Firstly I just want to start by saying this is NOT another blog post preaching that simply good content is the answer to guest blog posting, it’s really much more than just that. What I want to talk about is how I’ve seen a shift in what works and what doesn’t when using guest blog posting and hopefully those insights will help others deliver better results and not waste time in methods that no longer work. With Google’s next big Penguin Update 2.0 on the horizon its going to be essential that these tips are implemented into your strategy otherwise you run the risk of devaluation or even penalties.

The way people guest post content on blogs has changed, for the better I think, recycled content is especially something I’m glad to see the back of – so for that I suppose we should thank Google. The way links appear in blog posts has also changed (still changing for some), no more service/product specific anchor text plastered multiple times on link networks increasing exact match percentages. While a minority will see these updates as obstacles in making their jobs harder others will see opportunity and progression in a tactic that’s on the cusp of being “not allowed” by Google.

For me there will always be a need for guest blog posting, it’s just part of the blogger community and spirit; it’s like getting asked around to a friend’s house for dinner – who turns down a free meal with people you like? So I firmly believe there will always be guest blog posts, but the way people use them for SEO will have to evolve.

Here are some of the ways I’ve already started to change the way I approach guest blog posting, not only do I get better results than before but I believe most of these points will future proof this method of link building.

1. Creating good contact lists

There are some great ways of getting in contact with bloggers, such as My Blog Guest but the way I find most effective (by no means new) is just using simple Google commands – there are litrilally thousands of potential combinations for every industry. One in particular that works extremely well is to use “inurl:word1 intitle:word2”:

What this command does is return results that includes “guest-post” in the URL, there are many other combinations you can use like “write-for-us” or “guest” etc. Then the second part of the command refers to a word that appears in the title of the page.

How this command differs from others is that you know that each blog that you contact will have done a guest blog post around the subject you’ve searched for – it’s much less like cold calling than just approaching bloggers that just have content on the same subject as you. Bloggers will be familiar with the type of request, understand the principle of what you’re after and be more inclined to participate.

2. Sending the right emails

Perhaps the most important part of guest blog posting process is actually communicating with the bloggers. Being a blogger myself I can tell you right now I get so many emails every day, most of them trying to sell me something or offer me a thingimijig I don’t need. The best tip possible is “get to the point”, seriously, that’s it. I did a test last year looking at the type of emails I sent out and the success rate – you can see the results below:

During the test I got a much higher success rate (post live) when I sent emails to bloggers with just one sentence asking if they still offered guest blog posts. No fluff, no praise and no examples of previous posts and writing styles.

Besides  writing short emails it is massively important you find out a bloggers name; it’s really not that hard, it’s often on the homepage, about us page or contact page – if not there then check the domain info out or read a number of the bloggers posts and comments.

The last point in this section could be controversial but don’t mention you’re an SEO/link builder/content marketer etc. Not everyone will be honest here but based on experience you will get better results if you just include your name along with company name and contact details on a signature.

3. Quality Control 

This part of the process will require a certain amount of experience and self control. There are often occasions where you’ll find blogs that very obviously offer guest blog posts to everyone (usually visible in the bloggers main menu). While this will increase your success rate considerably the best way to approach this is to look through the bloggers content archives and answer the following questions:

1. Does the blogger upload more guest blog posts than his/her own content?
2. Do the other guest blog posts link to commercial webpages?
3. Do the posts use a lot of exact match anchor text?
4. Does the blog charge for guest blog posts?
5. Are there obvious paid links in the side bar?

If you answer “yes” to any of these questions I would personally not bother contacting a blogger as it’s more than likely the content published on the blog will offer little or no value now, and almost certainly none in the future.

A list of criteria my team and I use will often concentrate on the following metrics as positive signals that a blog is worthwhile approaching:

1. Does the blog have a limited number of other guest blog posts?
2. Does the blogger have an active social following i.e. facebook, G+ or Twitter?
3. Do the bloggers blog posts (and guest posts) receive genuine comments from readers?
4. Does the blogger make a real effort in creating content for their users?
5. Does the blogger have content indexed in Google?

If you answer 3 or more of these questions with a “yes” then I usually find you’ll get a good quality guest blog post published that will not only generate a good link back to your site but also an array of positive social signals.

4. How to avoid Penalties from Guest Blog Posts?

While the “off the shelf” answer to avoid penalties is to “create great content” it’s more complicated than that; a very good piece of content, given to an inexperienced link builder for outreach could lead to negative signals and be detrimental to your campaign. They could add too many links in the content, have a high percentage of exact match anchor text or even send out the same piece of content to multiple bloggers.

The way we should be approaching this type of activity is to create as many positive signals as possible in each blog post – making it hard/impossible for Google to think what you’re doing is not valuable.

• Link to your competitors – as crazy as it sounds it makes sense. I’m not saying link to a competitor for the sake of linking but if there’s a genuine reason then don’t hold back. Whenever I write a genuine blog post it’s very rare that I’ll only link to one external website and it’s ever rarer if I link to a page that’s sales focused. A nice way of linking to competitors is to look at what content they’ve created that is community driven, such as blog content or social campaigns. If Google’s algorithm does develop further to tackle links in guest blog posts then having 3-4 external links pointing to similar websites that are relevent to the page content shouldn’t give a negative signal but a positive one.
• Create bespoke content – if you really want to create a blog post that will genuinely add value then include assets like videos, infographics and images that have been created specifically for your guest blog post. This will of course increase the cost of performing guest blog posting but making sure the content is bespoke for each blog will usually ensure good pickup, links and social signals – all strengthening the value of the link back to your website.
• Link to your Google+ profile – If you’re writing good content then credit yourself (or your writer) – it shows authenticity to both users and search engines, also with the development with Google Authorship it just makes sense you start including the link.
• Invest in big content – If you invest 30 minutes into a piece of content it’s highly likely that the returns are going to be low, if any. If you have a resource at your disposal then spend anywhere up to a few days creating something worthwhile. Content that has been heavily invested in looks like it’s been heavily invested in and readers are smart enough to realise this – while your output in terms of quantity might be less, the returns will be much higher
• Anchor text strategy – simply put, exact match links strategically placed around content (even good content) looks unnatural and is likely to raise flags with Google, not to mention too many exact match links are likely to trigger Penguin devaluing the links anyway. Link using brand terms, keyword + brand terms, every day phrases and URL combinations – again it’s actually what you’d do naturally anyway.

5. Maintaining Blogger Relationships

An area often overlooked by smaller companies and agencies but if you create a good piece of content for a blogger and they receive lots of visits, social shares and links then they will want to work with you again. While the SEO value of another link from the same domain may be less than from a new domain it is again a positive signal to Google that your website is trusted (and being re-linked to over and over again) – this kind of behaviour is also a pattern that happens naturally.

Don’t keep your relationships with your bloggers to that of online only, host offline events and invite the ones you’ve worked with. Meeting bloggers face to face and involving them in your brand will lead to much more than the occasional link and while many will deny it a large number of bloggers will still ask for money or incentives – offline events are a way of getting around that problem (and keeping within Google’s guidelines). To me the initial guest blog post is similar to a first date – you want to leave a good impression, you want to be liked and you don’t want to be the one that does all the chasing!

It will take you more time but your results will be far more valuable and sustainable

Taking all these points into account, which is by no means quick or easy, you will start to see much more value come from guest blog posting. Not only that but you should be future proofing a link building technique to help increase your organic visits/revenue and rankings.

As you can see there is now a line break towards the end of the page separating a new set of results – notice the line “more results for” – with a strike through of the company name.

Depending on how many organic search results there are for each person seems to dictate how high up the page break appears; i’ve seen it appear as high a position 4.

Could this be the start of blended or extended search results, lets wait and see..

Will Reynolds

•  There is no finish line when it comes to link building
• Use your out of office to let people know what you do, Will’s wife received £1k donation
• Nudges – small actions can lead to bigger goals
• Use newsletter subscribers to help build social followers, after they signup point them to your twitter, Google+
• Links don’t make companies money, the actions that those links lead to do, Will then suggested Distilled rename linklove to revenuelove
• Will tweeted about Rackspace over Christmas talking about their values and that nudge lead to their customer service team  asking to guest blog post on their site
• some times you need to give away your secrets to build links, don’t hold back
• Printing pages are still valuable, thousands of people still use these, especially for learning
• Linkdomain intitle commands in Bing still useful for finding out psites that link to your industry

Lyndon Antcliff

I must apologise that I didn’t add more insights but I stupidly brought an iPad to the conference and live blogging on that tablet is near impossible!

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• How do I Get Them to Link? Lyndon Antcliff at #Linklove
• Small Business SEO for £350 per month #LinkLove
• Linklove 2013 – There is no Link Builidng Finish Line

What I found more interesting was Aaron Wall’s blog post on how Google themselves had done the same, promoting some of the core services and products like Adwords, Analytics and the Chromebook. One can only presume that the internal marketing department for those areas are NOT familiar with their own webmaster guidelines – which really actually doesn’t surprise me, given the size of the business.

Anyway – I managed to spot another national UK Newspaper with an advertorial – the Mirror seemingly putting 4 do follow links with exact match anchor text pointing to “MoneyVista”. (view the page here: http://www.mirror.co.uk/money/personal-finance/cheap-insurance-compare-comparison-sites-1705747)

I would hope that the guys over at the Mirror are now formatting the links in this article with the correct no-follow and start implementing a checklist for the guys that upload the content to avoid reductions in PageRank.

Moving on to the broader subject we all know paid links are bad but what’s not been discussed in specific detail before are the parts of the subject that constitute “grey areas” – of which there are many.

• Advertorials are often done by the biggest brands in the world by people that don’t even realise what SEO is – they look for consumer reach and PR pickup. While it’s completely the responsibility of the buyer and seller to know the correct technical setup such as the “no follow” – these are often missed 
• Product reviews – what’ to stop someone like Apple giving away 10,000 Mac Book Pro’s to the top most authoritative bloggers? Nothing. I’d be willing to bet that at least 30% would write about Apple and most likely link to them too
• Blogroll Links – a lot of bloggers still genuinely like to link to their friends, colleagues and respected similar websites but with the risk of penalties I’m sure many now avoid this
• Web Designer Links – many agencies and web designer like to mark their work with “Produced by” or “Designed by” at the bottom of websites. This usually happens to businesses that are small or medium sized as they don’t usually know the implications of leaving it there
• Partner Links – for larger businesses there are often company partnerships, these often result in crossover linking, either on a stand alone page or in the footer of a website. Sometimes this is a business requirement and useful to consumers – but would search engines know this?
• Guest Blog Posts – at the moment this is OK to do but only if you have a genuine reason to write something of value. Small or duplicated guest blog posts are NOT acceptable but many still fear their good ones could put them at risk.

I’m sure most of these links above will become outlawed if they’re not already – or simply just no-follow all links to remove risk.

Besides the new thumbnails showing the old brand logos has reduced in size and the business description now removed.  At the moment (9am GMT) the thumbnails are not showing fully in the UK but they are on google.com – most likely because it’s rolling out now.

What else is interesting is that Google now seems to be cutting off posts after 24 hours, probably in a bid to keep results fresh:

You can see that in the UK for a number of brands that do actually have quite a good presence on Google+ they now do NOT trigger their listing in the search results:

• Toyota has over 200k +1′s and over 2 million followers
• Burberry has over 2 million +1′s and 2 million followers

If anyone else has any more information on this update please let me know.

This is an area that I’ve always been questioned with by large businesses that want as much ownership from their brand in Google’s search results as possible. There are a number of reasons for wanting to own the first page of Google’s results (be it 10 or 7 results) but the simple fact is that if a potential customer is searching for your brand then you want to do your upmost to ensure that it’s only your brand they can find, not a competitor.

It’s something that Google has also tried it’s best to address with numerous, and not always successfully updates to its algorithm; think of the various versions of sitelinks, multiple listings from the same domain in search results, Google+ integration and the most recent destruction of extract match domains which will eradicate any attempt of tapping into your brand share by affiliates.

I do, however still see many brands, big ones too, that are losing out on at least 25% of their brands search volume – simply by not owning listings after position 3. So what can you do?

Social Networks – Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube

This is the most obvious of locations to start with but don’t confuse them with being easy to rank for, if you don’t optimise them they won’t rank for your brand name for a long time. Remember to use your business name where possible when setting them up i.e. in username, URL, bio, descriptions. To really get better rankings for all these networks there needs to be a verified relationship in place, essentially link back to your website from all profiles and on your website link back to all the profiles (think reciprocal). Even with the setup in place it will take time (but nowhere near as long as before), you’ll need to post regularly of course, your own content as well as others – build your fans & followers etc.

Wikipedia

This is again one of the more obvious ideas for protecting your organic brand listings but another one that’s not as straight forward as you might think. If your brand page already exists on Wikipedia then it will either be for another company with the same name or generally just a skeleton profile with very little or inaccurate information showing. Creating a Wikipedia page is something of an art form; to ensure its setup correctly be sure to provide as much company information as possible, be neutral when writing, highlight key historical dates, stats and achievements and be sure to cite credible references throughout.  In the external links section make sure to link back to your business, although this is a nofollow link it does show Google again that it’s a relevant result and there is some relationship in place – this is one of the results that can very quickly start ranking for your brand phrases and is certainly a good place to start.

Applications

Although iTunes and Google play applications have been around for a while now it’s only quite recently I’ve started to see the landing pages for them appear on the first page of brand searches. This could be for a number of reasons; brands are now leveraging mobile more with the building of apps and Google’s ever changing algorithm assigning more authority on iTunes landing pages. This will certainly be one of the more expensive ways of adding another owned listing to the search results but whatever application you have it will add to your brand experience and draw a high percentage of the CTR in from the search volume opportunity.

Sub Domains

This is probably one of the oldest methods of protecting a brand in Google, often unintentionally of course. Whatever the reason for your company using them, be it an international/language strategy or simply a way to segment a section of the main domain (think press and jobs) Google will still list these under the main domain if they carry enough authority. You just need to search for Google to see how they’ve segmented all their services (like maps, images, news etc.) and they are one of the few brands (that until recently) own all 10 listings (if you search in .com). As sub domains are treated like separate websites you will of course need to build up links and authority which may take some time.

GEO-IP Detection with TLDs

Top Level Domains are my preferred choice when thinking international targeting, sometimes, depending on your location you could have multiple language versions of the same site appear in Google. This usually happens in locations that have the same language i.e. US, AU and UK results are often mixed – when searching for a specific brand this is even more apparent. There is one area which boarders on being sneaky and not entirely in line with Google; if you own a .com then set the server side GEO IP detection to that of whichever country the user is in so they get redirected to the correct content. At the same time promote/link build for the local TLD and what you’ll get is both (for example see Alexander McQueen websites) the .co.uk and .com appearing in the same search results.

Microsites

This is one of the more expensive ways to ensure your brand occupies the entire first page of results and since the EMD update slightly less effective. If your company is large enough and you have a genuine reason to create a microsite; could be for a PR campaign, launch of a new product or even a sister company – then this is still a viable option. You’ll need to optimise the sites for your brand keywords as well as supporting the authority with external links and links from your main website.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn could fall under other the social platforms point but as its more business orientated it provides an alternative way to take up organic space in Google. A LinkedIn profile can be enhanced by the way you set it up as well as by the number of employees you have within your organisation. If your company has a few hundred employees that all link to your website externally as well as internally you’ll find the profile building up authority reasonably quickly. If you have fewer employees then participation in discussions is the best route to building up a good profile. Finally a good tip is to have certain employee’s link to other areas of your business such as sub domains or microsites, i.e. Head of HR link to a jobs. sub domain or a specific microsite. Besides taking up space in the organic results it also illustrates a good overview of your business and who’s involved in the running of it, for certain niche’s, especially marketing and technology these act as trust enhancers.

Google Local

Let’s not forget of Google local and how powerful this can be in certain verticals, especially travel and high-street retail.  If you run a business that has many physical locations then you should consider this an advantage for SEO, especially when thinking of organic brand visits. Currently in the UK, high-street retail/travel brands display up to 3 local listings within branded search results, usually within the top fold of the page. My personal tip for local is that to try and make each local listing link to a related landing page on your main company website, the content on that destination page is heavily considered by Google when looking at generic phrases.

Authorship Integration

Google Authorship and author-rank has already grown in value over 2012 and this will continue in 2013. This is quite a recent addition to the SERPS but Google will now display people when users search for brands; this makes complete sense as people’s search intent could now shift towards people included or involved with brands. The example above shows how Rand is now displayed for SEOmoz related search queries – of course you need to have strong social signals for the personal profile and between the brand.

With all these options in place you should be able to capture as much of your organic brand search volume as possible, not only that but reinforce to potential customers how much of an authority your brand is online and deliver the best experience over multiple websites.

I first noticed the result on my iPhone on which you can see the stars above the description but also with a smaller thumbnail of my author image:

I thought that a bit strange, so I also tested on a desktop too and got the same results (also same on tablet):

Now the particular restaurant was good (although not great) and the stars look ok but what if I had rated the place a much lower score? This would have then triggered a low star rating in Google for people searching my name, which could be misinterpreted as I’m not trustworthy or of low value – which I like to think I am not.

If this is intentional I’m not really sure what value this adds, perhaps if they include a phrase like “latest review” that might clear the confusion up.

Now in the past Google has tested including news results into top positions for competitive terms but having worked on a car insurance client for a few years I was unfamiliar with this particular site, so I looked a bit closer. Here is the page that ranks number 3 in the UK for the term car insurance:

Looks trustworthy huh..

The content on the site is very small, there’s nothing I could find that indicates hidden text or mass on-page spamming. Looking at the categories on the site it’s obvious this site is used to spam multiple categories/verticals as it’s all unrelated:

What’s worrying to me on this result is that for the last 3 years I’ve not seen this happen on a keyword of this magnitude, so something new must be being used by the spammers or there’s a new hole in Google’s ever changing algorithm.

The site is 5 years old and the is a fairly low number of low quality links but nothing out of the blue – I’ll have a look further into this but if anyone has any insights please comment and let me know!

**Update – Google dealt with the spam within a matter of hours, but given the search volume for that phrase these guys probably made quite a bit of cash.

Back in August this year I conducted an analysis looking at 10 of the top brands on Google+. I carried out the study for a number of reasons but primarily to help answer a question that had been grating on me – why do some brands appear to do so well on Google+ when others seem to struggle?

Some of my findings included:

• 50% of the top 10 brands had a daily follower increase of over 5,000 people

• The other 50% of the top brands had less than 1000 new followers each day

• About 75% of the brands posted more than 5 times a day with decent quality content

• The top performing brand, Cadbury, had an average of 68 comments per post, with the rest averaging at 20, so quite engaging

• Only 50% of the top brands actually promoted Google+ on their websites

• H&M and Burberry were the only 2 brands which had over 5,000 new followers each day but had no on-site promotion

• Out of the top 3 brands the number of comments that appeared to be fake looked like this: Cadbury = 1%, Pepsi = 20%, ASOS = 60%

Afterwards my general feeling was that some brands were doing things properly and some were cheating, it’s as simple as that. The results were certainly nothing new if you look at some of the fans and followers of big brands on Twitter and facebook, it’s just part of the way some companies operate.

So, what’s changed 3 months on?

Looking at the number of  Google+ followers in August and the number of new followers over the 3 month period, it shows some interesting insights. While the likes of Cadbury, H&M and Burberry have appeared to remain quite consistent – Glamour Magazine and Samsung USA have slowed right down. In fact, over the last 3 months Samsung USA has only had 552 new followers and Glamour Magazine with just over 22,000. The most new followers come from Burberry and H&M with over 500k new followers in just 3 months.

I’ve looked at both sites (Samsung USA and Glamour Magazine) and nothing has changed since my last analysis in terms of promoting G+, so looking on http://socialstatistics.com you can see that there was a sudden drop in followers for Samsung USA, this has been steadily happening since mid-September.

For Glamour Magazine it’s quite similar; up to August 2012 they were averaging around 5,000 new followers a day and then all of a sudden this too dropped to a much lower number. As well as this, in the start of October they began to follow other people/pages, which they had not done before:

Make of it what you will, but something looks out of place for these two brands.

Next on the comparison was the post frequency – essentially I’ve graded each brand a score out of 10 based on the number of times they each post content, those that post content regularly get a higher score:

Sony was the only brand that has improved the amount of content they’re posting (although it’s still fairly infrequent). I found it quite surprising that most brands had actually slowed the number of posts down.

The last metric I revisited was looking at the post quality of each brand – this again was just a personal scoring out of ten. The maximum point generated would mean that a brand has been posting high quality content such as images, videos, competitions and unique content specifically for Google+.

What’s good to see here is that the majority of the brands in this analysis have upped their game when it comes to Google+ content. Glamour Magazine and Burberry were the only two brands which seem to have dropped the quality ball slightly. I believe more brands are realizing that you cannot just post web content on Google+ and expect to proposer – more brands are creating unique content specifically designed for Google+ (with logos often appearing in imagery and videos). It makes sense to me as most people will have Twitter and facebook already, so why would they want a third location of the same style?

I will keep an eye on these brands and revisit in another 3 months.

For those of you who havn’t yet seen it:

Matt explains in so many words:

• Guest blog posts that are recycled over and over will be discounted – don’t do it
• Guest blog posts that write the “bare minimum” of 300 words are generally not considered good quality and are probably ignored
• If you have something insightful, valuable or genuinely interesting to say it is OK to guest blog post
• Make sure the content is well written – it helps if the writer is an expert in the field

Generally speaking guest blog posting has worked well for SEO for a few years now (extremely well to start with) but over the last 12 months in particular it’s really become one of the standard/out of the box link building approaches for many brands – and is therefore now less valuable/harder to find the gems. Typically the best way of identifying the right guest blogging opportunities is to use various Google commands to track down content and URLs that are looking for guest blog posts, there are even command generators available now to make it that little easier for you.

So what makes a Non-Friendly Google guest blog post?

I saw this great tweet from MyCool King:

He really hits the nail on the head with this one, whatever Matt Cutt’ says in his videos always use that information with a pinch of salt. The bottom line is that more than likely the only way Google will be able to detect if you’re abusing guest blog posting is if you do something glaringly obvious to them that makes you stand out:

• Use the same author bio or boiler plate
• Mass syndicate the same guest blog post on multiple blogs
• Create different blog posts that include the same links to the same pages
• Talk about topics which are not relevant to the blog itself
• Write posts in bulk and distribute all together

These are only some of the ways I believe you run the risk of Google’s algorithm taking more of an interest in what you write for guest blog posts.

Time invested will equal a good SEO return

If you want to play the numbers game it’s quite simple – you can either write many low quality guest blog posts which will give you direct links and a slight uplift or you can spend time writing few big guest blog posts of much higher quality that will give you immediate links PLUS social signals, reference links from other bloggers and more author-rank. Now i’m probably not alone when I say; I’ve created guest blog posts of 300-400 words but those words have been written very well by someone who knows what they’re talking about – unfortunately that probably isn’t going to cut it for returning enough value to make the process worthwhile anymore – the goalposts have just moved (or were they always this far apart..)

How to write a perfect guest blog post for Google?

• Finding the right blog will play a big part in determining how well the content will perform, obviously bigger brands with a good social profiles will give you a larger stage in which to talk about your subject. You’d actually be surprised how many high street and large brands are willing to accept content. They’re not always under an obvious URL too so you might need to do some digging around for email addresses – commands will not always find the gems people.
• Theme and topic of your blog post is equally important. If you’re trying to build links to uninteresting keywords (like finance) it can be quite hard to be imaginative and still produce something relevant but it’s essential you capture the right audience. Look at Google Trends and insights for inspiration and time-relevant angles may present themselves.
• The content itself should obviously grammatically well written but always support your blog posts with references, data and images where possible. If it looks like you’ve produced something that has taken hours then more people will value and respect the content you’ve created.
• Adding the links is often the part where people slip up – adding links in the first paragraph to a commercial website will look artificial to users and search engines. Don’t force the links in and don’t write for the links – create a blog post as if it was simply an essay and look to where you can add opportunities afterward.
• Author Bios are  often a good place to include a branded link to your website – explain who you are and also link to your Google+ profile if you have one

Examples of Google friendly guest blog posts

For the SEO’s we don’t have to travel far to find a location that illustrates guest blog posting done well – YouMoz. A section for SEOMoz’s users to write freely about the various topics within the industry with the added ability to include external links. What makes this so special? Well, they have a strict content guideline and really push users to write to the best of their ability, there’s also a review process which is undertaken for each blog post to ensure quality is continued.

A very high percentage of the posts on YouMoz look valuable – so when thinking about writing content for another blog use similar guidelines for yourself or writers before sending to blogs – you’ll find the blogger will love it and you’ll reap the rewards for much longer than before.