Guest Post Link Building 2017

Should You Stick a Fork in It?

[martinibuster]

If you don't know what Stick a Fork in it means within the context of link building, then read this. [mattcutts.com] Very important.

Matt had a way of writing things between the lines. SEOs have a bad habit of reading too much into his casual statements. The above blog post was NOT a casual statement. It was an explicit warning about guest post blogging.

Did you know you can dampen an SEOs links and the SEOs would chalk it up to anchor text ratios and basically never notice?

How about that initial bump then drop? Wonder what's going on?

Did you hear how paid guest post links on major magazine sites stopped passing PageRank a long time ago?

Nobody's going to shame you for your opinion. We're here to discuss honestly and respect, to help each other and share.


What do you think? Fork or Spoon?

[mack]

I think it's one of those situations where actions speak louder than words. What is the action? Well, would it be normal for person X to be writing content for you? or is this something that's being orchestrated with the intent of making gains.

Without reading between Matt's lines, it is fairly clear that Google is interested in giving a benefit to things that happen naturally. Guest bloggers have never been natural and more often than not are an attempt to play the system.

Sometimes it helps to do very little. Slow and steady, stay under the radar let things happen and be rewarded. The first key to having good content is having worthy content. Paid content, of any kind, requires an action. It DID work, but Google is not going to be played.

Mack.

[tangor]

One of the now (deservedly) retired SEO games. Guest blogging is no different than paid endorsement or infomercials. Next to no value or new content can be found. Pretty sure the fork is firmly stuck in that cold, dead, carcass.

YMMV. :)

[engine]

I still get requests each week, so, nobody listens! Most of the requests come out of sectors that still employ fifteen year-old tactics that have long been banished to the hall of infamy.
The way it was abused caused all the problems.

There's nothing wrong with a guest blogger, but the expectations should be for the content, and not the link.
Stick a fork in it for the links, but use the spoon for the the content, imho.

[Sujit Rocking]

Hi,

We still follow the GB method but not for merely getting links but building an authority. So now as it came in certain news, leading online news websites forbes, INC. have started adding no-follow link attribute to external links. So as Google came up hard on GB, and not giving much value to links coming from guest blog sites, more websites are going in Google direction to not affect there own value.

So as long as you do GB for content and knowledge its doing good, adding number of links to your website in the content wont work in near future.

Me personally still believe in GB as apart from getting some value, it build trust in the author and the associated website.

[martinibuster]

Sujit is rocking.
;)

[keyplyr]

I get requests all the time from various people wanting to contribute content to my web properties, only asking for a link to their bio or site.

I always decline. Not because I am against GB in principal, but because I write my own articles. All the content I publish is mine, I want it that way and I do well with it. If I accepted other people's work, then I couldn't say that.

Most of my competitors (if you want to call them that) accept articles and even promote contributing editors by name.

They have the advantage of a constant stream of fresh content, but IMO the value of having something of one's own is worth more.

[ken_b]

May be off topic, and maybe I'm revealing even more of my ignorance of such things ... but ...

As far as outbound links in user generated content, how does guest blog posting compare to any other form of user generated content, like forums, review sites, event calendars etc?

[engine]

ken_b, the fork is definitely well engaged on those UGCs.

[phranque]

how does guest blog posting compare to any other form of user generated content, like forums, review sites, event calendars etc?

most of those ugc links would be nofollowed by now...

[martinibuster]

Here is evidence that Guest Post link building has been dead for awhile.

Inc., Forbes, Huffington Post and Entrepreneur placed no-follows on external links this past summer. [seroundtable.com] The impact on rankings was zero. Google had already devalued them.

There is a reason to continue guest blogging. But paying for links on sites like that has been burned for at least a year. The SEO community simply hadn't noticed it.

Unless you understand how search algorithms work, Google and Bing are going to continue burning your links.

[edmundpelgen]

Hey Roger, I've seen in some of your other commentaries that Google simply ignores these links and there is no penalty per se from using them. Just no benefit. However, I'm diagnosing some drops for a client and I found they recently purchased a few "guest post" links to the page that is dropping. The timing seems too coincidental. However from what I understand reading here, Google doesn't penalise per se, just ignores these links. Be interested in your perspective on what might be the cause of these kinds of fluctuations, given nothing has changed on the page/site except these two "guest post" links. In terms of addressing the issue, is it even worth disavowing them if Google is ignoring them anyway?

[martinibuster]

Forbes, Inc., and Huffington Post slapped no-follows on their outbound links several months ago and people I know who had purchased paid links hosted on those sites experienced no change in rankings. In other words, the links had already been devalued.

The devaluation of those links is what I've been suggesting privately to clients who asked me about those kinds of links, and is what I had been alluding to publicly in my blog posts and elsewhere. I never engaged in buying links in those places and I have always consistently and vigorously counseled against purchasing links from Forbes, etc. because I understood that they were likely poisoned links.

As for your issue, I would have to know more about those two links. What would cause them to stand out is if they were part of a network that engages in paid guest posts or if the site has been indiscreet and was caught in a manual penalty, dragging your client down with them.

My take on guest posts is that it can be a healthy part of getting your name out there IF it's placed in a spot where potential customers will see it AND if the link is no-followed.

Link building, in my opinion, is not just about do-follow links. For me it has always, always, always been a tool for building sales. I know most people focus on the rankings part but there is much more to it than that when you switch the goal from ranking better to building sales.

Part of building sales is building awareness, building trust, establishing credibility. That's the long game. That's what a company that wants to build rankings that ranks at the top and stays at the top is going to add to their marketing mix.

[edmundpelgen]

Thanks for your considered reply. I do appreciate it. I agree with your approach to focusing on links that generate sales.

In terms of these two links, I've discovered they were procured through a PBN service, which I believe is simply a private PBN or publishers who've effectively sold their souls for the placements.

Search console is not showing any manual penalties. So I guess I'm seeking clarification that in the absence of a manual action, would these links have a negative impact or simply be ignored and thus the cause of the sudden drop can be found elsewhere, maybe in looking at whether the page no longer meets the users intent.

Thanks
Ed

[edited by: martinibuster at 2:52 pm (utc) on Oct 14, 2017]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics - That way we're talking about Issues, not someone's site. [/edit]

[martinibuster]

Now and then PBNs tend to experience a pop and drop effect. The PBNs help a site pop to the top of the SERPs then after awhile the juice is pulled out and the site drops. Pop and drop.

Afaik, not a manual penalty, it's just the site's not ranking anymore. But hard to say without knowing all the facts.

[HokuApps]

Guest posting means writing and publishing an article on someone else's website or blog. I offer this on my own site (occasionally) and do it quite a bit on other blogs with audiences that I want to speak to. It's a great way to connect with new readers and get your name out. Here also show you how to:
find quality websites accepting guest posts
do content marketing research and write great content
get quality backlinks
build relationships that might prove valuable in future
implement various outreach strategies

[s_rahbari]

Well, I think that you've over-analyzing the situation. Currently, I'm trying to guest post for some big names in the marketing industry. I have two reasons for that: 1. getting my company recognized more 2. getting that sweet link from the other website.

And it's not something I'm ashamed of. In my opinion, as long as I'm adding something to the web, there's no problem with any techniques I choose for link building. I believe that google want this too. They care about quality of the content.

What cutts has said, is only a warning about low-quality guest posts. And I agree with him. we should cut them off. But what about quality posts? Don't you deserve some kind of recognition if you write a great post for another website? I think of it as a sort of interaction and as long as it's interaction based, I'm totally cool with it.

Think about this for a moment: every SEO technique you can think of has been declared as spamming by google. It's quite natural of course. They want others to make links for you. But I'm sure that they themselves know that self-built links are important too. Shouldn't I get some recognition if I write a plugin for WordPress? Really?

[tangor]

Wonder? Try the sniff test. If it passes then okay. Otherwise... Guest posting is past prime. Difficult to explain to those intent to try, but the current results speak loudly, no matter how much rage against the machine is expended. The fork has been stuck. It is done.

[martinibuster]

Google is against any link building strategy that is designed to influence the search rankings. Period. So be honest with yourself otherwise you're starting your project lying to yourself. Always see things for what they are. Do not live in an illusion or fake version of reality.

...is only a warning about low-quality guest posts.

Heh. You're playing the "it's ok if it's high quality" card. A venture funded link selling company I won't name used to use that line to justify their link selling business. They said that they match high quality advertisers with high quality publishers. Thus it's a win-win for Google and consumers because the paid links take users to high quality websites.

That justification was also used in the reciprocal links days. SEOs said that Google is only against "low quality" reciprocal links. SEOs justified reciprocal links to themselves and their clients by saying that it's ok if you do it with high quality websites because it's a win-win for Google and consumers. The Google penalized them.

In other words, you are justifying it to yourself but it is not a win-win. I've evaluated the guest posting campaigns of companies working that angle and it's pretty obvious it wasn't working for them for the past few years. They just hadn't noticed it wasn't working.

Not noticing that a tactic is dead is a common problem with the SEO industry. For example, Forbes etc. had put no-follows on their links this summer. But the rankings of sites that had purchased links from rogue authors at those sites didn't change. That means that Google had caught those links and had devalued them already. The no-follows didn't affect rankings because the links themselves didn't affect rankings to begin with. And here is the takeaway: SEOs did not notice that those paid links were not working.

Duh. Double duh. Right?

This isn't 2013 anymore.