Link building for SEO remains a solid long-term strategy for growing search engine rankings and increasing online exposure.
Whether via manual link building (e.g. HARO or broken link building), guest posting services or guest blogger outreach services, dozens of link building strategies abound.
But how to build backlinks with guest posts that won’t elicit the ire of Google STILL remains a topic of perpetual debate.
As it should.
Guest blogging services are not what they used to be.
Quality matters more than quantity and when a single link in your backlink portfolio can create Google penalties, you should take stock of your current guest blogging strategies to make sure they are in-line with today’s best practices.
What worked as white hat only a few months ago, may now be considered a black hat tactic.
This is more true with penalizing Google updates like SpamBrain and the Helpful Content Update.
In this article, we will discuss how to find guest blogging opportunities for quality, avoiding low quality publishers and guest posting services that are blatantly associated with private blog networks.
Table of Contents
Spreadsheet Assessment Outline for Guest Posting Services
When assessing these various guest posting service metrics, we typically run them in a spreadsheet that has a header tab that might look something like this:
The spreadsheet header row includes:
- Site name
- Domain Authority (DA) score (per Moz)
- Domain Rating (DR) score (per Ahrefs)
- Ahrefs traffic
- Server IP
- Trust Flow (per Majestic) of the root domain
- Citation Flow (per Majestic) of the root domain
- Site niche
- Total backlinks (Moz, Ahrefs, SEMRush)
- SEMrush rank
- Alexa rank
- Moz quality score
- Moz spam score
- Percentage of quality backlinks
- Total # of indexed URLs
Creating something like this in your own guest posting service and link building outreach campaign assessment is no longer an option, it’s vital.
If you want a walk-through on assessing the quality of a guest posting service, we have created the following video, which should be helpful.
Now, let’s dig into the metrics for qualifying your guest posting services!
What is the Guest Post Site’s Moz Domain Authority, Ahrefs Domain Rating?
Both Moz and Ahrefs have their own proprietary metric to assess the authority of a given URL/page and a website overall.
This gauge is done by taking into account the totality of the site’s linkgraph, judging how the site looks relative to other sites based on the quantity and quality post links pointing to the site.
Both gauges are logarithmic, meaning a 1x jump in “authority” or “rating” equates to a 10x jump in quality.
Similar to Google’s old system of Pagerank, the Domain Authority/Domain Rating of a website can help provide with an initial gauge of the quality of the site and help you determine 1) the value of a backlink from the site and 2) how much effort should be expended in acquiring a link.
However, when making assessments for guest posting services, it’s important not to become too fixated on third party metrics. These are both good gauges, but they’re certainly not perfect by any means. Even Google itself reiterates the need to be wary of third-party metrics.
What is the Guest Posting Site’s Moz Spam Score?
Similar to Moz Domain Authority, the Moz Spam Score..
…represents the percentage of sites with similar features to the site you’re researching which we’ve found to be penalized or banned by Google. Spam Score is based on our machine learning model which identified 27 common features among the millions of banned or penalized sites in the data we fed it.
Bear in mind, the Moz Spam Score is also wildly imperfect. We have noticed that sites with non-dotcom (.com) TLDs are weighted unnaturally poorly via the Spam Score, without any guest post links to them. Just use it as a gauge, but not necessarily THE gauge of whether a site is worthy of guest posts nor is it a definitive one.
If a high Spam Score is present, but not other factors point to negativity, we have no problem using the site in your guest posting services.
It is, after all, a third party metric.
What is the Citation Flow and Trust Flow of the Guest Posting Site?
Majestic publishes two metrics that can help you gauge how natural a given link profile might look relative to other sites of similar age and in similar niches.
Not only are solid Trust Flow and Citation Flow numbers helpful, but comparing the two with one another can provide further detail on the quality of the site in which you’re considering adding to your guest posting repertoire. Majestic has a great piece outlining how to read and interpret trust flow and citation flow for sites that accept guest posts.
Essentially, these metrics help determine how naturally distributed a guest posting service site’s links might look.
Similar to Domain Authority and Page Authority, Trust Flow and Citation Flow measure both the authority and trust of a given site based on the site’s backlink profile.
We have discussed natural vs. unnatural link profiles in depth before, but mostly for assessing your own website and cleaning up spammy links. But, the Moz link graph can also help you tell whether a given guest posting service has a naturally distributed link profile.
We suggest a full assessment of the trustworthiness of a potential guest posting service would include a look into Majestic’s Trust Flow & Citation Flow as well as Moz’s link graph to see how natural a given publisher’s link profile appears.
Does the Guest Posting Service Include Relevant Blogs or are the Sites Generic?
There are several types of guest post websites from which you can attempt to acquire links. Here are just a few, in order of decreasing difficulty:
- High authority, corporate sites
- Low authority, corporate sites
- High authority, niche-specific blogs
- Low authority, niche-specific blogs
- High authority, generic blogs
- Low authority, generic blogs
We always tend to avoid guest posting services that include websites that fall into the last two bullet points listed above.
These types of guest posting services are not all that proprietary or value-adding.
The guest post sites they target are easier to acquire links from (remember difficult to acquire = better link opportunity), tend to link to ANY content provided, offer paid link programs and don’t typically filter for quality. In other words, they look more like a private blog network (PBN) than perhaps any other guest posting opportunity.
Here’s what a typical header menu looks like from one such site:
The most egregious sites like this will offer every topic under the sun in their menu with the invitation to “Write for us!”
Which brings me to my next point…
Avoid Guest Posting Services and Sites that Have “Advertise” or “Write for Us” Language
If anyone can write for a site and they are offering it as an option, then it diminishes the site’s value for a number of reasons:
- If anyone can write for a site, anyone can find it and anyone will write for them. Unless there is a strict filter, the value of any “write for us” site, regardless of domain authority, is greatly diminished.
- “Write for us” is something Google may use as a filter when assessing a particular publisher.
- “Write for us” sites tend to have a lot more outbound links with unnatural anchor text variation.
- By their nature, “write for us” websites are going to be less picky for the quality and type of content they accept, at least in most cases.
- This strategy for finding guest posting opportunities has been massively overused and abused.
We tend to avoid sites that include “Write for us” promotion plastered all over them. The lack of exclusivity greatly diminishes a site’s value as a quality publisher.
Manually Assess the Quality of the Content on Guest Post Sites
When determining whether or not to use a publisher site for guest posting, we always perform a manual review of the guest post website’s overall content by reviewing several pages, posts and articles while asking the following questions:
- How well is each article written?
- Are all the articles of similar quality or are some lower quality while others are higher quality?
- What do the outbound links for the articles and blog posts look like? Are they utilizing natural anchor text or are they extremely keyword specific?
- Does every post look like it includes links to some sort of paid promotional site?
- Does the internal linking of the guest post site look natural?
- Would you want to read the content as a user or is it so bad that a real reader would never want to read it?
This last question is the most important. Google can tell when content is good in most cases by simply looking at bounce rates. When real humans bounce (all else being equal), then the quality is likely poor. The algorithms know that and will adjust quality rankings accordingly.
Would you want links from a site that is certain to get majorly devalued at some point, regardless of the current authority?
I didn’t think so.
A manual review of the site’s used by your guest post service provider is easy and very telling of the quality of guest posts they are delivering.
How Frequently Does the Guest Post Site Update Content?
A site that has not been updated in a couple of years is not likely to be crawled that often.
Furthermore, if you are the only one to post on that site after a couple of years of little to no publication, do you think that will look very natural if suddenly a couple of posts go live which anchor texts that include “lawyer marketing” or “best personal injury attorney Los Angeles”?
That’s grounds for an immediate red flag from the algorithm.
Make sure if you’re planning on publishing with a guest posting service website that there has at least been some recent, relevant cadence to the previously published content.
Perform Archive.org and WhoIs Historical Review of the Guest Post Sites
A quick and dirty review via archive.org can help you assess whether or not the guest post site is simply a repurposed domain bought at auction or from the expired domain drop list.
When assessing various guest posting services, archive.org will show a lag in captures that perfectly coincides with a change in Whois registry for the site ownership.
Yes, guest post sites change hands all the time, but when the site lapsed for six months as a result of a dropped or registration lag and then was resurrected with something that was completely different, didn’t match the original site’s purpose and now includes a bunch of articles with links to other commercial sites using unnatural anchor text, it reeks of a private blog network (PBN) and it’s best to avoid the site as a guest posting opportunity, regardless of how high the Domain Authority is.
Perform an IP de-duplication check against other known guest post websites
Before we ever consider using a website, we keep a list of other blacklisted sites in a spreadsheet from which we run a check for IP address duplication.
It’s a simple task, but will show you what other sites are using the same IP address as the potential SEO publisher in question.
Take a look at who else is on the same server and you’ll be able to quickly see what other guest post sites the server owner is hosting.
Guest posts and links from different domains on the same IP address rarely look natural unless there is common branding among the sites.
In most cases this type of guest posting service is going to be seen as manipulation and viewed as a poorly implemented PBN strategy.
Check for indexation by Google
Is the site indexed by Google? If so, how many pages are actually indexed by Google?
When a site has been repurposed or penalized, it will often show very low or no-indexation rates relative to the total amount of content available to webcrawlers.
If you need help making this assessment, you can review our article on checking Google indexation here.
Make sure the level of total page indexation coincides with the site’s sitemap count. If that is not the case, then the site should be avoided at all costs.
Does the Guest Posting Site Have Existing Website Traffic?
Similar to the indexation confirmation above, sites that have little to nill traffic from search engines are not likely to add any value as a potential publisher for your guest posting service.
This is true for a number of reasons:
- Websites without traffic typically have indexation issues and indexation issues means your guest posting services are likely to have little to no effect
- Websites without traffic will not drive any real referral traffic
- Websites without traffic (especially those with high authority) are more likely to have issues related to Google penalties and manual actions
Ignore domain authority and be sure to check website traffic stats.
While third-party tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs aren’t perfect at predicting web traffic, they can and do provide ballpark estimates that will at least let you know whether the site has real humans visiting.
This final layer is the nail in the coffin for even some of the best guest posting services who may be selling snake-oil guest posts.
Hire the Best Guest Posting Services!
These are the very same filters we place on websites we source through our own guest blogger outreach service.
While you can’t control every link pointing to your website, there is some control on quality guest posting services, depending on who you invite and beg to link to a particularly compelling piece of content you may have created.
And, if you do it right, good online marketers can even outrank other larger websites for competitive terms.
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