A guest post is an article you write for someone else’s website or publication. In return you get exposure to their audience, an author bio, and often a link to your site. Industry blogs, trade publications, local magazines and partner businesses all accept guest content.
Two very different versions
The editorial version. Brightside Dental’s lead dentist writes “What parents should know about kids’ sports mouthguards” for a regional parenting magazine’s website. The piece is genuinely useful, the editor reviews it, and the author bio mentions the practice with a link. Parents read it. Some book appointments. That’s guest posting at its best: expertise shared with a relevant audience.
The link scheme version. A provider offers “50 dofollow guest posts on high-DA sites” for a flat fee. The sites publish anything for money, cover every topic from crypto to pet food, and exist mainly to sell links. Google’s spam policies name “large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links” as a link scheme. These links are likely to be ignored, and a pattern of them can lead to a manual action.
What Google says
Google’s guidance is that links in guest posts that exist mainly for SEO should be qualified with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" (see sponsored and UGC links). In practice, many reputable publications nofollow author bio links anyway. That’s fine. The real value of a good guest post is the audience, the credibility and the relationships, not one link.
How to do it well
- Pick publications your customers actually read, not sites chosen for their authority score.
- Pitch a specific idea that fits their audience and isn’t on their site already.
- Write something you’d be proud to publish on your own site. Use real expertise and examples.
- Keep links natural: a bio link, plus a link in the body only if it genuinely helps the reader.
- Don’t publish the same article in several places.
Common mistakes
- Paying for placements and not labeling the links
- Exact-match anchor text like “best dentist austin” inside the article
- Writing thin, generic posts that the host site’s readers ignore
- Guest posting on sites with no real traffic or no editorial standards
- Treating it as the main link building tactic, when digital PR and local partnerships often earn stronger links
How to judge a site before pitching
Check whether it has real readers (comments, social shares, a newsletter), a consistent topic, and editors with names. If its “write for us” page lists prices, walk away. RankThat’s Backlinks feature shows link building prospects and lets you track the links you earn.