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Guest Blogging Moving Forward – 4 Rules to Live By

By John E Lincoln

There have been so many changes in guest blogging over the last week. What do we do? Well, no one freak out OK? Let’s take a second to think about what is going on. First, what happened.

  1. A website was penalized over 1 guest blog
  2. MyBlogGuest.com was penalized
  3. eConsultancy no followed all of their external links in contributed post

So what does this mean? Is guest blogging dead? Is there still value? Here are my thoughts.

First look at this picture. I have guest blogs everywhere on huge sites.

Guest BlogsAs you may know, I am a writer for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and Search Engine Journal. Those posts are great for our business. They allow us to get referring site traffic, make a name for ourselves and just generally get exposure. So we can see just based on these points that guest blogs are still powerful for many other reasons outside of links and SEO. This establishes that there is still value in guest blogging. But now it is time to analyze the SEO implications.

  • If you get a guest blog on a bad website, with a followed link and anchor text for a keyword, can you be penalized? YES
  • Is it worth the risk? NO

So how can we still guest blog, but have no danger of penalties and still enjoy the other benefits?

The answer to this is simple, and thus, here are my four new rules for guest blogging moving forward.

  • Rule 1: Distribute your guest blogs yourself, and pick high-quality websites. Form real relationships!
  • Rule 2: Never use anchor text links in your guest blogs
  • Rule 3: If you use anything that is even close to anchor text it must be nofollowed
  • Rule 4: Don’t do it for the links, do it for the exposure

By doing this, you are taking the SEO issues out of guest blogging and are safe to proceed.

Guest blogging is under scrutiny from Google. I highly doubt Google will go around and penalize everyone who ever did a guest blog retroactively (that would just be evil and unfair). Moving forward, Ignite Visibility is 100% focused on organic digital PR (which is manual digital public relations promotion for SEO benefit online). We are very proud of this service.

We are also still excited to offer guest blogging, but only under the new rules, due to recent developments from Google.

What are your thoughts?

About John E Lincoln

John Lincoln (MBA) is CEO of Ignite Visibility (a 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 Inc. 5000 company) a highly sought-after digital marketing strategist, industry speaker and author of two books, "The Forecaster Method" and "Digital Influencer." Over the course of his career, Lincoln has worked with over 1,000 online businesses ranging from small startups to amazing clients such as Office Depot, Tony Robbins, Morgan Stanley, Fox, USA Today, COX and The Knot World Wide. John Lincoln is the editor of the Ignite Visibility blog. While he is a contributor, he does not write all of the articles and in many cases he is supported to ensure timely content.