Importance of Guestbooks in SEO

Search engine optimization is nowadays more important than ever and it is necessary for every webmaster to understand the true meaning of SEO as well as the potential it creates for every business.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization or SEO in short, is a set of rules that can be followed by website (or blog) owners to optimize their websites for search engines and thus improve their search engine rankings.

In addition, it is a great way to increase the quality of your web site by making it user- friendly, faster and easier to navigate.

SEO can also be considered as a framework since the whole process has a number of rules (or guidelines), a number of stages and a set of controls

What is Guestbook?

Talking about Guestbooks in 2019 is like talking about en era. We all remember the 90’s when internet was growing in the world. People were getting attracted towards internet and Guestbooks were one of the platforms for people to share, talk and interact with others. But it was spammed badly but few "spammers" who believe in short cuts. Most of the guest books are spammed by people by sharing multiple or spam links.

If you are willing to have a guestbook on your web then first you have to learn about GDPR and adjust your website policy on data collection. After making the changes you can include one.

How to use Guestbooks:

If you are willing to use one then you can try to search the guestbook by typing

Keyword + "sign * guestbook"

site:.com (it could be any extension) + inurl:guestbook (Refer the screenshot below)

You will get some guestbooks to sign. You can practice and then integrate one in your website.

Use of guestbooks for SEO

It was one of the best option in 90’s to get better SEO results but since 1990 the algorithm of search engines is changed completely. So It is just a technique with is not must to have. It doesn’t create any effect on your SEO score or SEO strategy in 2018. But if you wanted to use it wisely for collecting data and feedback then you can still use it.

Link Popularity and the Myth of the Guestbook Link

Link popularity is crucial for your pages to rank well in search engines, but the value of guestbook links is questionable, at best, and potentially lethal, at worst.

You have probably been to a site that had a section called a "Guestbook." Many sites ask you to "sign their guestbook," and many of these guestbooks also permit HTML code in the guestbook comments, meaning you or I or anyone can visit guestbooks on web sites all day long and systematically create links back to our sites from hundreds of other site’s guestbooks.

Naturally, some web marketers (probably the ones that think exit pop-ups are useful) think that by signing guestbooks and adding links by the hundreds they will improve their link popularity scores at search engines.

Before you get excited and do a Google search on the phrase "sign in to our guestbook" (1.9 million BTW) and head off like a link monkey, here’s my take on the whether guestbook links are valid, ignored, or penalized, and if they have any impact on the success of a web site’s link popularity.

Guestbook links are really no different than FFA (Free For All) links, if you think about it. FFA pages are pages where a link can be obtained by anyone (even a script) without human intervention, meaning no person even looks to see if the requesting site has any decent content.

Such link lists are obviously useless. Ask yourself when was the last time you went to a FFA link list to find a useful web site. How about never?

And since any site owner could do the same thing — sign a thousand guestbooks — how much credibility can such links truly have? None. If I run a site that sells snake oil I can spend my days signing the guestbooks of the best sites on the web and leech some link popularity from them? Nope.

The real question here is do search engines know about this scam yet, or do they count guestbook links as additional links for poplarity rankings? My hunch is that since guestbook links are not in any way an indication of content quality, then they do not matter at all.

Hi, I am Martini i am basically a freelance content writer and have published many articles in magazines.