How guest posting works
You find a site whose readers match yours, pitch a topic to its editor, write the article to their guidelines, and they publish it with your byline. The link usually sits in your author bio, and sometimes in the body if it's genuinely useful to the reader.
Many sites advertise this with a "write for us" page. Others don't accept guest posts at all, and the best publications pick contributors carefully.
What Google says about guest posts
Google's spam policies list large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links as link spam. In a 2017 reminder about large-scale article campaigns, Google said it doesn't discourage articles that inform readers or raise awareness, but that links in articles written mainly to build links should be nofollow.
The line is intent and scale. One in-depth piece for a publication your buyers read is fine. Fifty articles on any site that will take them, each with an exact-match anchor, is a link scheme. See exact-match anchor.
Paid guest posts and guest posting services
Many "guest posting services" are link sellers: they charge a fee to place an article on a site in their network. That's a paid link. Under Google's rules it must carry rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", which removes most of the SEO value being sold. Sites that publish anything for a fee are also the ones most likely to be ignored by Google's link spam systems. What backlinks cost compares the prices and risks.
When a guest post is worth writing
- The publication is one your buyers actually read, and you'd write for it even without a link.
- The editor is selective and doesn't publish paid posts.
- You have something specific to say: data, a method, a lesson from your own work.
- The link is your brand name in a bio, or a genuinely useful reference in the body.
Guest posts vs mentions in existing posts
A guest post creates a new page that has to earn its own readers. A mention in a post that already ranks, such as a best-of list, an alternatives page, a resource page or a how-to guide, puts you on a page people already find. That's usually less work per link and closer to buyers. BacklinkGenie doesn't write guest posts; it pitches editors of existing posts to add you. How to get backlinks compares both approaches.
Example
Margin's head of research writing one in-depth article for a respected academic-writing blog is a reasonable guest post; buying ten guest posts on unrelated sites is not.
Putting it into practice
Where to use it: White-hat link building checklist and Declining a paid-link request. For the longer version, read how guest posts compare with other ways to get backlinks.