What is a Guest Post? A Short and Simple Guide

Here’s a question we get a lot from clients: What is a guest post? How is it different than a regular blog post? A Guest Post is a an article written and posted on someone else’s blog. When you write something on your own blog its just a “post”, but on someone else’s blog the writer is a ‘guest’. Guest posts are valuable tools for reputation marketing for a number reasons like getting your brand mentioned or occupying branded search query results. But most people use them to embed backlinks. Guest posts are abused though, and we’ll get to that later in this article.

If you have found someone else’s blog to blog on then you are the ‘guest author’. We’ll assume you are doing it both get the word out and hope to get a link back to one of your own web properties.

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The basics of guest posting

Here are a few guidelines about writing guest posts you should know. There is a lot of information on the internet about this subject and we have included links to a number of good resources at the bottom of this article. But here are the quick and simple basics.

Important Things to Remember About Guest Posts

Guest posts must be well-written. Search engines are beginning to get choosy, people too.
They need to be on-topic. People must want to read them to get maximum value.
People should want to share them using social media. Sharing increases readership.
Outbound links must be helpful and relevant to the article. Anchor text over the links accurate.
Don’t post on sites that clearly post a lot of guest content because the links are pretty much useless.

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Who can write a guest post

Almost anyone can write a guest post, but few can write a really good one that goes viral. You can’t generally “make” a post go viral. But it does not need to go viral. It just needs to be helpful, on-topic and well-written to generate traffic and link juice over time.

A good guest post is on-topic, relevant and can be of various lengths. Most guest posts are between 500 and 1000 words but folks like Neil Patel say they should be much longer. More like 2500 words. Data suggests that more content means your web page has odds for a high position in Google results. For a detailed overview of how to write a post for people and search engines check out this post about SEO enabled articles.

Sometimes it’s worth it to hire a professional to write guest posts because doing so consistently is important. Once per week at least, and who has time for that? Well, we do.

Blog post headline basics

Let’s say you are in the llama shaving business and that the search phrase you want to protect or improve is ‘Lloyds Llama Shaving Business’. In this case you may have written articles for posting on someone else’s blog, and those posts may have had titles like these:

Best Shears for Shaving Llamas
Top Ten Llama Shaving Questions Answered
Llama Shaving Secrets Revealed!
Legendary Llama Shavers Throughout History
Restaurants in New York That Allow Shaved Llamas

If you’re a llama shaver, these are really accurate (and compelling) headlines for your niche. Remember, the objective of a headline is to get clicked in search results.

But also keep in mind that some headlines can be clickbait. Clickbait headlines are meant to bait you into clicking (hence the name) but the content doesn’t always measure up to what you were expecting. Sometimes it does though. Here is an example of a clickbait headline:

You Won’t Believe What Doctors Found in this Girl’s Abdomen!

It’s a clickbait headline because it creates an information vacuum in your mind, it’s sensational, and it prays on humans’ FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).

You can learn more about clickbait headlines here.

Headline ideas for guest posts

Common blog / guest post headlines include the following ideas. These are meant to be the seed for your headline creativity:

What is…
How to…
Tips for…
Examples of…
Best examples of…
Benefits of…
Alternatives to…
[Process] template…
[Product] vs. [Product]…
How to fix…
How to use…
How to integrate…
How to cancel…

Embedding Relevant Links

Within each of these articles is an opportunity to embed a link to one of So let’s say that these are the web addresses of three positive web results you want to promote. One of them is your own website, the other two are existing positive articles about your business that already show up high in search results, but not high enough. So this is your own list of links you want to promote.

http://lloydsllamashaving.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/garden/the-llama-is-in.html?pagewanted=all
http://shavedllamas.com/

But people don’t just want to reference your sites. They want to reference other authority as well. Outbound links to other sites like the best llama shears, the right time of year to shear, where to buy a good llama, etc. are all important to the reader.

So in the first article ‘Best Shears for Shaving Llamas’ you’ll want to embed a link to lloydsllamashaving.com. Your article might look something like this:

Best Shears for Shaving Llamas

One of the most often asked questions about llama shaving is ‘what are the best shears?’. We’ve tried all kinds of shears from the The Heiniger Llama Kit to Wizard Shears. At Lloyds we’ve found the best ones to be the Wizard Shears…

The paragraph above has the word ‘Lloyds‘ as a hyperlink. And if you click on the link it would take you to the website lloydsllamashaving.com (if you do actually click on it, it will take you to our home page). Your website or blog will probably make this very easy so you don’t need to write any HTML, but if you do, here is what it might look like:

lloyds-llamas

But How Many Links?

Zero, if they aren’t relevant. But if they are relevant and helpful to the article you need to place the right number of links, and there is no set number. The question is “will a link improve the piece?” If it doesn’t then don’t add it – even if it’s a link to your own material. Quality is important as you’ll see in the final paragraph of this article.

But, if you still need a guideline then generally speaking, place just one link from a guest post into every 500 words. So a 1000 word guest post could probably handle up to two or maybe three links. Even if your guest post is awesome, too many links can make it appear spammy even if it’s not. Remember, it’s about the reader – not your needs for linking.

Abuse and the demise of guest posting?

Back in January 2014 Matt Cutts of Google said this “Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.” Has guest posting died since then? Nope. But web spam has to a large degree. We don’t think that guest posting in and of itself will ever die. Imagine major publications without contributors. But as Rank Brain and other Google upgrades continue to roll out, abuse of the practice should wane.

We think Google uses stylometry to ID authors

There may be something to Google’s distain for SEO practitioners overusing guest posts. At Reputation X we believe that Google uses a form of stylometry along with many other methods such as link profiles and scraped content to identify blogs and authors using guest posts to build links.

Stylometry is the practice of identifying an author based on their style of writing.

How might this work? There are thousands of sites that exist simply to sell links on. A person buys an article on the site, they place content, embed a link to their site, and it gets posted. The idea is that Google will find the article, follow the link to the target site, and count the link as an authority signal – eventually helping to rank the target page higher in search results. This practice was common until 2012 when Google made an update to defeat Private Blog Networks (PBN’s).

An entire industry devoted to paid guest posts

There is an entire industry based on paid guest posting. An SEO guest post writer may generate thousands of articles on different subjects for placement under various names on many sites. But if Google uses stylometry to identify that author across many sites they can then identify the sites that are probably selling links in guest posts. We think this is one of the methods Google’s Penguin update from 2012 uses.

So if you’re going to use guest posts for SEO beware of using sites that do it regularly, or worse – all the time. You’ll spend money but the links won’t count because Google’s Penguin algorithm update runs in real time. No one will tell you the link isn’t passing authority, not even Google, and certainly not the person who paid for the link.

Google wants guest posts to include nofollow links

In this tweet John Muller of Google said ” if you’re providing the content/the links, then those links shouldn’t be passing signals & should have the rel-sponsored / rel-nofollow attached.”

johnmu-nofollow

Google is essentially asking blog owners who allow guest posts to tag the links from their blogs with NOFOLLOW or a similar directive so that Google knows the link may not be trustworthy – even if the link is in fact completely trustworthy.

Nofollow might hurt SEO

It will be interesting to see how many bloggers add the nofollow attribute to outbound links. Why? Because adding rel-nofollow to outbound links removes much of the incentive for people to contribute content to a blog as a guest contributor. Some people just want to get the word out, but in our experience the vast majority of people who contribute to blogs are hoping for a link.

Why? Because fresh, high-quality content, is a big SEO signal. It then follows that by adding NOFOLLOW attributes to all links as a matter of course could also hurt the Google rankings of the blog. Do we know this for sure? No. But we suspect it could happen in many cases.

We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.