Latest On the Blog
In today's blog post, we'll explore "ethics creep" in the writing community, why it matters, and how we can all avoid amplifying it.
Are Unethical Competitors Affecting Your Business?
This week's blot post was inspired by a conversation with Peter Bowerman relating to professional ethics in the writing community.
It also ties nicely to last week's post over on Freelance Writing Pros, where I shared a detailed look at how freelance writers can use SEMrush for competitive research.
In that post, I mentioned that I've used tools like SEMrush (also Moz, ahrefs, etc.) to find competitors, including fellow freelance writers, engaging in black hat SEO to gain an unfair advantage when it comes to building search visibility.
Why Awareness of Black Hat Competitors Matters
I know some freelance writing colleagues don't like to think much about SEO, but if you're ignoring it, you're leaving leads on the table.
And if you don't know what competitors are doing to some degree, you can be frozen out of search results that could drive those warm leads your way.
Here are just a few examples of black hat SEO tactics services like SEMrush can help you identify:
- Competitors buying links to manipulate search rankings
- Large-scale link exchanges
- Competitors engaging in other link schemes like using link networks (or hiring an unethical SEO rep to do this on their behalf)
- Competitors running negative SEO campaigns against you
Today, let's take a look at that last one and what you can do about one of the most common types of negative SEO campaigns you might come up against.
What is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO is when someone intentionally tries to damage your website's search engine rankings.
Here are some ways they might do that:
- Submit your site's link to a lot of spammy sites.
- Republish your content to numerous other sites in the hopes of seeing you hit with duplicate content penalties (not as big a risk as it used to be).
- Hit your site with an injection attack to insert spammy links across your site so Google will devalue your content (less likely, but these can be tough to clean up).
- Leave negative reviews about your services, or publishing negative content about you on third-party sites in an attempt to outrank your own site and poison your reputation.
For freelance writers, the type of negative SEO you're most likely to come across from competitors would be the first example: them rapidly building bad backlinks to your website using spammy link networks.
And with a tool like SEMrush or the others I mentioned above, this is a type of unethical competitive behavior you can easily discover.
How?
Run backlink reports on your own site and look for any peaks in new links being found.
If you see a spike in your charts that doesn't correspond to legitimate link-building you've done, then you know to dig into those backlinks further.
By looking into IPs of the sites, how and when they were set up, etc., you can sometimes piece together who's behind them (though it's not necessary in most cases).
Not all spammy backlinks come from negative SEO campaigns from competitors. For instance, some massive networks of "top sites" websites create spammy links to thousands of domains on a single IP address.
But no matter how they showed up in your backlink profile, you'll want to make sure these bad backlinks don't negatively impact you.
How can you do that?
Submit the URLs or domains for those bad backlinks to Google in a disavow file. SEMrush makes it easy to identify and audit questionable backlinks, and it will even create a disavow file for you after you audit your links.
Be careful with this. You don't want to disavow legitimate links in the process. If you'd like to learn more about how to disavow links, here's a post you might be interested in from SEMrush: How to Disavow Links.
Changes Coming to the Job Board
Over the next couple of weeks, there will be a change to the All Freelance Writing job board I want to make you aware of.
Hear me out on this though. It shouldn't affect your experience much, if at all.
What's the Change?
Currently I require all jobs to disclose a pay rate range. This is something that's long set this job board apart from traditional ones, and in a broader sense, it's a policy I would have preferrred to keep.
However, in the next week or two I'm going to start allowing undisclosed pay rate gigs to be posted to to the job board.
But...
The existing pay rate categories will remain.
I am building new filtering options into it (similar to the writer directory), so you will still be able to filter out all undisclosed pay rate gigs if you want to.
I will also add filters for the different rate ranges similar to how they're set up for the job email subscription options.
You'll actually end up with more control over what you see on the job board.
No changes are being made to job email subscriptions.
That means people subscribed to receive all jobs under the current system will still only receive all jobs with disclosed pay rates.
I'm not forcing anyone to see these new jobs if they don't want them.
Instead, there will be a new job email subscription option that will send you all jobs, including the new ones without disclosed pay rates.
Why am I Making This Change?
One of the biggest complaints I hear about the job board is there aren't enough leads.
That's the harsh reality of limits like this. Most gigs advertised don't disclose pay (as much as I personally feel they all should).
This makes it tough when I curate leads. I can't force anyone to disclose pay elsewhere, and sometimes it can go days (or longer) without seeing decent job ads with disclosed pay to share with you.
The new policy will enable me to share more freelance writing leads.
This means there will be new jobs posted more consistently.
For the ones I curate, I'll aim for leads that look like they're appropriate (if a project sounds scammy, spammy, or like it's going to pay peanuts, I won't include that in curated leads).
The new policy will also better support All Freelance Writing.
By putting strict limits on the gigs that can be posted to All Freelance Writing's job board, I've also spent years severely limiting how much the job board can help financially support the site.
I've never wanted All Freelance Writing to become a membership site or "product pusher" site - constantly requiring readers to spend more money.
Instead, I designed the site to monetize primarily through optional add-ons like profiles and through non-writer payments such as job advertisers and ad networks to support the curated listings. It's been a good policy for a long time, but it's hit a ceiling under current limitations.
By enabling a wider variety of job listings, that will allow the job board to better account for the time and resources managing and growing the site requires.
So, in short, this job board change will:
- bring you more leads;
- help financially support the continued growth of All Freelance Writing and its collection of content and resources.
What won't change is your ability to quickly glance at the job board and see jobs in rate ranges that appeal to you. And the new filters will give you more control over how you view job listings than ever before.
There's one more ad-related change coming as a result of this.
Because this change is part of an effort to better support the site with minimal impact on readers directly, I'm also going to adjust in-content ad policies.
Right now, you generally see ads in All Freelance Writing content only in specialty cases (like an affiliate promotion post, which aren't frequent here), or if you visit a blog post directly from a search engine or third party link.
If you come to the site directly or via my social media links, you don't see those ads. If you visit a post after visiting another page on this site, you also don't see those ads. The idea was always to show them to one-time visitors, but avoid showing them to regulars.
Because the job board should make up the difference before long, over the next week or two I'm also going to fully remove the contextual ads (from Google's Adsense network) from all blog posts for all visitors.
Those ads will still appear in other areas of the site for now, such as the main job board page and in curated job listings (they're not in job listings advertisers have paid for).
I know that's a lot of information, but I wanted to keep you in the loop rather than springing these changes on you without notice.
I also know not everyone will be happy, but my aim is to give you greater options and greater control while also being able to justify spending more time creating tools and content to help you build a successful freelance writing business.
You'll be able to find more details on the site (such as how the new filters will work) as soon as the changes are made.
Happy writing!
Jenn
