Quality Control a Must When Accepting Guest Posts

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DragonBlogger.com has always been a site open to guest bloggers and writers and will remain that way in the future. Recently, I noticed many requests from people to submit guest articles on DragonBlogger.com and I always have one primary policy and that is to make sure content is of decent quality, topic is on point for my audience and an article submitted to DragonBlogger.com is unique and original.

I specify that the article should pass Plagiarism Checker scan, but recently I admit I wasn’t as thorough checking a few guest articles as a result of my busy work and holiday schedules. This lead me to find that one article I published on behalf of a guest author turned up on 6 other sites when I did a random scan with Plagiarism Checker. It was the same article verbatim, and I knew the sites weren’t just feeding in my article but that the author pitched the same article to several other sites.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not ignorant of the fact that many companies or people will contact your site (especially if it is above a PR0) and ask to host a guest article in exchange for including a link or two in the article. In many cases these are writers who are paid to put “articles” on as many sites as possible that met the advertisers criteria at the time. I see jobs like this all the time on Freelancer.com and various forums and it is just another way people try to make some money on the internet by publishing articles on a variety of sites for a per site fee or per job fee.

I am not even opposed to this or bother for the most part as Sponzai which is a guest blog program by Izea has a similar idea where an advertiser writes one “promotion” type post for a product or service and then this same “guest post” is published on all blogs that are approved and apply for the sponsored opp. When it comes to promoting a product or service and making sure you have a consistent image or a press statement of some such it is important that information is duplicated to avoid incorrect interpretation in some cases.

What I don’t really like is an author claiming an article is original and will pass Plagiarism Checker only to find out that it doesn’t, I made the mistake of taking it at someones word which I rarely do but again I get about 10 guest posts per month and I don’t publish all of them. The one thing I couldn’t figure it is how to check an article against Plagiarism Checker without publishing it first? Then I realized this feature is only available from Premium Plagiarism Checker at a cost of 5 cents per search.

So for 5 cents you can cut/paste the code the guest poster sent you without having to put it in your blog and publish it first. The other think you could do is create a sandbox or dev blog like I have and publish guest articles there, run Plagiarism Checker against them before you publish them on your “real” blog. This takes extra time but if you really are trying to avoid the 5 cents you can do this, I find the extra time involved is more than the 5 cents however.

I highly recommend in addition to reading a guest article for quality control you also make sure the article is original by running it through Plagiarism Checker or some other service that checks for duplicate content on the web. I obviously don’t do this for my site writers or guest bloggers who I know stand for quality, but generally if someone contacts you about a guest post and you don’t know them or this is their first guest post this is a good idea.

Don’t make my mistake and get lax, or else you might find quality suffering on a site and remember that reputation is key. My own site had one of my long time readers complain about quality on an article which made me realize I need to take a tougher stand on guest posters and be more diligent on quality control.

Update:

If you want to create a sandbox subdomain and make sure it isn’t listed or indexable you need the following 2 files setup like this:

robots.txt
——————–BEGIN FILE———————————–
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
——————–END FILE———————————–

.htaccess
——————–BEGIN FILE———————————–
Options All -Indexes
——————–END FILE———————————–

-Dragon Blogger

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.