The Guest Posting Hype
Right now there is a lot of hype about whether or not guest posting is an ethical method of backlinking. Many have been using this tactic for years and will for years to come. The issues aren’t with the tactic itself, it’s the person writing them and guiding them. You need to know how to write and submit a guest post in an ethical manner.
What Happened In The Past
How many of you remember the website BuildMyRank? Do you remember the irrelevant 200 word blog posts that were submitted to websites with the intent to solely gain a backlink to rank a keyword? Well this is what is happening again. After Google slapped everyone for using methods like this, everyone got very worried and ran as far as they could from this method. It’s not that this method stopped working; it’s just that Google caught everyone doing it.
What Is Now Happening Again
Many people are subconsciously reverting back to the blog post style that they once used and some are just still using it. They are submitting a low quality keyword optimized article to a guest post website and websites are allowing others to submit it. Let’s face it, it cost more money and time now to write a great quality article than it did to write a keyword optimized article a year ago. Most think because they stopped writing 200 word articles and started to write 500 word articles it will save them. This is very untrue. Just because you write a longer article doesn’t mean that it’s quality. Many people use highly promotional and keyword optimized articles that will do nothing for them at the end of the day except waste their time.
Can Guest Posting Get You Penalized
The answer to this question is yes. Guest posts can certainly get you penalized in many ways if you’re not careful. You must use them in an ethical manner. Below are some of the ways that you can still get penalized using guest posts. I am not suggesting that just 1 method can get you penalized; I feel it’s a combination of them all. These are however the same principles that apply to all marketing methods used.
- Low quality keyword optimized articles.
- Using just your anchor text and not linking out to any other authority websites.
- Using your anchor texts to many times in the same article.
- Not using enough words in a guest post. Writing 200 – 300 or so words won’t cut it anymore.
- Submitting your guest posts to low quality spam websites.
- Building to the same keyword to many times and not others. The overuse of the same keyword isn’t natural and will do nothing, but help penalize your site.
- Never place your anchor text in the first paragraph of your article.
- Writing your guest post in a promotional manner will never help you ever. Don’t write something that is all about your website, this isn’t a natural link to your site if you are writing it. Let others write about it. Google doesn’t like fake reviews about your company and whether it’s a guest post or not, it’s just a fancy review of your company if your writing it in a promotional manner.
This list could go on, but they are much smaller and technical reasons on how you could get penalized and what you shouldn’t do.
A Great Template For A Guest Post
At this point your probably a bit confused and asking, so how do I write a guest post in an ethical manner? This isn’t going to show all of the ways, but this will point out a few methods that work great.
- Link to authority websites such as a dictionary, Forbes, Google, Yahoo, etc..
- Analyze the website you’re about to post on. Use Moz’s SEO tools to analyze the sites domain authority and backlinks. Check the age of the website and make sure it’s at least 1 year old. Check the page rank of the website, not for quality or authority purposes, but this will indicate whether or not the website is penalized or banned. Often websites that have heavy penalties will have their page ranks revoked from them for black hat tactics.
- Make your article interesting and write something others can engage in. Don’t make your guest post promotional.
- Use plenty of images, videos, and info graphics if you have them.
- Only link to your website one time throughout your full article
- Make sure your article has a minimum of 550 words not including your byline.
- Proofread your articles to make sure the flow of the article makes sense.
Below is a great template for writing a guest post. This can obviously be edited pending on many factors, but this is the minimum I feel everyone should have.
Title of the guest post
Header – Make this relevant to the paragraph
Paragraph – Add a picture if you can that is relevant.
Header – Make this relevant to the paragraph
Paragraph – Add a picture if you can that is relevant and link to an authority website
Header – Make this relevant to the paragraph
Paragraph – Add a picture if you can that is relevant and link to an authority website
Header – Make this relevant to the paragraph
Paragraph – Add a picture if you can that is relevant and link to an authority website
Byline – this is where you should have something about yourself, or whoever wrote the article. Let others know why you’re qualified to write the article your writing. Tell them where you worked and a bit about yourself. According to the MyBlogGuest this is the best spot for an anchor text to be placed on a page.
So as you can see it’s much more complicated than just saying yes or no, there is a lot that goes with answering why it’s ethical or unethical. I would highly suggest getting yourself or your company a great writer. A great writer can make all the difference when others or possibly even Google’s review team is analyzing your article.
Don’t take the road everyone has already been down, take the road that on one has been down that will lead you to a journey where no one has been.