SEO industry was shaken several times by Google algorithms and this had caused many SEOs to change their link building strategies to cope up in this huge change in SEO. There are many strategies that were developed and analyzed carefully by SEO experts as alternative to the old fashioned link building tactics that we used to practice before Google rolled out their deadly solution to prevent spamming and unnatural linking activities such as:

In the modern era of SEO, branding is the most effective way to establish a strong online connection within your network. To ensure that you will be fully established your online popularity and reputation, providing highly informative information in a form of content is the primary key to success in your branding strategy. Mostly, this is done through guest blogging on popular websites as guest authors believe that this is the only possible way to increase their online exposure, referral traffic to their websites and to build links unfortunately.

Personally, I do guest blogging for my blog to get the attention of other readers within my focused niche. I guest posted on not so many blog related websites with a legit amount of traffic that might visit my website through links on the post. The competition in SEO is no longer about links, it’ about content. High quality content that goes viral will reward the author and the linking pages on the content in the long run. However, we should not rely on guest posting that much as it may negatively affect our website if Google updates their algorithm for another round.

Here are the snapshots of my guest post. :)

Some scary facts about guest blogging:

You might disagree with me on this but guest blogging may become the reason why your website will be affected by the next Penguin update. We are all aware that penguin was designed to target link manipulated techniques and Google can easily identify if you are manipulating your links through guest blogging.

Here’s how:

Author Bio – This is a section where we briefly introduce something about ourselves, profession and business. Typically, we include links in the bio to drive visitors to our website in a form of anchor txt. Unfortunately, most people use their target keyword in the author’s box and they overuse the same author’s bio with the same target. Although, it is natural to have them same author bio description, it is unethical to keep having a link in the bio that pointing to your website.

Massive Guest posting – Guest blogging is becoming the new way of article directories but the difference is blog sites have regular readers, active social media attention. If you guest posted on twenty different related websites within your niche, all are highly recognized websites and all have the same author’s bio description with a single anchor text, it may look like  manipulative.

It is guaranteed that we will benefit from disturbing content to other websites but we should not overtake advantage of its benefits and only participate if necessary. Content contribution is the best way to introduce ourselves to blogs with established communities and increase our exposure but keep in mind that when linking our website in the post, it should come in a natural way. 

Joseph Gojo Cruz is the author of RankingElite, a Philippine-based Online Marketing blog. Joseph has been working in SEO industry for over 3 years from website audit, link and content development, social media and search engine optimization. Connect with Joseph on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook. Joseph is also a contributor on SEJ and Ahrefs.