If a page rank 6 technology blog has a post about mens’ dress shirts (and a clean link out to the shirt guy) are you telling me the engines are going to penalize the link? I don’t buy it. That would contradict the whole premise of page rank, which is Google’s determination of the value (and implicit trust) of the host blog page.

A straight link out of a highly rank page gets juice. A link from a lowly page doesn’t matter. The rest is just arrhythmic long tail.

Not trying to bust your balls or anything but you should have thought that one through a bit more.

Let me just say you would never catch me guest posting on a blog about men’s fashion. Being as I’m an SEO. ;-) It just doesn’t make sense.

Links from high-PR websites, regardless of relevance add SEO power to your website.

Consider the logic this way…. the President recommends you purchase Steaks from the Butcher on Lexington St. You, and whoever else received the message would take that as a positive referral. Obama isn’t a Steak expert (well, maybe he is, but let’s say he wasn’t), but because he’s an ‘authority’ figure you’d be more trusting of the Butcher on Lexington.

Same case here. SEJ is an authority in cyberspace, specifically in SEO, but because SEJ is an authority, the link I receive from SEJ is like a positive referral to Blank Label (in the eyes of Google), even though we’re in separate areas in cyberspace.

I mean, wouldn’t you love to have a backlink from a PR9 website, even if it’s content was about diapers? I’m fairly confident that you’d be more than ecstatic to have a website of that caliber linking to you, and that Google would see that as a positive ‘vote.’

I meant to write this post to stir up more critical thinking on the logic behind Google’s Search algo. While my points might not have the strongest arguments, they are a starter for deeper conversation.

Cheers,
Danny

#2 you were talking about yourself. LOL

the guest posts are not always on domains that are relevant to what your website is all about (i.e. im posting on an SEO website, when my company makes custom men’s dress shirts)

This post was written by Danny Wong the Lead Evangelist for Blank Label, a provider of custom dress shirts consumers design with Blank Label’s virtual dress shirt design app.

# Website Semantic Irrelevance – the guest posts are not always on domains that are relevant to what your website is all about (i.e. im posting on an SEO website, when my company makes custom men’s dress shirts)

Why the hell would you be posting on an SEO website if your company makes men’s dress shirts? Does anyone really do this?

That would be an example of irrelevance but I don’t think many intelligent bloggers would do this.

# It’s a Cheap Tactic – with good copy, and decent knowledge of a certain space, it’s not hard to guest post anywhere. Google may see this as a cheap tactic because of how easy it is for an SEO to guest post on a high-PR blog without that post being an unbiased editorial or mention of your company

I have to disagree 100% here. If a bloggers takes the time to write a quality piece of original content that is useful and relevant, that is hardly considered a cheap tactic and I doubt Google view this as a cheap tactic either.

# Duplicate Content Complications – the byline with your self-serving links might be seen as ‘duplicate content’ (if you copy and paste your signatures for guest posts) that was plugged into all these other websites, therefore devaluing the links’ power. But this can be easily resolved by creating a unique byline each time which takes little to no effor

This is a far shot. There is such a thing as duplicate content filter but there is no evidence I have ever seen that the same or similar byline takes away from the effectiveness of the link juice.