{"id":1241,"date":"2018-04-07T12:42:47","date_gmt":"2018-04-07T11:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cookywook.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1241"},"modified":"2018-04-07T12:42:47","modified_gmt":"2018-04-07T11:42:47","slug":"beware-the-guest-blog-post-invitation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cookywook.co.uk\/blog\/beware-the-guest-blog-post-invitation\/","title":{"rendered":"Beware the guest blog post invitation"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, this is basically just a heads-up about something that happened a while back. I could only find one or two other posts about this online, so I thought I’d write it up in case it helped anyone else. If you don’t manage a blog or website, this might not be very relevant for you – but you might find it interesting anyway.<\/p>\n

Last September I got an email from someone asking if they could do a “guest post” on my blog. Naturally, I was very excited! The idea of someone thinking my blog was interesting enough that they’d want to contribute themselves was really cool. It was the first time someone had been in touch, and it felt like a thrilling opportunity to get some good exposure. But something was amiss.<\/p>\n

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For starters, they hadn’t used my name in the email. Oh well, that’s understandable. People are pretty busy, and maybe we’ve got past the point of needing to use, like, introductions in emails and things. Straight to business, that’s fine with me.<\/p>\n

But then, thinking about this, I also noticed they hadn’t referenced\u00a0anything<\/em> to do with me or my blog. Not even like “I saw your post about\u00a0x<\/em>“. Also the content they were suggesting didn’t seem a natural fit for my site. I write essays about Shrek and the Simpsons, under the general umbrella of what I call “cultural artifacts”. A blog about identity theft didn’t seem super relevant to my audience.<\/p>\n

The author was from a site called\u00a0culturecoverage.com.\u00a0<\/strong>Checking out the site, the content there seems harmless enough. Nothing very different or exciting, but it was a real website that had real writers. What was going on?<\/p>\n

Suspicious, I checked out the example blog posts in the email. They all seemed above board. Pretty generic filler content you’d get on any entry-level blog about technology. If this was some kind of scam, I couldn’t see the end game.<\/p>\n

So instead, I Googled to see where this blogger had already written reviews as a guest on other people’s sites. It turned out quite a few people had taken the blogger up on their invitation, enthusiastically introducing them, seemingly as thrilled as I was to have someone offering to come and provide some content on their site.<\/p>\n

And, again, the blogs seemed pretty innocuous. They were things like:<\/p>\n