What is Guest Posting?

Guest posting simply means writing for another blog. In this context, the recipient blog or website owner updates an article written by someone else other than themselves or staff on their website or blog. The guest writer is the person who writes for guest posts other blogs. Usually, in a guest post, there is usually a link pointing back to the author’s blog or website. Guest posting works fine when the author’s blog and destination blog share a complimentary niche. For instance, a landscaping blog owner writing a guest post for a gardening niche blog, an animal feeds blog owner writing a guest post for an animal care blog, and the owner of the freelance writing jobs website submitting a guest post for a career or recruiting blog. These blogs are complimentary and can be linked to each other. The aim of the guest poster here is to share a relevant, captivating, and useful blog article while providing a link back to his blog for a complementary action or activity.

Link building is simply the process of building and creating more links and connections that lead back to some pages on your own blog or website. This can be achieved by writing and submitting blog articles like the one you are reading now to another blog or website. This process is called guest posting. Apart from guest posting, another link building strategy includes blog commenting, directory submissions, the setting of public profiles, forum participation, press release submission, and so on.

Needless to say, good links are effective ways of boosting your website or blog SEO rank. Having a link back from an authoritative site of complimentary niche is highly valuable to SEO. Linking externally is also a good SEO strategy for blogs and websites.

Despite the enormous benefits of guest posting as a link building strategy, there are some major shortcomings in it. Many SEO experts have reported that guest posting may have some negative effects both for the guest author and the recipient blog or website.

Here are the Major Pitfalls of Guest Posting

One major loophole of guest posting as an art of link building is a compromised article quality. Generally, an article should be written to meet the needs of the readers and answer the questions the readers may have in mind. However, writing an article for the sole purpose of generating leads may jettison all of these facts but rather focus on creating links back to the guest’s blog.   Spamming is another major loophole of guest posting for link building. Since the writer is basically writing to generate links, the article may be saturated with links which can result in spamming.   Some authors write guest blogs that link to a fraudulent or fake information or product. In some cases, the articles may link to web pages that are completely irrelevant or fluffy. This can negatively affect the blog on which the guest post was updated.  

Conclusion

Truly, guest posting as a link building strategy has a lot of advantage for SEO. However, there are some major pitfalls attached to it. Guest posting can result in spamming, low-quality article, and irrelevances, cheats, and frauds.