Top 10 Google-Friendly Guest Posting Guidelines for Digital Marketers

I have covered all the important points which should be taken care of in guest posting, along with the benefit of guest posting and some grey areas.

What all SEO’s, online marketers, inbound marketers, and webmasters must ask themselves is “How do I perform Google-friendly guest blog posting?”

Here Are My Top 10 Tips To Ensure Your Guest Posts Are “Google-friendly”

1. Only write and publish high-quality guest posts that benefit the reader.
2. There is no redundant content.
3. The post must be on a relevant blog with the same theme/topic/industry as the site that is getting the backlink.
4. Don’t label your post as a guest post.
5. Don’t use guest posting as your only link source to your website.
6. Use blogs that don’t‘sell links’; this is easily noticed by looking at the sidebar or footer and checking if there are irrelevant keyword-rich anchor text links on the homepage.
7. Another trick is to ask the webmaster to buy a paid link, and if they make you an offer, don’t upload your guest post there.
8. For a start, check for actual social activity (and engagement in that activity) from real people on places like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This is also a great way to get your guest post published if you can reach out to the webmaster via some of their active social media and engage them personally.
9. Ensure the site has visitor engagement – check comments on blog posts.
10. Check the quality of writing in other posts on the blog and ensure that new posts are uploaded frequently. Make the single link to your website from the author’s bio area with non-spammy anchor text and have other links (both internal and external) come from within the body of the post.

Is Guest Posting Safe in Search Engine Optimization?

I see guest blog posts as being in the grey area of SEO. It can be done as a white-hat SEO method by merely putting up quality content with no intention of gaining link juice from a specific blog. Or we can do it in a very spammy way by paying for blogs to be uploaded with low-quality content using anchor text-rich hyperlinks to pass page rank from one irrelevant site to the destination site. The guest posts are written with high quality and relevant to the blog, but they are still written with the explicit intention of passing page rank, which is not allowed according to Google’s user guidelines. Google’s rules (aka Google’s guidelines) have made it clear that guest blogging is not 100% clean SEO because SEOs utilise it for link juice and sometimes pay for posts. If you only use high-quality, relevant blogs and do not pay for posts, you are walking on a fine line of guest posting, and hence you fall within the grey area I am speaking about. Being within the grey area means that, currently, Google will not punish your website.

In the end, Google eventually succeeds in punishing the grey area and brings everyone back to the white or extreme black hat SEO techniques. Those are the only two options. This is what Google has successfully done time and time again with its algorithm changes.

Is Guest Posting Still a Usable SEO Strategy?

A point of interest is that, in my opinion, Google can’t algorithmically punish guest blog posts that are created to “pass PageRank” or “link juice” that is placed on relevant and non-spammy blogs. An algorithm won’t tell if a blog post has quality and has no intention of passing PageRank if a few basic rules are followed. It is also essential that the post be authored by an actual (or fictitious) person with an active social profile, which it uses to “know” if someone exists. This only leaves Google to use manual actions. Using many employees to police the web manually isn’t financially viable for Google. Hence, only extreme cases would get a manual punishment.

Final Words

I suggest all SEOs perform quality control and be picky before guest blogging. Plus, don’t overuse this linking option; it should be just one of the plethora of sources of links that Google says are essential. In the future, I know that guest blogging may not be considered acceptable by Google, but it is still valid right now.

Don’t jeopardise your results by being too clean when there is no need to be. The grey is fine for now, and make sure you’re not overusing this technique.