I received a client question in my email today that was great to do a video on, because I get this question a lot. So what happened was that someone went to my client's website and submitted a contact form. The client forwarded that form to me with this message: "Good morning, Rachel! I sometimes get requests like this. Do you see this as a worthwhile activity or a distraction? Thanks! " This is the contact form that was submitted. This is what it said: 

"Hi! I've learned so much about... blah blah blah blah. In that spirit, may I contribute a guest post to your website with blah blah blah?I can feature your website in that article as well. I think it would be a really helpful piece for your site visitors, and my offer is free! Thanks for reading! "  

When we get this, my first thing is, "What is in it for them? They took the time to seek out your site. They didn't reference anything about your site, and there is no reference to what they liked about it or what you're doing. So this is a pretty blanket message that they sent this on multiple sites, which means they're hunting for something, so I want to look and figure out what that is. And then I look at: Is the request going to help me at all? Is the request going to hurt me at all? And I take those data points to make a good decision. So I can tell you from my experience the reason why they sent this. 

What it does for them is, one, it gives them inbound links. If they write on your website, they can link out to their website, and that raises their organic SEO. So that's a good thing for them. The second good thing for them is that they can say that they've been featured on your website. So that is more credibility for them Another third reason is that any of your site visitors that you have rapport with, they have a relationship with you. When they see that person on your website, some of that relationship transfers through you to them. 

So, what happens in referrals is you have a relationship with someone and the person you trust refers you to someone, so you automatically have a little bit more trust in that person. So you'll need to be really careful who you refer to on your site, who is even posting on your site, or articles, because you are transporting some of your relationship and credibility on to that person  If this was someone who is a referral partner , let's say you're a real estate agent and this is your mortgage person and your mortgage person is giving information about mortgages, that's above and beyond what you do, so it's supplemental to you but not what you do, then that can be something different and that's something you guys can talk about the benefits of doing something like that. 

Having pages on your website that are directly related to a certain topic is a good thing. It raises SEO. If you're someone who needs to have those pages and you're not a content creator, then having outside people give content that is not in competition with you is a good idea. This client is a content creator. She creates the content, so there's no benefit for her. She's better off to write an article herself and have it SEO'd to that topic and be in her voice and how she wants to talk to clients and be the expert. She's better off to refer that client out. In this message it says: "I can feature your website in this article as well." 

That might sound good, but think about it: this article is already on your website, so there's no reason really to feature your website! Now, if this article was on their website and they linked out to you, then that would be an inbound link to you and that's a good thing, but that's not what this is. You'll also need to be careful about link trading, which means they link to you and you link to them. The reason why is that kind of null and voids it because Google realized a long time ago that people were just link trading. So they are careful of that now. They want someone who's a really good expert at what they do. Someone who can get a lot of organic traffic and people stay on the site, they read through it, and they don't go back and try to find other things on that topic. So that's why organic SEO is so important, and to have this variety of articles, but you don't want someone else to get credit for that based on the SEO of your site already has. 

She said my offer was free. Well, of course it is, because you're getting so much benefit from having this article on my site. When I get stuff like this, the question might be, try just to ignore it? NoReally look at it. See what it says, see what the intention is, because some people have really good intentions but they're not the best at writing these. There might be a good referral source to do this. So what I would do is go to this person's website and see if it's a referral partner, because if it is, you have an opening to connect back and say: "I wanted to know you better" or "I think  there might be some synergy here" and you could possibly create a referral partnership, but you won't know that until you really get to know the person and their intetions and their business. So before just chucking it out the window, it does take time, but it is worth it to do a little research on who this person is to see if there is future value that might be in there that you don't know at the time. 

Something else you might want to consider is never, ever, ever giving anyone the login information for your website. Sometimes before, I've seen things like this go through and the next email was great: "I have it written. Here it is, check it out. I know you're super busy. My programmer can put this on for you to make it super easy for you! So give me your login to your website and I can have limited editing capability and my programmer can do it. "Don't do it! Because they can go in and they can program anything in the background of that web page, so they can link out to other places. They could try to do a back-in link. They now have a login to your website, so you know, you never want to give out your login information for someone else to put an article or create a page on your site. 

You're better off having your programmer do it or hiring a programmer to do it. That's a really high-security risk, and I've seen people do it. Where they'll say, "Oh, I'm going to be your referral partner and I'll create this page on your site." Great, but let my team handle it. And if they start throwing a fit about it, then it's a really big red flag. So there you go. I answered that one in like 7 minutes! If you have any follow-up questions about anything else that I can answer for you, please let me know.