Guest blogging is a powerful way to build links and generate traffic to your website. However, as for any other link-building technique, you need to be careful with it.
There have been many serious changes in the world of SEO connected to guest blogging this year. The head of Google’s Webspam Team, Matt Cutts, says it should be done in moderation if you want to avoid being blacklisted.
So, what now? The only purpose of guest blogging so far was to build links and juice traffic to your website. Even if you follow all the rules of link building and create valuable content, you cannot make enough links to rank high in search results, at least not in the first three or four months. Is this still an affordable investment?
The answer to that question is (epic drumroll) – YES! Google has held on to the same ideology since the late 90’s – provide people with relevant information from relevant people. Over the past decade, Google has launched a great number of updates to their search algorithms in order to distinct relevant information from common spam. However, many SEO specialists have followed them all through and have always found loopholes on how to manipulate links and harvest SERPs. With its latest search algorithm (Hummingbird), Google has taken the definition of spam to a whole new level.
How will this affect your business?
Guest blogging has always been the greatest way of natural link building and probably the most successful way of online promotion. In order to work for you, not against you, you need follow all the rules and be informed of all trends, changes and updates.
In order to achieve the perfect balance without overdoing it, you need to focus on a long-tail campaign. Now, every business website needs to have a blog implemented and regularly updated. It is by default that you will link your product/service from your website in it. The article you are posting will be used to inform your visitors about the specific product/service that you are selling. However, if you are guest posting the article, you should avoid putting an affiliate link in it (a link to your product/service page) on a blog relevant to your niche. It is for the best that you use a link that leads to a blog post on your website as a source or a link relevant to your guest post. This way, you will not gain high ranks fast, but you may be certain that you will be in a constant rise and will never have to fear of penalties. Google sees this as the most natural way of link building and it greatly rewards it.
So what changed?
The rules are the same, but the game has changed. Keep your content high quality and relevant, write for the readers – not for machines. Hummingbird is a semantic based search algorithm. It reads through your content by connecting successive sentences, even whole paragraphs.
The article you are using to generate a link to your website, must be not only well-written, but it also must be relevant to both your website and the category of the website you are posting it on. For instance, if you are writing about online marketing and include a link for buying online marketing services you shouldn’t by any chance post it on a home improvement blog even if it has thousands of pageviews a day.
Buying a link on highly visited blogs will only bring trouble. Paid links are easy to distinguish from the natural ones by Google crawlers. Paid links now present a great threat to your future rankings in search results and this should be avoided at all costs. There were rumors among some SEO specialists that some companies have paid thousands of dollars for a single backlink! Many people have tried to manipulate their ranks by paying links and now, they have ended up with severe negative aftereffects.
Exact anchor texts are punishable if not related to the content. Do not try to manipulate search results by making a link around the keyword you are competing for – it will sink you to the bottom of the abyss. Google Ads and Keyword Planner are to be used for that – not guest posts. It will most certainly decrease your rank in search results and penalties for it are hard to recover from.
Since linking from content is not allowed on many high-ranked blogs, many people were using their author byline to link their or their client’s website. This was highly popular and exploited over the past few years – people could even use exact anchor texts in order to generate a backlink. Do not put it in the author byline unless you are a contributor to the same. Google is using your author bio on other websites to verify your Google+ account. If you are using links that you are not related to, you will never gain authorship.