Guest Posting After Panda and Penguin Updates – What You Need To Know

Every time Google launches an algorithm update, a quick visit to some forum or community of webmasters or SEO professionals will make you think that the sole purpose of that update was to annihilate the SEO community. Truth is Google makes these changes to improve their search results in a way that they deem to be more suitable for their users. Such is the magnitude of this search giant, webmasters have no other option but to try and adapt to the changes and recommendations made by Google.

You can object and rant for all you want, but if you are looking to get free traffic from Google, you have to abide by their rules. The fact is that the recent flurry of updates has changed the way we optimize our websites for search engines, affecting both on-site and off-site factors, and guest blogging is one of them.

It’s true that guest blogging has many benefits, but for many, getting a back link from an authority blog is probably the biggest motivation for guest blogging. Thankfully, all those penguins and panda updates haven’t dented the worth of guest blogging, in fact it has amplified. However, you must keep the following points in mind from now on.

Write on Relevant Blogs and Topics:

In the early days of SEO, usually the metrics like Page Rank, DA, age of the domain, or the number of back links, were considered the standard benchmarks for evaluating a link prospect, everything else was considered secondary. Not anymore … relevancy has always been important, but now its significance is greater than before, even more than the typical metrics like Page Rank. In simple words, if you have to choose between a PR 1 blog that is directly relevant to your website’s theme and a PR 3 blog covering random topics, all else being equal, you should be going for the more relevant blog. In case you can’t find lots of good blogs on your niche, you should try to write on a topic that is at least relevant to some extent.

Write on Socially Active:

Social Media is not just another ranking factor; it is itself a power to reckon with. Social networks are unarguably the most cost-effective yet far reaching mediums for Internet Marketing. So you must make sure that the blog has an active community and social media integration like Facebook likes. Relevancy combined with an active social media presence can work wonders for your business. Remember that a blog that just keeps churning out post after post on random topics, with little or no response from its community is just a modified version of article marketing that doesn’t carry much weight after the Panda update.

Write Detailed Posts:

Just because some bloggers will accept a post with a minimum of 400 words doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try and cover the topic in depth. You must have heard about the drawbacks of “thin content”, so the more comprehensive and detailed your posts, the more value your links will have. Not to mention that the blog owner and the readers will appreciate your hard work and you will get a much better response than just a back link.

Don’t overly optimize your links:

When I say don’t overly optimize your links, I am actually pointing at the heavily optimized anchor texts that some guest bloggers are looking to use, even worse, when they start worrying about the keyword density to the extent that it compromises the quality of the content.

Remember that you don’t need to use the exact keyword or key phrases in the article again and again to make it relevant. Just write on a thematically relevant topic and link to your website or blog in a natural way. For example, if a blog allows three links in the bio, that doesn’t mean you must avail the option and link to three different pages of your website with SEO anchor texts in just a couple of line that an Author bio has, that will look unnatural and will be devalued by search engines.

Farah Mustansar is a link building expert and guest blogger for PostJoint, a guest blogging platform helping both writers and blog owners.