A guest post is an article that an outside person or company writes for another website or blog. It usually carries an author line and a short bio. In SEO it is one way to reach a new audience and to earn a link back to your own site.
What is a guest post for?
Marketers name three goals. They want to reach readers who do not know the brand, to build a name as an expert on a topic, and to get a link in the author bio or text. The links that publishers allow vary. Some set nofollow, some link without a qualifier. Semrush notes that selling links violates Google’s guidelines and that guest posts as such are acceptable.
Publishers look for original ideas, a fit with their audience and their style guidelines. A common route is to pitch a topic by email before writing the full article.
Guest posts and Google’s link spam rule
Google’s spam policies list links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases that are distributed on other sites as link spam. Paid articles with links that pass ranking credit are on the same list. If you pay for a post with a link, Google says to qualify the link with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".
A guest post that a publication accepts on editorial grounds, without payment and without optimized anchor text, does not appear in that list.
Example
A logistics company writes a trade article about supply chains for an industry magazine. The magazine accepts it without payment, names the author with a short bio, and links to the company’s website using the company name as link text.
FAQ
Are guest posts allowed by Google? Google does not forbid guest posts. It names distributed guest posts with optimized anchor text and paid placements with ranking-credit links as link spam.
Should guest post links be nofollow? If the placement is paid, Google asks for sponsored or nofollow. For editorial placements the publisher decides.
Sources
- Spam policies for Google web search (link spam) – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Qualify your outbound links to Google – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
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