest post request, you have several options:
- Delete it – a common and straightforward choice.
- Respond – consider responding if you receive multiple repeat requests from the same person, politely declining the offer.
- Mark it as Junk or Spam – often the most effective option.
Guest posting spam is the practice of submitting low-quality or irrelevant content to websites in the hopes of gaining backlinks and boosting search engine rankings. Unfortunately, this tactic often involves the use of automated software or outsourced services that generate large volumes of low-quality content that is poorly written and lacks useful information.
Businesses are now facing a growing epidemic of guest posting spam, particularly from free Indian and Pakistani freelancers. While some of these freelancers do provide legitimate and high-quality content, many others engage in spammy practices that can be detrimental to a website’s reputation.
Despite the growing problem of guest post spam email requests, free email providers such as Gmail and Outlook don’t seem to be doing enough to combat this issue.
While these providers offer some spam filtering tools, they often fail to catch the more sophisticated forms of spam that business owners have become to despise.
As a result, businesses are forced to rely on their own monitoring and management practices to identify and filter these spammy email requests with internal mail server settings or simply blocking free email service providers completely.
The Guest Post Plague Has Descended Upon The World
A plague has descended upon the business world and website owners in the form of guest post spam emails. The emails have been noted to become increasingly common and aggressive, with spammers resorting to all sorts of dirty tactics to deceive and mislead website owners.
The requests these spammers send out are asking for irrelevant niche links on business websites and often include the placement of gambling, casino, or essay writing services links into websites that have nothing to do with these niches.
It’s a tactic that reeks of desperation and dishonesty, and it’s getting worse by the day. Eg. Online gambling links to be published on a cake recipe blog
But that’s not even the worst part. These spammers have no shame in their game. There are never any pitches, and many of them offer to pay a measly $5 for a link placements on high-quality websites.
They then sell these links to buyers or a link building service as the middle man for $100 or more. It’s a blatant rip-off and a scam that preys on unsuspecting website owners who are simply trying to improve their online presence.
These disrespectful freelancers or so called “seo experts” in disguise don’t care, read or pay attention to a websites submission guidelines or any rules for that matter. They manually send out these spam emails and disregard any form of decency or professionalism.
The actual emails (not the article content) are often poorly spoken and have terrible English skills along with and they use fake names and email addresses to hide their true identity. Gmai.com is is the currently the No.1 platform for sending these emails as there is almost no requirement to confirm ones identity.
They often claim to be professional content writers or SEO experts with articles that will increase your website traffic. However, these spammers are nothing of the sort. They will use AI content writing tools to create generic and worthless content for the sole purpose of placing a hyperlink into it.
It’s time for website owners globally to take a stand against these guest post spam emails. Don’t let these spammers take advantage of you and your business and report the spam to email providers where possible.
India And Pakistan Lead in the guest post spamming world
We recently completed a 1-year study of the growing issue and found from 1000 “Guest Post Reseller Spam Emails” 66% originated from India and 31% were from Pakistan. Just 2% came from other regions around the world.
Over 80% of these emails used a fake alias name and 24% were found to be males posing with a western English female name.
The most common surname was also found to be “Smith” while 67% said they were either a seo expert, professional blogger, or the content manager for a ‘Company.”
Additionally, from 1000 emails containing requests for “Guest Posting’ 98% were pure spam and did not come from legitimate bloggers, writers, journalists, or human written text pitches.
How Many ” General” Spam Emails Are Sent Per Day?
According to Statista, in September 2021, the estimated spam volume was 88.88 billion spam emails a day. On average, this works out to be 21 spam emails per person per day. These figures include both general spam and guest post request email spam.
The Risks of Publishing Content For Guest Post Spammers
- The content you commit to publishing may pose a threat to your site. It could be spun, excessively generic material bought for a mere $5 from Textbroker, or even plagiarized from a source that has already published it elsewhere.
- The majority of content provided by these guest post requests is likely to be of little value. Most of these sites are of extremely low quality or outright spam, often being sandboxed or blacklisted by Google, offering minimal or zero SEO benefits.
- Be wary of fake sites. Frequently, these sites are part of private blog networks seeking to draw SEO value into their network, making their activities appear less dubious by essentially “laundering” link juice through your site. There’s even a risk of your site being penalized if their network faces consequences.
- Relevance matters. Guest blog spammers often overlook the content of your website, using software to scrape millions of websites. If the site they want to promote is unrelated to your industry, it’s best to ignore the request.
- Watch for spammy-looking links. Google can discern between natural citations and links sought for SEO value. Keyword-match links like “buy scuba equipment” or “cheap CBD vapes” are obvious attempts to manipulate rankings and can negatively impact your site’s reputation.
- Traffic risks. Linking to a harmful website can lead to penalties, creating a bad link neighborhood. If Google penalizes a group of sites linking to a spammy source, your site might be affected. Examples abound of sites experiencing significant drops in traffic and business after publishing such guest posts.
- The potential outcome. At best, you receive a neutral or low-value link, generic content, and a meager compensation of around $15. At worst, your site faces penalties for violating Webmaster Guidelines, necessitating efforts to audit and remove the offending content to lift the penalty.
In essence, the person initiating the email is likely benefiting more from the arrangement.
The No.1 Red Flag That Identifies The Spammers Geographical Location
It is difficult to provide an exact number, however it’s not uncommon for guest post spammers to use impersonal and disrespectful language in their emails, such as “Hello Dear,” rather than addressing the recipient by their name or company. A common indication of the region.
This is often viewed as a red flag for spam and should result in the email being immediately deleted or marked as spam. It is important for businesses and individuals to remain vigilant and exercise caution when receiving unsolicited emails, particularly those that use overly familiar or inappropriate language.
What About Real Guest Posts?
Suppose you wish to keep the option open for guest posting on your channel without the inconvenience of sorting through unsolicited messages. What steps can you take?
If you’re determined to seize every opportunity without overlooking any, brace yourself for a considerable amount of effort.
Chances are, fatigue might set in before you uncover a promising lead, though there’s a possibility I could be mistaken, and you might have a valuable one already at your disposal. To assess and filter through these opportunities, follow these steps:
- Examine the email’s personalization. Is it tailored to you and your writing, or does it resemble a generic template with a few details plugged in for your brand? Did they address you by name, or did they opt for a more generic greeting like “Hi there”? Verify the email’s legitimacy by checking if it originates from a company email address matching their website
- Evaluate the pitch. Was the article already provided in the email, or are they proposing an idea? Typically, guest blog spammers already have content prepared for their ulterior motives.
- If the initial assessment is satisfactory, scrutinize the details. Does the email explicitly state the site it represents? If they request a link, what is the destination site? If they aren’t seeking anything in return, do they still provide information about their identity? If not, consider dismissing them.
- Inspect the promoted site. Conduct a Google search to check for its visibility in search results—deindexed sites may indicate red flags.
- Subject their domain to analysis. What is the Domain Authority? Examine their backlinks and assess their spam quotient.
- Evaluate the appearance of their site. Does it feature a logo? Are the images unique, or do they rely on stock photos or pictures sourced from Google image search?
- Scrutinize the linked sites. Are they unrelated or vaguely related blogs? Or do they link to high-quality sources that bolster their claims with facts and information?
- Research the author. Do they have a visible social media presence? Are they featured on other reputable sites? Verify the authenticity of their name and email.
- Thoroughly read the content. Use Copyscape to check for plagiarism. Consider the word count, and analyze it with Grammarly for potential errors. Assess the readability, informativeness, and relevance of the topic to your audience.
- Examine all links in the guest post. Since spammers aim to promote their website, scrutinize each link for potential spam. Identify whether they predominantly link to homepages or product/service pages and assess the quality of the linked content.
By diligently following these steps, you can enhance your ability to discern valuable opportunities from potential spam.
It’s also recommended you setup a guest post submission form:
Here’s our details and publishing options.
- News Contribution Guidelines
- News Tips & Submission Form
- Opinion Article Submissions
- Apply To Become & Journalist – Write For Us
Unveiling the Pitfalls of Accepting AI-Generated Guest Posts: A Call for Quality Content
the emergence of AI-generated text has been both fascinating and concerning. While artificial intelligence undoubtedly brings innovation, there is a growing need to discern its application, particularly in the realm of guest post contributions.
Here, we explore why accepting AI-generated guest posts should not be reconsidered:
Why AI-Generated Content Falls Short:
- Absence of Value: AI-generated content, stripped of statistics, charts, editorial comments, source validation, and percentages, often lacks the essential elements that contribute to informative and engaging articles. Such contributions may leave readers unsatisfied and unenlightened.
- Dehumanized Expression: Content created solely by algorithms fails to capture the unique human touch that adds depth and authenticity to writing. The absence of genuine effort and thought can be glaring, resulting in a disconnection with the audience.
- Trust and Credibility Concerns: Guest posts are expected to uphold standards of accuracy and reliability. Without human oversight and validation, there’s a risk of disseminating misinformation, undermining the trust established between content creators and their audience.
How to Spot AI-Generated Content:
- Lack of Personal Voice: AI-generated content often lacks a distinct personal voice or style associated with human expression. Identifying a mechanical tone can be an early indicator of content generated without human input.
- Uniformity and Predictability: Automated content tends to exhibit a degree of uniformity and predictability. Consistent patterns, generic language, and a lack of nuanced expression may suggest the absence of human creativity.
- Exclusion of Supporting Elements: Be wary of submissions void of statistics, charts, editorial comments, source validation, or percentages. Genuine contributions usually incorporate these elements to enhance the credibility and depth of the content.
Why Publications and Blogs Deserve Human Involvement:
- Craftsmanship: Writing is a craft that requires human skill, creativity, and the ability to connect with an audience. Content crafted by human hands reflects a dedication to the art of storytelling and communication.
- Authenticity and Effort: Genuine effort is a hallmark of meaningful contributions. Submitters who invest time and energy in crafting their content demonstrate a commitment to providing valuable insights and information.
- Quality Assurance: Human writers possess the ability to scrutinize and validate information, ensuring the content’s accuracy and reliability. This critical oversight is indispensable in maintaining the quality of published material.
Winning The War Against Guest Post Spam Emails
Winning the war against guest post spam emails requires a collaborative effort from individuals, organisations, and technology providers. The first step needs to start with free email providers.
This parasitic spam also simply won’t stop until website owners cease using their websites to sell hyperlink embedded worthless content placements that provide zero to no value to readers
A website or blog is for the purpose of providing useful information, tools, products or services and should not be used to sell “Links” that pass PageRank in the search engines.
