Since the launch of SEO as a safe tool to rank your websites, there are various methods used to improve a website’s SERP which includes guest posting and link building as basic techniques. Guest post used to be an honorable activity when a reputed website would allow you to do blogging on their platform. It was pleasure to write for good quality websites or provide them with quality content which was used to be a link building strategy. Later on with the rising trend of guest posting activities, this strategy turned into a rotten method to achieve SEO targets. Some of the negative guest post methods include guest posts with keyword stuffed anchor texts, large scale of low quality content in articles and content mills to generate excessive amount of useless articles. Additionally, there was a rising trend of content mills and article spinning gained its momentum which derailed the beautiful and creative art of guest blogging.
Similarly link building used to be an ethical SEO technique to gain page ranks in search engine. Websites with relevant content or similar business, used to provide high quality back links to their counterparts to improve their website rankings. Now link building has turned into a black hat SEO technique since it is used in manipulative way to achieve back links for website. This turned to be true when Google released its Penguin update to penalize those websites that relied heavily on low quality back links or had unnatural ways to achieve thousands of backlinks. The negative link building activities involved buying and selling of back links, excessive amounts of link exchanges or partner pages were created for cross linking. Keyword stuffed anchor text links were major issue as they appeared too lousy and unnatural.
Now with strict Google webmaster guidelines, it has become necessary for companies to and websites to either avoid these two strategies or if they are planning to employ these in their SEO campaign, then proceed with precautionary measures. Now getting does follow links for your website to pass page ranks is not an easy task as many websites have become conscious due to the strict penalizing policies of Google.
Similarly guest posting has become spammed as recently the internet marketing Guru Matt Cuts announced, “If you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.” Guest posting used to be a backbone of content marketing, but now it has become illegitimate due to unethical methods introduced to carry out this strategy.
Although guest blogging has not permanently finished but it is advised by the internet marketing experts that it should be done with caution. It should not be the primary part of your SEO strategy but it can be incorporated in it as a legitimate method. If your guest post consists of high quality content then there is no doubt that it won’t get shared and you would not get natural back links.
Similar advice goes to the link building technique as Matt Cuts point out that Google still uses links to find out website relevancy. It is only the way that you build natural links which can be achieved through the following:
- Provide valuable links to the readers which influence their interests.
- The link should be on a website related to you or is relevant to your field.
- The landing page and the page with the link should have relevant content and at least should be related to each other in context.
- The link should encourage the reader to click on the link.
Both Guest Posts and Link Building strategies seem to be in declining phase due to their black hat techniques, but if done according to the defined rules by Google, then they are still best methods to build an effective SEO strategy.
