traffic

Publishers no longer providing backlinks and traffic

Article Written by :  Internet Marketing Showtime

There was a time when guest posting was a great way to get backlinks to your site. Some changes by Google made that less productive. However, if the
site was big enough, there was still enough benefit to go through the hard work and toil to write amazing content for another site. Sadly, it appears that the larger publishers have begun taking steps to limit that exposure, most likely to hoard PageRank.

The first tactic that publishers use is to add the nofollow tag to articles by guest authors. This denies a backlink to the author and preserves any inbound link authority for the publishing site. Fortunately, if the page generates enough traffic, there is still a link back to the author’s site.

The second and slightly more extreme tactic is to noindex the guest post. This means that only visitors to the site will find the article, as it will not appear in search engine results. This method was adopted by the Huffington Post recently.

The third method in use is the complete removal of any attribution on the page to the author. Instead, the author gets a profile page on the site which contains a link back to his page. The only thing a visitor would see is a byline that indicates who wrote the article which links to the profile.

It looks like these changes accomplish only one thing, which is to limit link authority and traffic to the publisher’s site.