How to post a guest blog without looking like it has been paid for? This is a question which must have been circling in the minds of the curious SEO PM who are proactive in their thinking. For them there is a good news, Matt Cutts himself has answered this question in a recent video.
According to Matt Cutts, the difference between organic guest post and paid guest post is just glaring and Google can sniff it very well. In the paid campaigns, people generally pay to get a desired backlink from the body of the guest post to the desired site.
How to Identify a Paid Guest Post?
If the topic of the guest post doesn’t match the niche of the blog or the site then there is a high chance that it is a paid post. Google thinks that the paid guest posts are generally off topic or irrelevant and has almost no correlation with the niche of the site. A direct keyword based linking is another way to recognise a paid post.
Google has many times confirmed that a guest post should come from an author who is an expert of that topic. In a organic guest post, the author bio indicates why the writer was asked to write this guest post and what are his credentials. A true guest blogger also doesn’t look to take a direct anchor based backlink to another site.
Google is aware that since articles were given less priority, there has been a rise of guest posting which are not adhering to quality which should generally come from a topic expert. This means they are being written by amateurs and with little or no knowledge of the topic. Guest blogging might not prove beneficial in the long run and Google has already warned the SEO managers of this via Cutts. Google also warned against posting guest posts here and there to get backlinks for any site. We have seen whenever any warning of Google has not been taken carefully, an update comes to penalise the culprits. There is a great risk that rampant low quality guest posting might prove harmful in a near future update.
Google thinks that the difference between the true guest posts and paid links are way too visible for them. If you are doing guest posting which runs the risk of looking like a paid post, you better be careful from now on. We have seen, sites which are penalised under any Google updates take a long time to come back to good ranking, if ever.
