Guest Posting: Selecting the Best Sites to Do It
Guest posting is a powerful link building method if done correctly. The premise is simple: you approach a website owner and offer them original content that includes a link back to your website.
While this strategy has been overused in recent years (leading Google’s Matt Cutts to officially declare it dead), guest posting remains one of the easiest ways to acquire links. And backlinks are still the #1 ranking factor in Google.
Problems happen when you don’t take the time to properly qualify guest posting opportunities. By targeting the wrong sites, you’re undermining your efforts. At best, you’re wasting your time; at worst, you’re jeopardizing your site’s organic value.
There are several ways to evaluate a site’s suitability for guest posting. We’re sharing part of our internal process for vetting guest posting opportunities. The factors below have proven reliable for us and will serve your link-building efforts just as well.
1. Review the site as a returning visitor
The first step is the easiest. Visit the website and make an honest assessment of the impression it leaves on you. Does it have a unique design? Is there a lot of recently published content? Is the content well-written?
You want your guest posting to appear on high-quality, relevant sites. If there’s one golden rule to remember, it’s this: Don’t guest post for the sake of a link, do it to get people to read your content.
Most people don’t read sites that are full of problems or look unappealing. This means that more often than not, you can rule out a website shortly after landing on it. From a simple branding standpoint, you don’t want to associate your name and reputation with a low-quality website.
More importantly, the quality of a website can also be a strong indicator of its authority or lack thereof. If the website looks unattended, has typos/spelling errors, and generally doesn’t present value to potential visitors, ditch it.
2. Check the overall organic strength of the domain
When building links to your website, quality is key. High-quality links will improve your authority while spammy links could hurt it.
One of the most useful metrics to consider in this regard is Moz’s Domain Authority or Ahrefs’ Domain Rating. These ratings measure the authority of a website based on the amount of linking domains, which gives a rough idea of the site’s value to search engines.
If you use Ahrefs, you can enter any website address into Site Explorer to see the Domain Rating (DR). Rated on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 100, Domain Rating provides an estimated value of the site based on the popularity of the backlink. The higher the score, the more authority the site has.
Alternatively (or simultaneously), you can use Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) to evaluate the strength of a website’s overall organic value. Like Domain Rating, Domain Authority is measured on a scale of 1 to 100, with higher ratings generally indicating stronger domains.
In addition to authority, it’s helpful to get an estimate of your site’s organic monthly traffic. Using Ahrefs, you can find this information in Site Explorer under “Organic Traffic“.
Higher traffic means your article is more likely to be read and your link is more likely to be clicked. If a website offers guest posting opportunities but gets less than 100 visitors per month, it’s probably not worth your time.
3. Check outbound and inbound domains
One of the lesser-discussed domain strength factors we check is the site’s ratio of outbound to inbound backlinks.
- Inbound: Sometimes referred to as backlinks, these are the links a website receives from other sites.
- Outbound: Sometimes referred to as outbound links, these are the pages a website links to.
The key thing to keep in mind is that the number of links and referring domains is more important than the number of links and referring pages.
For example, if you refer to Ahrefs Site Explorer, a website may have 1,000 backlinks but only 200 referring domains. That means all of those 1,000 backlinks originated from 200 websites. That’s not as valuable as 500 backlinks from 500 websites.
The number of referring domains is more important because search engines value link diversity. One link from 10 different sites is more valuable than 100 links from one site.
Ideally, you want to see more inbound linking domains than outbound linking domains. This isn’t always a problem in terms of guest posting opportunities (and certainly shouldn’t be used as the sole reason to pass on an opportunity), but this metric can give you a great indication of a site’s popularity and value. If a site has many more outgoing links than incoming links, it could mean that the site is not very popular overall. In either case, this makes for a bad link partner.
There are free SEO tools that allow you to check a site’s inbound and outbound link profiles. In Ahrefs Site Explorer, you can find the number of unique inbound links under “Referring Domains.” To find outbound links, simply click on “Linked Domains” in the left column and refer to the report.
If you don’t have a paid Ahrefs account, you can use a free tool like SEO Review Tools Internal Link Analyzer to get roughly the same information.
4. Check the domain’s traffic history
Aside from the average monthly traffic, it’s crucial to do a thorough analysis of the domain’s traffic trends. In Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, click on “Organic Search” to see a visual graph with this information.
If a site’s traffic is declining, this can be a solid indicator of potential problems. Sites with estimated traffic drops are losing their value, and you may not want to spend the time and effort to get a link from them.
Traffic drops are often indicative of punitive actions by search engines, and you may want to think twice before getting links from websites that Google has devalued or deemed in violation of its terms and conditions.
5. Check the site’s industry relevance
Relevance is key when it comes to link building. If you’re building links from sites that aren’t related to your industry, you won’t generate as much value from those websites. Worse still, a lack of relevance can suggest to search engines that you’re engaging in unnatural link building activities.
One way to avoid this is to look at which pages on your site are generating the most traffic. If most of your top pages aren’t related to your niche, it’s probably best to look elsewhere for opportunities.
Ahrefs once again makes it easy to check the top pages. Enter the domain into Site Explorer, then click “Top Pages” in the left menu.
Another way to gauge industry relevance is to use Majestic’s Trust Flow, which measures a site’s linking to see if other credible industry sites are linking to it.
6. Check how quickly articles are indexed
If you take the time to write an article and link to your website, you want to make sure Google indexes the page in a timely manner. You can easily check how quickly a site’s content is indexed.
Start by finding the most recent article on the site.
Repeat this process for the most recent 3-5 articles to get a sense of how quickly articles are indexed.
This activity shows how often Google crawls a particular site. If your site’s pages are indexed within a day of being published, this is often a hint that the site has good organic value.
7. Check the impact of existing outbound links
Before you drop a link on someone else’s site, take a moment to see how similar links are performing. As with the previous step, you’ll want to start by reviewing a few posts on the site. It’s best to use other guest blog posts.
Look for the anchor text on those pages (you’ll often find the most relevant link in the author bio), then enter the links into Ahrefs Site Explorer. Take a look at the “Organic Traffic” graph. If traffic is increasing, that’s a good sign. If it’s stagnant or decreasing, that could be a sign that the site isn’t passing on much value.
Look at traffic trends for several recent links, as one or two links won’t tell you much. A page’s traffic can increase or decrease for a variety of reasons. However, if you notice that most of your recently linked pages are moving in the same direction, that trend may indicate that links are partly to blame.
8. Beware of Guest Posting Fees
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, guest posting has been abused as a link building tactic in recent years. Part of this abuse is the number of webmasters and bloggers who charge for links in guest posts, which is against Google’s recommended best practices.
It’s also common for publishers to charge some sort of fee for guest posting.
This means that some opportunities may cost you an upfront fee to get your article in front of publishers. Some sites will list fees as part of their posting guidelines. More often than not, you’ll need to contact the webmaster directly and find out the terms.
If a site has excellent authority and engagement, as determined by the previous steps in this article, it may be normal to honor a reasonable guest posting fee. However, if the site fails most of the above checks and the owner requires payment, you should probably ban it.
Many legitimate authoritative sites tend to have some sort of following on social media. Look at their content and see if it gets shared (just look at those Share Now buttons with share counts on their posts).
High social engagement is a great sign, as it can indicate legitimacy and reinforce the value of the site. It can also mean your article is more likely to be shared and your link value is maximized.
Alternatively, you can check if their posts get a lot of comments on the site. Most sites prefer to keep their readers on their own domain and encourage conversations directly on the article pages.
Ultimately, you are checking for true engagement and readership of the site’s content. The more engagement, the more valuable the site.
Conclusion
A great guest posting opportunity doesn’t have to meet every criterion on this list. In fact, we’ve gotten links that provided great value from websites that didn’t pass many of the above factors. But it took our skilled minds and detective work to identify the site’s underlying value.
As a general rule, most of the above factors should be positive if you’re measuring the value of guest posting on a site. You shouldn’t dismiss an opportunity just because there are more outbound links than inbound links or limited social media engagement.
