It’s a wonderful feeling when someone writes to you and they ask if they can publish a guest blog post on your site.

Why do I say that?

There are a number of reasons:

1. It means I have a break from having to create a blog post myself

2. I and my readers get to find out about a new blogger and a different perspective on the subject of the blog post

3. The guest blogger hopefully gets some new visitors to this site

4. The guest blogger gets some link love from my site and I feel I’m helping them

However before I accept the guest post I do have some rules/guidelines:

1. The post must be a minimum of 400 words. Anything less than 400 words makes it harder to optimise the post for SEO.

2. The post must be unique, original and not be published anywhere else on the Internet… especially important with the latest Google algorithm changes.

3. You agree not to publish the post anywhere else (i.e. on your own blog or as a guest post in other blogs). You can refer to the guest post from your blog, if you wish. This point is connected to the point above as I want the guest post to be unique and original.

4. You can include up to two links in your bio, which will be displayed at the bottom of the post. I think two links is generous enough and the links should be linked to non-sales type pages/websites.

5. A guest post must be grammatically correct and on a subject which is relevant to my blog.

6. The guest blogger agrees to come back and reply to all comments.

So these are my reasons for feeling good when another blogger would like to publish a guest post here.

And my rules/guidelines are pretty standard.

This is what normally happens:

1. I get the e-mail from the prospective guest blogger asking if they can publish a guest post on my site.

2. I reply saying, “of course”…pointing out the rules/guidelines.

3. I receive the guest post and I check for uniqueness using CopyScape. 99 times out of a 100 the post is unique.

4.  Sometimes there are some small changes required to the grammar which I change.

5. I tell the guest blogger when the guest post will be published and can they please respond to all comments.

6. I publish and provide a link to the guest post for the guest blogger… again reminding them to respond to all comments.

7. The guest blogger responds to the comments.

We all live happily ever after.

However sometimes the guest blogger is nowhere to be seen when it comes to replying to the comments.

I think the guest blogger is losing out by ignoring the comments.

Their reputation as a blogger and authority is at stake, don’t you think?

So what do I do in these situations?

Do I remove the post?

Do I just remove the links in the bio so my blog still get gets the SEO benefits of the published post?

Do I ignore it and let it be?

What would you do?

I would really love to see your comments.

Please share your views in the comments below.