The link building method of Guest posting continues to be the most popular and successful method of building links to your website. Obviously if guest is abused and is only implemented to gain mass links to your website optimising for key search terms, then a penalty from Google is likely. Both the Penguin and Panda updates have become much more sophisticated in detecting these. There are several important guidelines that anybody wishing to use guest posting as means of building links to their website should follow. Here we have outlined some key factors.

1. Not including an Author Bio

A guest post that has an author bio will ensure that the content is more credible especially as the writer is identified. Other posts can be found by the writer online so Google can also add credibility to the writer but trusting content that they write. There has also been evidence that using authorship and G+ is helping with rankings in the search engines. Obviously adding by authorship to your posts, the site you post on becomes more important.

2. Abusing Anchor Text Usage

Still abused by many, over optimising posts and blatantly creating lots of links using exact same match anchor text will eventually result in a penalty. Also creating articles then including anchor text with no relevance to the article is another thing to avoid. It is important if to include link variation such as brand, generic and some exact match. Tools like Majestic can be good for identifying your anchor text distribution.

3. Publishing your Content on Low Quality Blogs

Link quality has always been important. One quality link to an established blog can be worth more than publishing on lots of low quality blogs. It is important to look at the quality of the blogs in question checking Domain authority and Page authority. Also look at the content quality and social signals. Check that the blogs is indexed and also read any comments left on posts. Generally you will get a feel for a real blog that only publishes quality and well written articles that will add value to their community. Having lots of links from low quality blogs will ensure your site is hit by Penguin.

4. Publishing Content that has Grammatical Errors

Content must be readable and quality will be distinguished by well written information that has no grammatical mistakes. There are many blogs that are full of poor quality articles and in the long term, these will be devalued as spam farms. Again link quality is important so publishing content on sites that have lots of poorly written content will only damage your own site and rankings in the future. Google continues to send out the unnatural link warnings. Anyone one publishing content should ensure that it is well written and adds value to the website that you aim to publish it on. Copywriter can be used for those who have problems writing in English.

Guest posting can still be effective and if done correctly can be a great way to gain new followers or promote your own website. As a link building method, Guest posting really is the only link building tactic that currently works. There is no doubt that future updates by Google will aim to penalize those websites that abuse it. For website owners who outsource their guest posting, it is important that you work with a reputable agency who can guide you on the best practices to use. For example varying your anchor text, only publishing on quality sites, including authority links and making your article look natural and most important ensuring that your articles adds value to the blog you are publishing on.

Author Bio: This post was provided by Daryal Begley from Magnetize PR. As well as providing a guest posting service, they also offer full inbound marketing services including Social media campaigns, SEO consultancy, content marketing and blogger outreach.