How to Deal With Poor Quality Guest Posts

by Ashvin Sawmynaden · 1 comment

in Tips For Webmasters

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While most people automatically think that guest blogging is hard only for the writers and that webmasters have an easy ride, this is not completely true. Although it is true that writers actually need to do all the effort of creating the content and writing quality posts, webmasters also need to do some work. Obviously, this involves reading the content and deciding if it’s worthy to be published.

In other cases, they may need to do some editing before they can actually publish the article. In such instances, it can be difficult determining what level of editing would be acceptable to the writer. Too much editing could indeed annoy the writer who may request for his or her article to be deleted from the webmaster’s blog. Although this may not sound such a big deal, burning your bridges with a good writer would be a huge mistake.

Unfortunately, as a webmaster willing to publish guest posts on a website, you will always need to reject posts from aspiring writers. These rejections can be for various reasons such as poor grammar and spelling, off-topic posts, vulgarity, linking back to dodgy websites, to name only a few. Although you can personally do some editing in the case of poor grammar and spelling to make the article ready for publication, you do not want to waste too much time doing so. You could indeed have used that time spent on editing writing a brand new blog post yourself.

When you need to reject a guest post, keep in mind that you are also dealing with an individual. As such, you need to know how to inform that writer that you cannot accept his article. You may be tempted to just ignore him or send him a nasty email after a long day at the office, but this could really hurt your own reputation. It is instead much better to take the time to send him a proper email and to tell him that you unfortunately cannot publish his post. The author will no doubt appreciate that and, although you may not have deemed his content good enough, you will very probably get a regular visitor to your blog.

You can also give some feedback to the author when you inform him that you will not be posting his article. This is obviously not something you must always absolutely do, but you should grab the opportunity if you actually have the time to do so. This will allow the writer to improve and he may even contribute a terrific article to your blog after he has improved.

Lastly, unless someone is consciously spamming you, it is always a bad idea to make fun of someone’s guest post on your blog. You run the risk of alienating your visitors and of essentially burying your own blog. Keep in mind that English is not everybody’s first language and that the writer may have gone to a lot of effort to write his article.

Ashvin Sawmynaden is a blogger from Mauritius who writes on several blogs such as the famous Ile Maurice spa and hotel Paradise Cove website and the relatively new Mauritius Paintings Rosy Ferrara blog.

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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

1 Guest Blogging | Kira June 10, 2011 at 8:45 am

Poor quality guest post would bring your search engine rank down especially in Google. I believe it’s gonna be the job of the blog owner to check strictly each guest post article.

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