What Is Guest Blogging and Link Building?

What Is Guest Blogging?

Briefly, guest blogging means publishing content on other websites. It’s a common practice in digital marketing and it can work very well as a tool for SEO because you can include a link back to your website. In turn, this can have a positive influence on your search engine rankings.

What’s Wrong with Guest Blogging?

Within Google’s guidelines, there’s nothing wrong with guest blogging. According to HubSpot, 53% of marketers say blog creation is their top inbound marketing priority. So it would take a pretty blunt announcement from Google before we can safely say guest blogging is a no-go.

The issues stem from bad practice and misuse. Because of the potential SEO benefit of guest blogs, people have overly used the technique. This means that Google has voiced their concerns to the community on more than one occasion to make it clear on what they consider to be good practice.

In his statement back in 2014, Matt Cutts said that guest blogging had become “overused by a bunch of low-quality, spammy sites”. He clearly criticised guest posts that are written purely for quick links to manipulate Google’s algorithm to drive rankings, rather than for writing for people and adding value.

Meanwhile, Google’s warning in 2017 didn’t suggest stopping writing guest posts altogether. You can benefit significantly from publishing high-quality content that reaches out to readers, not just search engines. It’s imperative to follow Google’s webmaster guidelines on link schemes and not abuse the system.

How to Ethically Approach Guest Blogging

The most important thing to remember when creating content for other sites is that you are doing it for more than a link. You are aiming to educate and add value to your target audience. That should be the primary objective of guest blogging. A link back and any clicks from the blog to your site should be secondary. Taking this approach will help keep you in the realms of ethical practice and within Google’s guidelines. I mean, why would you want to contribute a quality guest blog to a terrible site that doesn’t receive any traffic?

Here are a few tips to help keep you on the straight and narrow with guest blogging.

1. Only Write for Trustworthy and Relevant Sites

On the surface, look for sites that are easy to use, with lots of well-written content already on them. It’s also important to look under the hood before submitting a guest post: think traffic, links, and visibility.

Use SEMrush to see a good estimate of how much traffic a guest blogging website receives. Good websites get lots of traffic. While you’re there, look at the backlink profile. Moz’s Domain Authority metric can be deceiving, so don’t solely rely on it to determine whether the guest posting site website is quality. So, check out the backlink profile using Ahrefs or Moz’s Open Site Explorer. Finally, is the guest blogging website visible in Google’s search engine results pages? Use search operator site:domain.com in Google to find out for yourself. If Google hasn’t indexed the website, there’s a reason for that; so avoid them.

In addition to the above, make sure that the sites you write for focus on a similar topic or industry to yours. This will ensure relevance and means that you’re also reaching the right audience with your content.

So, where can you find quality guest blogging opportunities? The first point of call is your page one competitors. Use backlink auditor tools such as Ahrefs to identify links from guest blogs that have contributed to helping them climb to page one of Google. From there, use Google search operators such as keyword “contribute” and use Buzzstream’s prospecting tool to scan for opportunities.

Take the time to look at this definitive guide to guest blogging from Backlinko!

2. Only Write for Sites Where Content Is Curated

This could fall under the point above, but it’s important enough to warrant its own. Much like adding listings to online directories, make sure that humans moderate guest blog content. If websites allow you to upload content with no questions asked, that’s a big red flag. Only write for websites where you know content is carefully reviewed before publication, to ensure it’s quality. Look out for clearly displayed contact details too, as this is a good indication that the business is legitimate.

3. Don’t Abuse Anchor Text

Avoid using exact match keywords as your anchor text for every link you get from guest posts. While anchor text still has a direct influence on rankings, it’s important to maintain a natural and varied anchor text profile from external links.

For example, if you’ve relied on guest blogging too much and this has resulted in a high proportion of exact match anchor text such as “paint suppliers”, you could be in trouble. Use tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush to get a handle on your anchor text profile and maintain a balanced anchor text ratio of a combination of branded and commercial.

4. Don’t Keyword Stuff and Keep Your Audience in Mind

Write for people, not search engine bots! Set out to provide truly useful information to readers. This also means Google won’t see your content as unnatural and written specifically to dodge their guidelines.

5. Don’t Mass Produce, and Repurpose Content with Caution

Google’s warning in 2017 specifically targeted large-scale article campaigns. This ties in with a spammy tactic called article spinning. This process involves tweaking and editing parts of a post in an effort to have it published on multiple sites. While repurposing content you have written previously for a different audience is fine, it’s not to take that piece of content and rewrite it over, and over again. It’s safer and likely to get you sustainable results if you write original guest blog content that adds value to your target audience.