Guest Posting for Link Building

Guest posting is becoming more and more popular as an effective way to build quality links back to your website Guest posting is when you post a blog on someone else’s website for the purposes of adding quality content to that person’s site while gaining valuable backlinks in return.

The Golden Rule of Guest Posting

• Never post the same blog on your own site that you have posted on someone else’s.
• Duplicate content can kill a website. Using Google authorship code can protect your website from duplicate content penalties when you are submitting non-exclusive articles to quality sites .
• It is best to only submit original content to other sites on which you are guest posting.
• If you discover someone you made an arrangement to guest post with is posting duplicate content, immediately ask them to delete the posts off their website. If they refuse then delete their posts off of yours.

What are the Benefits of Guest Posting?

• The main benefit of guest posting on another blog is gaining links back to your website. Links are still the most important factor in how your website ranks in the search engines.
• Another benefit of posting on popular blogs is that you can increase the number of visitors that visit your site through the links in your posts.
• Guest posting also increases the value of the website you are contributing to. By adding quality content to another site, you can help increase its authority and Page Rank which makes the links that you have coming from that site even more valuable to you.
• If you were to allow guest posting on your own blog, the same benefit of increased authority and Page Rank would apply to your own site as well.
• The most valuable links will come from blogs that are closely related to your own industry.
• By working together each company can experience a benefit from guest posting.

Are there any Downsides to Guest Posting?

Not if you do it right. You want to make sure that you are posting on quality sites.

• You can define a quality site by its content and how often they post on it and not by its Page Rank. Page Rank is important, but you will have trouble finding sites with a PR of seven or eight that are going to allow you to guest post.
• Most sites with that much authority are going to have strict guidelines if they even allow guest posting in the first place.
• If your website is new and has a low Page Rank of its own, then guest posting on a site with a one or two Page Rank is a benefit to your site.
• If you have a site with a Page Rank of three or four then posting on a site with a Rank of two to three or four to five is going to help you.
• Try to avoid, if possible, reciprocal guest posting.

The best way to guest post is to both post on other people’s sites and let others post on yours. That way you receive both benefits of guest posting.

Invalid Links (404′s)- Generally Don’t Harm Your Ranking

A very busy thread within the Google Webmasters Help forum currently contains one webmaster asking about the large number of invalid links on his site and whether they will harm his rankings.

The answer to this is no they won’t necessarily harm your websites rankings within Google, however, they probably will hurt your sites internal linking structure as well as user experience, but it is more than likely that you will keep your positions, as long as you have nothing else wrong, Search Engine Optimization wise, on your site that is. These invalid links will harm that specific page rankings as it is not there and you are not receiving the full benefit of internal linking, but having a 404 and isolating that page will not harm your whole sites rankings, it is probably best that you sort these things out however as user may not use your services if they cannot get to the information they require.

John Mueller, who works at Google, had this to say about invalid 404 links:

“The number of crawl errors on your site generally doesn’t affect the rest of your site’s crawling, indexing, or ranking. It’s completely normal for a site to have URLs that are invalid and which return 404 (or 410, etc). That wouldn’t be something which we would count against a site — on the contrary, it’s something which tells us that the site is configured correctly.”