Guest Posting on Sites with a Low PR: Is There an SEO Benefit

It’s no secret that guest posting is becoming one of the most popular ways to earn quality backlinks. Contributing a guest article in exchange for a link back to your site not only improves your SEO, but it helps your company gain visibility and credibility in the industry. However, there are a few known rules about the SEO success of guest posting. First, it’s best to include links back to your site within the copy of the text. Second, it’s best to spread your links around by contributing articles to several different websites as opposed to just one. Finally, it’s best to get backlinks from authoritative sites, or sites with a high Google PageRank.
There are of course other tips and tricks to guest posting, but these are three main “truths” of guest posting for SEO purposes. Following the first two rules is ideal, but veteran guest contributors know that this isn’t always possible, and so life goes on and the article gets published. However, the third rule is a bit different. Many guest bloggers will blow right past a website if it doesn’t have a high PR, and the article won’t go on. This then leads some to that inevitable question: Is blowing off a site based on PR really a good idea?

Why Would You Want to Choose a Site with a Low PR Over a High PR?

You wouldn’t. It’s always best to try and find a site that is very authoritative in the eyes of Google because these backlinks typically hold more weight when it comes time to rank different sites for a Google SERP. However, getting your article placed on a very authoritative site isn’t always easy for several reasons:

It takes a great deal of time to prove you’re an expert to sites that have tons of guest contributors. If you’re a full-time guest writer, it’s hard to justify spending all your time waiting for an email reply or writing an article that you hope someone will like.
Sites with a high PR typically have a high PR because they only publish the best. If a site is asking you for samples of your writing and you don’t have enough, you might not be able to get published on that site.
A good deal of authoritative websites don’t even bother accepting guest posts. This really limits the number of sites available.

Now no one said it was supposed to be easy to become a contributor for a PR 6 or 7 site, but sometimes there simply is too much time in one day to fill it with pitching these important sites. There are plenty of PR 1, 2, and 3 sites that would be happy to have your article, but is this smart when it comes to SEO?

How to Analyze a Site with a Low PR

Posting on a site with a low PR can be beneficial in terms of SEO; however it’s important that you really analyze the site to determine if it is of quality. Just because Google hasn’t found the site yet or the site is too new to have many backlinks doesn’t mean it won’t be big in the future. If this happens (and it should if the site really offers quality content) you will have gotten a link on an authoritative site—you just did it the easy way!
Below are a few ways you can analyze a site despite the low PR:

Check dates and frequency of articles.

You want to make sure that the website is maintained. A website could have a great design and look neat and clean, but if no one is uploading any articles it probably isn’t going to grow. Check to see when the last article was posted and how frequently new articles are being posted. Anything longer than 6 months might be a red flag.

See if you can navigate your way around the site.

If a site is difficult to navigate you can usually tell just be looking at the way the site is laid out, but this isn’t always the case. Make sure that you check the website out fully to see if it is intuitive and something that visitors would be able to use. If Google bots can’t navigate the website, the PR of the site likely won’t go up, which makes this a good indicator if you’re considering to contribute an article.

Analyze the content and the focus of the articles.

Great blogs and websites have unique content surrounding a particular industry or topic. Make sure that the blog isn’t syndicating a bunch of content or copying already published content. Consider copying a few sentences from a few of the articles and pasting them into Google search to see if the content is duplicated. Finally, make sure to consider the focus of the website. If the website has articles all over the place on different topics, it may not get very far.
How do you justify posting on sites with a lower Google PR? Do you have any tricks you use when analyzing these sites? Let us know in the comments below!

Friday, 25 January 2013