Guest blogging from blog walking has been a way many people do to increase their rank in Google. The method was widespread that many people implemented it, making it a spam. Google has been warning webmasters about guest blogging abuse for many years, and Head of Webspam Matt Cutts declared that this method is dead.
Guest blogging, also guest posting, means publishing content on other websites. This method used to be a respectable thing. it's a common practice in digital marketing and has worked well as a tool for SEO because blog posts usually contain a link back to the guest's website.
However, as the method became more common, the practice is abused by many people. And since abuse and spam can do more damage than it can do any good, Google consider this a bad practice.
Guest blogging had become overused by low-quality spammy sites. This is because posts on those sites are written just for a single purpose: building quick link in order to manipulate rankings, rather than for real people.
Read: The World of Spamdexing
However, this doesn't mean that guest blogging won't do any good. Businesses can still benefit from publishing high-quality content that reaches out to readers, not just search engines. 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 many high-quality guest bloggers/writers out there.
High-quality articles and posts should include, and not limited to, the following:
- Original.
- Well-written.
- Relevant.
- Exclusive.
And to wrap it all up, you need to have the passion and enthusiasm in blogging in order to deliver the goods and enjoyments to others.
Guest Blogging with Purpose
Google and other search engines could never eliminate guest blogging because the practice is one of the ways that built the internet in the first place. Spreading relevant links across the web means giving people further readings and references, and this is a good thing.
And as for webmasters, some has opted to eliminate guest blogging from their sites, while others still accepts. If you want to still want to use guest blogging to increase your exposure (rank), you should consider creating posts that do the following:
- Helps building your brand.
- Further develop your credibility in a specific niche.
- As a way to increase traffic, in order to have new audience and create a community.
- To build authorship.
- Etc..
As a summary for the above points, you must not create posts for just having a backlink to your site. When you find an article that attracts you on the web, before thinking of putting a link there, you need to engage to readers and encourage them. And when you provide a reference in the form of link to that post, link it to the appropriate landing page where people can see the call-to-action on your site.
Read: Creating a High Conversion Landing Page
A link from a good site can make your website more visible to search engines. This is because search engines like those type of links, and not to mention, people. Everyone that surfs the web likes links that benefit them. And if you succeed in doing that, your readers can contribute by becoming the right kind of visitors, which could them lead to increase your sales.
Since guest blogging is usually done on spammy and low-quality sites, you should consider posting your guest posts on trustworthy and relevant sites to yours. Make sure that the sites you write for focus on a similar topic/niche/industry to yours. Use keywords accordingly, never abuse and overuse them because Google hates it. Only write for sites where contents are curated. Make links from different of high-quality sources. And most of all, write for human audience.
These is how you build others' trust on the web. These posts are what people like. And what people like, Google likes.