How to Check if a Sites Backlink Profile is Penguin Friendly?

[Luia]

Post penguin I am of course very wary about which sites I proactively solicit links from.

Here is the scenario. Let's say for example I found a blog relevant to my business sector, had good domain authority/moz rank and noticed that they accepted guest posts. Sounds great?

Well on the surface it sounds like it would be worth reaching out to the blog owner - but what if that blog had been involved in some really shady link building practices in the past and the reality is that I could end up damaging my own site by association.

Can anyone share any useful resources such as articles or tools that will help to understand how to qualify if a sites backlink profile is shady and should be avoided as a link prospect?

[RyanKent]

Post penguin I am of course very wary about which sites I proactively solicit links from.

For the most part sites penalized for manipulative links have had specific pages penalized, not the entire site. If you are writing a new article on the site, then it should have a new URL which would not have had any manipulative links pointing towards it, so that page would not be penalized.

If you want to examine the site anyway, an easy way to check is to perform a Google search for a term you expect them to rank well for. If you are trying to earn a link from SEOmoz you can search google.com for "seo tools" and you will notice the site ranking in position 3 (Rand? What's up with that? If you are the best seo tool provider shouldn't you rank as #1?)

You can also check the site's backlink profile in OSE. If you examine the top 50 links and most offer anchor text, especially if it is the same anchor text repeated, that is a warning sign.

Now that I addressed your question directly, I would also share none of the above really matters. Ideally you should be posting your content on your own site. If you decide to post on another site, then you are doing so to reach their audience. SEOmoz, for example, has a dedicated community. A large percentage of the community visit the site because they have the URL memorized, or bookmarked, etc. You are trying to connect with that community and even if your article had no direct search traffic, look at the numbers of followers Moz has earned (check the upper right corner). When an article is published it goes out to over 100k RSS feeds, 130k+ twitter followers, etc. That is who you should be trying to reach with a guest blog. If you are going to depend on search traffic, then the article might as well be on your own site.

[Audiohype]

Hi Luia, Ryan's answered your question in terms of detecting penalties / shady link building.

I would just add that if you are going to guest post, it should be to reach the audience and less about the value of the link. Ultimately, if you can get readers to your site and interested in (and sharing) your content it's going to be much more rewarding on an ongoing basis than that single link.