Guest posting can bring a lot of value to any given website. Aside from helping increase traffic, guests posts can also help improve a site’s credibility and present more networking opportunities for its owner.

The practice of guest posting has been in place for years, but with Google mentioning guest posting in its updated link schemes guidelines, the Internet has been thrown into a constant debate about what this means for guest posting in general.

Large-scale guest posting campaigns

The updated guidelines warn against, among other things, “Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links”. That’s quoted directly from the Google Link Schemes document. Just from that quote alone, a lot of webmasters and SEO people have already taken to completely doing away with guest posts for link-building.

However, what the quote above from the updated guidelines is saying is qualified. It says “guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links”, not all guest posting per se. It specifically warns those who intend to write guest posts on a large scale without paying any attention to quality just so they can build links and get keyword-rich anchor text links. That means the targets are those who do article marketing by spinning articles and regurgitating content—on a large scale—in the guise of guest posting.

How to do guest posting within Google guidelines

That said, guest posting remains a great tool for helping your site grow. Getting penalized by Google should not be much of a concern if you know how to do guest posting within its guidelines. That means it has to be a well-written article that took time and research, and has to go to a relevant site and provide value. Whatever backlinks that post gets, they are, by and large, of good quality even when they’re not really that many. For always, a handful of quality backlinks are better than thousands upon thousands of backlinks that turn out to be spammy and irrelevant.

It also goes without saying that a guest post done properly is less likely to show up on Google’s radar for websites to penalize, simply because writing and researching the post, contacting webmasters, making an agreement with them and publishing it take too much time and effort to make it reach the “large-scale” level that Google is referring to in the first place.

In other words, website owners and bloggers have to play it smart when it comes to guest posting. As long as they produce high-quality guest posts that have inherent value, they will be fine.