Guest Posting
The term guest posting is used to describe an article from a third party author on a blog or a website. In many cases it is a one-time or sporadic cooperation.
How guest posting originated
Originally guest postings were used mainly in the form of expert articles. Experts published guest articles related to their field of expertise on other websites, primarily to strengthen their own reputation and draw attention to themselves. Over time, guest postings were also increasingly used for the purpose of drawing attention to websites. Guest articles turned into an important tool of search engine optimization.
Quality of guest postings
In a YouTube video, Matt Cutts, in his capacity of a known employee of Google, explains Google’s view on guest postings (Video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGieiNe6RL4 How can I guest blog without it appearing as if I paid for links? (Matt Cutts)). Accordingly, particularly the quality and naturalness of the text and backlinks used, determine whether guest articles are regarded as positive or negative. Guest posting of poor quality can be recognized because they do not fit the website in question in terms of topic relevance. In addition, keyword anchor texts are regarded as a negative characteristic for a guest posting. Text spinning and guest articles which are published on multiple websites simultaneously are considered low quality.
High quality postings include the following features:
- High content relevance in relation to the blog topic
- Natural keyword density in the text
- Dissemination of expertise that complements the website sensibly
- Information about the author and their motives for the guest article
Benefits of guest postings
Guest postings offer a win-win situation for the site operator and the guest blogger, providing they are high quality. Website operators gain new content. They often cover topics from related fields, which the site operator does not himself write about. Thus such contributions bring variety and added value to the site. Traffic volume is raised thereby and the advertising effect is not to be underestimated. The guest blogger on the other hand benefits from these advantages:
- Increased visibility (authority) through frequent mentions of their name on the web
- Quality backlinks for link building
- More traffic
- New visitors with longer duration of the visit
- Development of new contacts in the blogosphere
- A high reach in specifically selected target group
- Presentation of one’s own abilities in the text area
- Gaining subscribers for newsletters or e-mail lists
Risks
However, guest posting also pose some risks. For the site operator there is a risk of copyright infringement or damage caused due to duplicate content, if the guest blogger did not create their text with the necessary care. Especially for inferior contributions with many backlinks or prominent keyword anchor texts, the probability is great that the Google algorithm will sooner or later get alerted to it. In this case, both the site operator and the guest blogger will be faced with penalties if the search engine experts find that guest articles were placed on a large scale.
Importance of guest postings for the SEO sector
High quality guest postings are one of the most important link building measures in the field of search engine optimization. However, as in most areas of the industry the same applies here: if guest postings are randomly distributed across the website regardless of content relevance, they can certainly have a negative impact. If you use high quality guest article to support a broad SEO strategy, you can definitely benefit from this method.