How does guest posting affect SEO
Do you use Guest blogging as one of the ways to build links to your blog? This article explains how guest blogging can affect your sites ranking and SEO.
One of the major factors that influence the search engine ranking is the number of quality incoming links to the site. Link building has been one of the major activities of all SEO experts in the past. However, with all the Panda and Penguin updates from Google, link building has got a different dimension now. Excessive link building could bring negative results and it is better to avoid it than overdoing it.
If you are doing a lot of blog commenting and guest posting, it is time to revise your strategy rather than waiting to get caught by Google.
Read the differences between Google Panda and Penguin updates.What is guest posting?
Guest Posting is writing articles or blog posts on someone else's website or blog. In most cases, the guest posts will have one or more links to the website related to the author. The primary goal of the guest author is to promote his own website by providing links to his website from the guest article.
If you are a blog owner, you could allow others to publish an article in your blog. On the other hand, you could write articles for other blogs which will typically have a link to your own blog.How does publishing guest posts in other websites benefit the author?
The goal of guest posting in most cases is to get links to a website from the publishing blog with an aim to improve the search engine ranking of the target website. Incoming links from quality websites will significantly improve the SEO and search engine ranking. If your blog is all about gadget reviews, you could write guest articles for many other gadget review websites and get quality links from them to your website. By carefully choosing the publishing websites, guest posting is currently the best way to build links unless you overdo it.Who gets the best benefit from guest posts - publisher website or author
Guest posting benefits both the parties. Author of the guest post will get one or two free links to his website. The publishing website will get a free article, which could add value to his site and potentially improve traffic to the site.
In my opinion, in most cases, the author gets the best benefit because getting incoming links is a big challenge these days. Because of various penalties from Google, most bloggers and webmasters do not give links to external sites. If at all they give any link, they will mark such links as "nofollow" link which almost nullifies the value of the link. So, the author of the guest post gets a big benefit by publishing some guest articles in other websites.
Publishing websites get very low value from the guest posts, unless the guest article is really unique and have very high value. During last several yeas, I have analyzed the traffic to guest articles published in my websites and almost all of them get zero traffic. When I spent enough time to investigate, I found most of the guest articles given to me by unknown people are spun articles or reproduced from offline sources which are hard to prove.Future of guest posting?
Guest posting has been the most favorite activity of bloggers last several years to build quality links to their blogs. I am a member of several SEO and blogger groups and have seen hundreds of bloggers regularly offering guest posts in such groups. Until recently, as soon as a guest post is offered, someone would grab it and publish it in their blogs. They were happy to get an additional article to their blog even though it has a couple of external links.
The scenario has changed now. Almost all guest post offers get no or very little responses. No one would be interested to take your guest article and publish it because the external links in the article could cost them a lot in terms of search engine ranking.
On the flip side, as a blogger and webmaster, I do receive a lot more emails asking me if I could publish a guest article in my blogs. I rarely accept guest articles in the past and now I have become much more vigilant in checking the quality of the post. You can read more details on the disadvantages of accepting guest articles in your blog.Is guest posting bad for your blog?
Well, there are 2 sides of it.
In most cases, the website to which the links are given from the guest article is benefited more than the site which publishes the guest article. The only advantage for the site that publish the article is, it gets one more article to its credit. But the sites that are linked from the article gets some incoming links, which are very hard to get these days.
If you like to build links to your site, guest posting is still one of the best ways, even after the new Google algorithm updates. Search engines still largely depends on the incoming links to check the popularity of any website and guest articles is the best way to take advantage of it. Listen to Matt Cutts on Guest Posting
Here is a video from Matt Cutts of Google, where he talks about how guest blogging could impact the ranking of your website:Guest Blogging Best Practices
You should take care of few points if you are writing guest articles to promote your website or blog:
1. Do not publish too many guest articles. Do it in a limited manner. May be 1 article per week is a good limit.
2. Write quality articles. Do not spin same article and publish in several websites.
3. Do not over optimize the anchor text in the guest articles. Natural links are never keyword optimized.
If you are a blogger or webmaster wondering whether you should accept guest posting, read this article on how to accept guest posts without affecting the SEO of your blog.
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Hi. Good article. I'd just add that try to find blogs that are relevant to your market. As they say, relevancy is the new PR.