If you're looking to use guest posts to boost your SEO rankings, Google may not be your best bet. The search engine giant has been devaluing links from guest posts for years in order to reduce their ranking power. Additionally, there have been numerous reports of unnatural penalties being imposed for link building. Not all sites include referral URLs in guest posts; some allow publishing, but add the “nofollow” tag. For this reason, Google's link policy prohibits the buying and selling of links, the excessive exchange of links, and marketing campaigns for large scale articles or guest posts with keyword-rich anchor text links.
They also stated that they have years of data to train algorithms that detect and devalue links from guest posts, so that they don't help a site rank better. So the big question now is “what effect does all this have on SEO, guest posts and backlink strategy?” Companies can still create high-quality guest posts that solve problems faced by target audiences on other sites in order to increase their authority and brand awareness. John Mueller, from Google, said that the reason posting links as a guest is problematic for Google is that it generates unnatural links. Guest posting will still be a valuable method for demonstrating authority and reaching new audiences, but due to the new UGC link attribute, it won't be a good way to improve your search rankings directly. John Mueller, from Google, stated on Twitter that Google not only disapproves of the publication of links by guests, but has been devaluing them for the past few years.
Representatives from the company, including senior analyst John Mueller, have always been very open about the use of guest posts. Website owners and some SEOs have started to worry after reports that Google has begun to impose sanctions on websites that publish posts as guests. The bottom line is that while guest posting can still be a great way to increase your brand awareness and authority, it won't be a great way to directly improve your search engine rankings. Companies should focus on creating high-quality content that solves problems faced by their target audience in order to increase their authority and brand awareness. Additionally, they should avoid buying or selling links or engaging in any other link building activities that could be seen as unnatural by Google.
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