Guest blogging: is there a safe way to do it?

[Jeepster]

Following Google's nuking of My Blog Guest, is there any way of doing (high-quality, small-scale) guest posting safely?

Specifically, do the tips from Neil Patel here (written Jan 22) still stand up?

• Only post on relevant blogs – ideally these blogs should also be larger than your website. In other words, do it because it will help with branding, traffic, and sales. Posting on bigger blogs that are also relevant will provide you with more good exposure than posting on small, unknown blogs.
• Avoid using rich anchor text – rich anchor text will become a huge red flag and will probably cause your site to get penalized eventually, especially if you are building these links through guest posts.
• Share the love – you won’t be able to link out to your site only. From Wikipedia to your competitors, you’ll have to link out to whichever site benefits the reader the most.
• Build up your author rank – with Google Plus becoming more popular, it will be easier for Google to determine how good of a writer you are. So, you’ll have to focus on publishing only valuable content as you won’t want crap tied to your author account.
• Co-citations are valuable – even if you don’t get a link from a guest post, just having your site mentioned in the article can help with rankings. I think Google will place more emphasis on co-citations in 2014.

[MarieHaynes]

My rule of thumb is that I will only guest post in a place where I would have taken the link even if it was nofollowed.  I guest post on Moz and Search Engine watch and those links improve my branding and bring me traffic and clients.

But, if the question is, "How can I guest post for links and still get away with it" then I might have a different answer.  There are ways that you can probably get pagerank passing links out of guest posting for now but I wouldn't use it as a long term strategy.

[Jeepster]

Thanks for the reply, Marie.
What does "improve my branding" mean exactly? That you use branded, followed links?
Also, what happens when, as is often the case in my industry, a blogger writing a piece on the wider industry contacts me for a quote and writes in his piece, "...Jeepster of Jeepster.com (followed link) said: "Blah, blah..."

[MarieHaynes]

What I mean by "improve my branding" is that I am making people more aware of my brand.  So, in my case, my brand is either me (Marie Haynes) or my company (HIS Web Marketing).  When I post an article on Moz, lots of people read it and my hope is that they say, "Oh, that's Marie Haynes.  She's really good at Google Penalty Stuff".  I have branded myself in this way.

If I was managing SEO for a company that makes greenhouses and I managed to get an article published on the Better Homes and Gardens website, the main purpose would not be so that bhg.com links to me for SEO value, but rather that people who regularly visit that website see my company's brand and recognize them as a leader when it comes to greenhouse design.  I would also hope that people will click on my link and come and buy some greenhouses.  If you're guest posting in places where no one is likely to click on your link then there's a good chance that you're placing unnatural links.

"a blogger writing a piece on the wider industry contacts me for a quote and writes in his piece, "...Jeepster of Jeepster.com (followed link) said: "Blah, blah...""

I would say that that is a good link.  But it could be easy for you to build that into a linkbuilding tactic and have it slip into an unnatural tactic.  If a few sites contact you and quote you and link to you in that way, then that's fantastic.  But, if you start offering to pay people to link to you that way or if you offer product in exchange for a quote and a link then that's not good.  But, if people think you are authoritative enough to quote you in an article then this is great.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

My rule of thumb for guest posting...

If you start with the intention of adding in highly targeted anchor-rich links, you will fail at the first hurdle. You can get away with a URL link, click here, co-citation, but I would only guest post now if I were getting credited as the author. This link would follow through to my Author page on G+.

Co-citations are great you can add surrounding text to a link, but even though the link isn't live, there is still a benefit, and one that isn't going to see you get a penalty.

-Andy

[SamuelScott]

First, I'd forget about doing guest blogging for the sole purpose of gaining links. Matt Cutts, Google's head of web spam, told us in clear terms that online marketers should stop doing this. (I'd add that people should not have been doing this in the first place.)

Rather, I'd focus on contributing to online publications for the purpose of increasing awareness and coverage of your company, website, product, and/or service among a specific, targeted audience. Don't worry about the links. They'll come naturally themselves as long as you do online PR in the right way.

For more, I'd suggest looking at my Moz post on the topic: http://moz.com/blog/an-introduction-to-pr-strategy-for-seos

In short, I'd focus on the websites from whom you would want links even if Google did not exist. If you sell widgets, then you want a mention -- with or without a link! -- on a website that is read by people who are interested in widgets. Think about this issue like this and don't worry too much about getting links directly.

[Jeepster]

Rhetorical question: but surely these guys shouldn't be allowing followed guest post links?

[MarieHaynes]

I saw people tweeting about this and it intrigued me.  However, Google has not said that ALL guest blogging is unnatural.  If you check out Matt Cutt's post on guest blogging, he says:

"It seems like most people are getting the spirit of what I was trying to say, but I’ll add a bit more context. I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there.

I’m also not talking about multi-author blogs. High-quality multi-author blogs like Boing Boing have been around since the beginning of the web, and they can be compelling, wonderful, and useful."

It's not wrong to publish a guest post and allow a link.  The sites that are currently getting manual penalties because of a connection with My Blog Guest primarily used guest post links as a way to manipulate Google.

[JaneCopland]

Hi,

Guest posting, or seeking PR on third party websites, is still going to work well for a high number of people, especially as Google gets better at determining what is natural and what is not. I believe the issue currently is that determining intent with guest posts is very difficult for Google, hence one reason why they have taken out a sweeping penalty on sites that have even looked sideways at My Blog Guest in the past few years.

The point about going for a piece whether you get a link or not is quite important, although be aware of some other points as well. If you get a post written about you on a site, in a newspaper or magazine:

• Does that site / newspaper offer advertorials / paid posts for other people? If so, are you going to be swept up in that and assumed to have paid for your post?
• Would you guess that any of the other posts on the site have been sought by SEOs? If you have any suspicion, best to stay clear.
• Is there an "advertising" page where you can contact the site about links (not affiliate / banner ads that go through redirects)? Check out that such advertising isn't a red flag for SEO.
• Do sites place "sponsored" disclaimers alongside posts by external authors? There is no evidence or proof that Google crawls for these types of disclaimers, but it wouldn't be hard to do.

There are plenty of awesome businesses that have built good rankings off of PR and will continue to do so. Google's primary challenge is also that many people who are doing guest posting for SEO really well are continuing to do it and it's impossible for Google to detect at present because it looks just like PR. In some ways, this is what Google kind of wants anyway - some "SEOs" are now producing content for links that is good enough to add value to the web, basically meaning that Google's stringency has made those posts no longer part of the problem.

[MarieHaynes]

This is excellent advice.

[JaneCopland]

Cheers!