For quite a while now guest posting has been the favorite way of building links. However, this vanilla period seems to be coming to an end, as Google is expected to increase scrutiny on guest posts due to spam. 

Where do we post?

The major focus of website owners and writers should be on the quality of the sites where they post their guest content. You certainly want to guest post on a reputable site, and you can only check reputation if you look at quality measurement metrics: these are Domain authority and PageRank. The right website to guest post is one that has social shares, an engaged audience and links to top ranking websites.

Where does the spam risk lie?

While there are many just reasons why we should appreciate the advantages of guest posting for link building, we also need to be aware of the risks involved. Lots of small business owners feel enthusiastic about giving the voice to readers; they see this as a method to validate their website. However, in many such cases, the small business website is just targeted by black hat marketers trying to spread links across the web to rig search engine rankings.

Before you know it, your website contributes to promoting shady products or services, and the web is so dense that it’s difficult to find the way out. If someone you don’t know offers to write a guest post, say NO.

Poor quality content – the decline of guest posting

In the early days of guest posting, it was an honor for those writing the post to contribute to a high-profile website. If your content was sought after by such a titan, it was a big step in one’s writing career. But these days are long gone.

Guest posting exploited as SEO technique has led to an influx of low quality content. Even if you have a great website, accepting the wrong guest posts could tarnish your reputation and credibility. The phenomenon has gone to such an extent that website owners are now offered money to allow guest posting. Easy money, but what’s the real cost?

Could Nofollow links save guest posting?

Nofollowed links have been proposed in order to protect websites against the risks of spammy guest posting. Nofollowed links could still help with branding and reaching new audience, yet this could negatively impact to the website’s reputation. It would be a loss for a small business website if a popular top site in the same niche would not link to it directly.

There are still conflicting results in the analysis of nofollow links efficiency. While Google claims that their search engine does not follow the link, SEO experiments have shown that they do NOT index the linked-to page, but they DO follow it. The nofollow link is followed by the other search engines Bing, Yahoo! and Ask.com, but they do not take it into consideration for calculating ranking.

The question of whether nofollow links could save guest posting remains open…