Guest posting with a reputable, high-quality host, often done with help from a link building agency, can be a great way to boost your website’s visibility and improve your search engine rankings. But, like any SEO technique, it needs to be done properly to provide value — both for the guest poster and the host. If you want to learn how to guest in a way that benefits your business, you’ve landed on the right article.
Introduction to Google Indexing
It’s not easy to visualise how exactly Google does what it does. While there is some information available, and many more theories, Google has never officially released information on how its Algorithm ranks pages — there is no one secret recipe to getting your website noticed.
But in order to appear on a search engine results page, a site must first be indexed. That’s basically a fancy way of saying that Google’s algorithm needs to know that the site even exists before it can be assessed and ranked. In order to be indexed, a site needs to be discovered by the Google web crawler, known as a spider, or the ‘Googlebot’. The Googlebot crawls the web by following links from and between known sites, and submitting domains to the indexing algorithm. It uses these links as part of the PageRank algorithm that Google uses to determine the level of authority of the site. Authority is one of Google’s methods for determining how reliable and useful a site is. Other factors it uses to calculate ranking include the quality and originality of content on the site, the authority ranking of sites that link to your site (known as your backlinks), the specific language related to search terms used on your site, and the overall quality, speed, and other technical factors about your site that affect users’ experience when visiting.
Google has a specific way of ranking guest posts. They use their knowledge about link building marketplaces, content formatting, and the placement of links in a page to determine whether or not a post is a guest post, and they do take this into account when evaluating the quality of both the site providing the link and the site it links to. A guest post can either help or hurt your PageRank results, depending on the visibility of the post, the page it’s on, and other factors that help provide context about the guest post.
The Do’s of Guest Post Indexing
As in any search engine optimization technique, the most important aspect of a good guest post is the quality of the content itself. If you’re writing a guest post that contains high quality, original, accurate content that someone out there searching for information on Google might find useful, Google will give you points for it. Other factors obviously still matter, but when it comes to PageRank, quality is king.
Keyword optimization is important, too. Ensuring that your content contains not just good information, but relevant, ranking keywords related to the topic at hand will help your guest post rank up and be seen as relevant content when users are searching for it. Dropping a few backlinks using those keywords is useful, too, especially if you’re linking to authoritative sources with quality content who also use keywords relevant to the searches you’re targeting.
In general, sticking to Google’s best practices is always a good idea. The company is relatively transparent about the general guidelines that make content more likely to rank. Ensuring basics about the site that your guest post will appear on can be a major help: you should only post on sites that are publishing properly structured content, avoiding duplicate content and distracting ad or popup placements, including unique and relevant images, using proper meta tags and alt attributes, and internal linking.
Lastly, it’s not just about the post and where it is, but also how it’s promoted. Promoting your guest post through legitimate and official channels, like branded social media accounts, your own site, and reputable publications will go a long way in boosting your post’s ranking, since they will be taking advantage of the pre-existing authority of those channels. The Don’ts of Guest Post Indexing
When done poorly, guest posting can actually hurt your ranking. Linking to your own site in and amidst content that is low quality, reproduces false information, contains duplicated content from other websites, or is ‘spammy’ or otherwise not created in good faith will nearly always do more harm than good. Sometimes low-quality backlinks can help a website in the short term, but eventually, Google’s algorithm usually sorts the wheat from the chaff, and posting content and links on a low quality site will actually hurt your PageRank score in the long run.
Engaging in techniques known as ‘black-hat SEO’ is also generally a bad idea. This includes actions such as keyword stuffing, using hidden text, creating gateway pages, URL cloaking, manipulated structured data like fake reviews, and misleading hyperlinks or redirects.
Keyword stuffing is the act of adding excessively repetitive or irrelevant keywords into your content that might be used by searchers to find something like whatever you have to offer, but aren’t actually related to what you’re saying. Repeating the same keywords over and over — especially in a way that doesn’t make sense in context — can do more harm than good. Some black hat SEO practitioners accomplish this using hidden text — text that is the same colour as the background, or that is hidden behind images or other page features, in order to artificially inflate the instances of desirable keywords.
URL cloaking is another deceptive practice designed to show search engines one thing, and users another. Some websites use code to detect crawlers and use their knowledge of the PageRank algorithm to serve the crawler content that will have a positive impact on SEO, while displaying the content they actually want users to see when the crawler isn’t detected. Google has ways around these practices, and while they can help initially, Google often figures them out, and penalises domains accordingly.
Structured data is a way of annotating content using code to help Google figure out what data should be displayed in search results. For example, tags can be added to images and certain types of content, like ratings or other aspects of the information that websites would like to be displayed, such as product information, pricing, etcetera. Manipulating structured data in a way that misleads Google or its users, for example by inflating ratings with fake reviews or lying about pricing, is yet another technique that can help in the short term but will eventually be punished.
Disingenuous or undisciplined link building techniques can also really hurt a guest post, just as they would any regular backlink. While reputable link building agencies and SEO specialists will know how to build quality links, someone without in-depth knowledge of the field may accidentally do more harm than good. Like many of the above techniques, these undisciplined practices can act like a sugar high — quick results that later collapse, and wind up doing more harm than good.
At the end of the day, if you want to improve your site’s ranking through backlinks, your best bet is to provide lots of high quality content. Barring that, work with a professional to make sure you don’t accidentally shoot yourself in the foot!
