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I have recently said that guest posting as a link building strategy is not going to stay a safe route to building links, not in its current format with author bios for anchor text links anyway.
What does the community think?
I think there is a fragmentation on what is guest posting, i'm looking at guest posting from a referral traffic perspective so a very successful could reduce reliance on having to rank #1 for keyword... I think it's more similar to a modern day spin on performance marketing you produce good content and show yourself as an authority, people like your post and visit your company/product to learn more.
I don't think there will ever be a situation where publishing content on other websites is going to be completely devoid of value.
There may well be devaluing of exact match anchors in author bios, and links in author bios in general.
Having a natural link in the main body of the post may be the only way that guest posting brings value in the near future. If you're trying to post on a website that only accepts links in author bios then you might want to question the value of posting there in the first place.
I don't see the weight of the link being the issue. What matters is reaching a highly-engaged audience, the citation and the collateral sharing. If Google is moving more to recognizing brands and other entities, then one extra link pales in comparison to the other benefits.
Guest posting will always be an awesome strategy, so long as you're reaching an audience who cares via medium they care about. Tim Ferris nailed this with the 4-Hour Chef book launch - his write up as follows... http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2012/11/24/the-4-hour-chef-launch-summary-of-week-one/
At the end of the day, it's an algorithm we're constantly worrying about. Math. And math detects patterns.
The algo isn't going to devalue guest posts as whole, because guest posts as a whole aren't manipulative. What might be manipulative is the links, so they might get devalued. So, in order to avoid a devaluation or anything similar, simply link in a new way. As others have said before me, links in the middle of the post will definitely be OK. You might even lead off with the link at the top of the post like Problogger does with their guest posts.
Regardless, not concerned with guest posts as a whole (even though I don't use them much), just more so concerned with how exactly that link is being obtained from it.
So, an answer probably like most. They're in the clear as a whole.
Agree but also want to add the effectiveness depends on your competition. In some verticals your competitors might have crappy guest post and a good guest post might outweigh their crappy link building. Or what I have seen is a few good guest posts beating out hundreds of crappy links.
Thanks Jon for lighting on this area!
Quality content shared to a wider audience, will always have value. We still get traffic from guest posts submitted more than a year ago. We also welcome high quality guest posts from people who bring their own audience.
On the other hand, the practice of submitting low quality content written by someone without a true command of the English language, in the hopes of building links is a waste of time. The sites which will accept the content are probably not high quality sites with real readers, so what's the point.
No. It will be linked to author rank. And if anywhere on the page says: "guest blog" or "guest blogger" it will have a small penalty. Better to have regular authors on the site...
True, I hope AuthorRank has a positive impact on guest blogging as a strategy from a readers point of view.
I think that Author Rank is a way of "sorting out the cesspool" as Schmidth once described, if you take this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/dougkessler/crap-the-content-marketing-deluge and apply the author rank, it will be how Google will sort out the crap out of the content that's being produced. I wouldn't wonder if they crawl inbound and track the number of upvotes and connect it to specific author :)
Also, this is a way for google to tackle "long tail" explosion as they cannot discard their historical link profiles on shorter tail and brand-centric parts of algo. My 5c :)
It's a great way to build links, which means its going to be sold.
Once it's being sold (side note: it already is) then it's at a point where those links aren't "earned" in the utopian sense.
Right now, instead of buying links from blog posts, you just buy guest posts. Same core idea, just a higher quality bar.
Now, will google care? Personally, I think the guest post market will decide. If prices are ever driven down to the point where a volume of buyers are using them to promote thin or shit websites, google will need to do something.
If we can used this "new" and evolved paid linking for good sites, we should be able to spare ourselves another penguin-scale update.
The standard blog posts with links in the author bio could be hit as the number of them explodes. Really blog networks have just been replaced by guest blogging in a lot of cases, where the site only really exists to take in blog posts and link out to other sites. I do think this tactic could be devalued.
I agree with Jon though. If you providing guest blogs to a relevant audience and mix up the links e.g. link across to relevant pages within the post, I don't see how there could be issues with that.
Guest blogging done right can be about a bunch of things, industry rep, traffic, links, building relationships, if you go in with a link only attitude, like most things, you are probably going to suck at it.
The Tim Ferris launch is a great example. If you're going to go out and create a bunch of low quality content with the sole purpose of snagging links, then I'd be worried about the sustainability of your strategy and possible future updates. On the other hand, if you're heavy on the outreach and you're establishing relationships with people who have a following, a community, an audience, etc. because you want to get your content in front of their following, community, audience, etc. then you have nothing to worry about. Bonus if you're content is awesome because you'll get links and lots of them.
I think people who go out and flood guest posts on low quality sites with exact match links over and over will be hit. It is just a matter of time.
If you play it smart and build guest posts on high quality sites, with branded links and make it look more natural you will probably be alright.
You ask some SEO agencies what their strategy for link building is they say - 20 x guest posts a month, on our "Trusted network of bloggers", so yeah these types of SEO's will probably be the ones who are hit hard.
But yeah I agree with your post in eConsultancy, link building is changing and if you are not smart you will be hit.
I suspect it will come back to quality and relevance in the end - quality of the site the blog is on and quality of the blog itself; relevance of the site the blog is on and relevance of the blog itself.
I would not be surprised if there are tweaks to the way that quality is assessed.
I don't think guest posting will die entirely. I think that Google will most likely devalue lower quality guest posting and spammy exact match anchor text links with little relevance to the content or the linking site, however I believe they will place more relevance on co-occurrence and the relevance relationship between the two linking documents going forward.
I think the concept of pro-active link building as a whole, is going to become less and less important (especially link building from poor quality guest posts).
SEO is becoming more like traditional (offline) branding and advertising. It’s going to be less about geeks and math, and more about creativity.
Produce the goods, and you don’t have to pro-actively build links (with guest posts). Hundreds of people do it for you, organically (the reason why Google looks at backlinks in the first place, to judge authority of a site).
Nope! I think everyone using all these guest posting forums/groups are going to get popped really soon. Everyone is using the same guest blog lists and crappy content.
True guest posting will stay 'safe' but crafted guest posting will not be - a bottom of post author bio link from blogs with clear signs of 'guest post', 'write for us', 'submit' will be questionable. If we are talking about the big G, ofcourse this needs to consider domain authority.