What is Guest Posting in SEO?
One phrase covering two activities that have almost nothing in common. One is ordinary trade publishing that has existed for decades. The other is a link scheme wearing its clothes. Learning to tell them apart from the outside is the whole point of this page.
What Guest Posting Means
Guest posting means writing an article that appears on somebody else's website rather than your own. You supply the piece and they publish it. Your name usually appears alongside it. That is the mechanism, carrying no judgement in either direction.
It is also nothing new. Trade publications have run contributed articles for as long as trade publications have existed, because a magazine covering a specialist field cannot employ experts in every corner of it. A surveyor writing about a change in regulations for a construction title is doing something entirely ordinary. Surveyors were doing it long before search engines existed.
What happened afterwards is that the same mechanism turned out to be a way of manufacturing links at volume. The activity did not change. A second activity appeared that looked identical from a distance and shared the name.
So the phrase now covers both, which is why it produces such contradictory advice. Some sources call it essential and some call it a penalty waiting to happen. Both are describing something real. The full series sits in the complete guide to backlink building.
The Legitimate Version
You know something a publication's readers would want to know, so you write about it and they run it. The relationship is between somebody with expertise and somebody with an audience for that expertise.
What it looks like in practice. A publication in your actual field, read by people in that field. A subject you can write about because you do the work, rather than one chosen for its search volume. An editor who reads the piece, asks for changes, cuts the parts that do not serve their readers and decides where it sits. A byline identifying you as somebody with a reason to be writing it.
The link, where there is one, is a consequence rather than the objective. It usually sits in a byline or a short note about the author, because that is where a publication conventionally credits a contributor. It is frequently accompanied by an attribute declaring that the publication is not vouching for the destination, which changes nothing about whether the piece was worth writing.
The test of whether you are in this version is what you would do if the link were refused. If you would still write the article, because appearing in that publication in front of those readers has value to your business, this is the legitimate version. If the answer is no, the piece was never a contribution.
The Version That Is A Link Scheme
The other activity uses the same word and inverts every part of the relationship. It is described here as a category with recognisable characteristics. This page contains nothing about how such placements are arranged, where they are found or what they cost.
The site exists to host contributions. Not a publication that accepts them, a property whose entire content arrived from outside. Nobody on staff writes anything, because there is no staff and no editorial position to have.
The subject matter is incoherent. A single site carrying articles on cosmetic dentistry, cryptocurrency, industrial flooring and holiday lettings, because the subjects were determined by whoever paid rather than by any readership.
The author knows nothing about it. The piece was produced to a brief by somebody who has never done the work, which is usually visible in the writing to anybody who has.
The link is the product. Everything else exists to surround it. Frequently the paragraph containing it reads slightly oddly, because the sentence was built to hold a link rather than to say something.
There is a price. Money changes hands specifically so the piece appears, which places it in the category Google's published guidance identifies as a violation, discussed in how Google detects unnatural backlink patterns.
Telling Them Apart From The Outside
You can settle this in about five minutes on any site you are shown. No tool is needed. Six questions, applied to the site itself.
Does it publish anything not written by outside contributors? Look at the most recent twenty articles. If every one carries a different author who never appears again, nobody is running a publication.
Is there a named editorial team? Real publications have editors with histories. A contact form and no names is a different kind of operation.
Does it cover a coherent subject? A site whose articles span unrelated industries has no readership to be coherent for.
Does anything suggest a readership? Discussion, references from elsewhere, a reason for somebody to visit who was not published there.
Is there a page inviting contributions that mentions metrics or payment? A publication seeking expertise describes its readers and its subjects. A page promising authority scores and turnaround times is selling placements.
Would you be pleased to be seen there? The one that overrides the other five. Look at the site as a customer would, with no thought of links at all. If your answer is that you would rather they did not notice, that is the answer.
What A Real Publisher Expects
Approaching a genuine publication is harder than buying a placement. Every part of that difficulty is doing something useful.
Subject knowledge. An editor in a specialist field can tell within a paragraph whether the writer has done the work. There is no way to fake this to somebody who knows the subject.
Something new to say. Not a restatement of what already exists on their site and forty others. A view, an observation from practice, a change nobody has explained yet.
Editorial control on their side. They will cut things, change the headline, ask for evidence and possibly remove your link. Their obligation is to their readers rather than to you.
No guarantee. They may decline. They may accept and then not run it. They may run it in six months.
Now the point that makes this block worth reading. Every one of those frictions is a filter. The filter is where the value comes from. A reference from a publication that publishes anything means nothing precisely because it publishes anything. What made the placement worth having was the possibility of refusal, so removing the difficulty removes the thing you were trying to obtain. Paying to skip the filter buys the appearance of having passed it.
Does It Still Work
Yes and no, depending entirely on which activity is meant, which is why a single answer to this question is always misleading.
The legitimate version does what it always did. It puts you in front of an audience of potential customers. It establishes that somebody with editorial standards considered you worth publishing. It produces a reference from a source relevant to your field. It builds a relationship with a publication that may run you again. None of that depended on search engines, so none of it has been diminished by anything a search engine decided.
The other version produces links of little value and carries real risk. The links come from sites with no readership, which is the property that makes a reference worth having. They sit within a recognisable pattern rather than in isolation. The exposure sits with the business that bought them rather than with the site that sold them.
The reason blanket answers circulate is that people generalise from one version to both. Somebody whose contributed articles in trade titles produce enquiries says guest posting works. Somebody whose purchased placements quietly stopped counting says guest posting is dead. Both are reporting accurately about different activities.
So the useful question is never whether it works. It is which one you are being offered.
If An Agency Proposes It
Four questions. The answers will place the proposal in one category or the other before you have to decide anything.
Which publications? Named, in advance. An agency doing editorial work will tell you which titles it intends to approach, because there is nothing to conceal. An answer describing quality rather than naming places is the answer to a different question.
Will I see them before anything is published? Your business name is going on that page permanently. If approval is treated as an obstacle to efficiency, that tells you what the efficiency depends on.
Who writes it? Somebody with knowledge of your field, ideally in conversation with you. If the answer is that a writer will produce it from a brief, ask what that writer knows about your trade, because an editor at a real publication will be asking the same thing.
What is the editorial relationship? Is this a pitch that an editor may refuse? Or an arrangement where publication is expected? A proposal quoting a guaranteed number of placements has answered this, since nobody can guarantee decisions other people have not made.
The wider set of questions worth putting to any supplier sits in our guide to the questions to ask before buying backlink services. The taxonomy this fits into is in how many types of link building there are.
Contributions,
not placements.
We approach publications in your field with subjects somebody with your expertise can genuinely write about, named in advance and approved by you. No purchased placements, no contribution networks, no price per link.
Included every month:
One fixed monthly rate. No setup fee. No price per link.
Twenty four guides.
One subject.
This page covers contributed articles. The rest of the series covers the categories of link building, how patterns are recognised, what to ask before buying and when links are not the right spend at all.
