Guest Blogging Post-Penguin 2.0

Any website owner that uses guest blogging as a means to which they try to move  themselves up the Google ladder has seen the many changes that have developed throughout the last few years. During the golden days of blogging, it was easy to  share and repeat information on blogs because the word was out: “as long as you have links posted all throughout the internet, Google sees you as a viable website of interest for higher rankings in searches.” Guest blogging quickly became the way to do this. Although this is still the case to a small degree, a tactful approach must be made if you are  still a strong advocate of guest  blogging for your internet marketing campaign.

Guest Blogging Post-Penguin 2.0

The Penguin 2.0 launch has brought a lot of uncertainty as to whether guest blogging will thrive or die, but it does seem that Google still puts a high price on guest blogging. It’s what goes on within these posts that Google monitors more closely. Here are some tips to ensure you will keep guest blogging alive for everyone else and benefit from it yourself:

Raise the quality of guest posts

The guest blogging market has been flooded with overwhelming amounts of repetitive content and countless spammy links. This is to blame in part on Google. If Google had been more particular before their system had been taken advantage of, there could have been an internet full of heavy, fulfilling content. If content really had been treated as king, would the blogosphere have the same amount of intelligence that it currently has today?

If the quality of guest blogging or the value upon which it is developed and used stays at a high level, the effects of backlinks may be able to gain a higher assessed worth again. Since websites are pulling back their openness to guest bloggers, a natural pruning is already in order, but if the general writing public takes this matter seriously, the grip could potentially loosen and guest blogging would be able to take a more prominent role for traffic creation once again.

Stop using the same backlinks over and over.

The more often a website is backlinked, the more that it falls into the “spam” category. Let’s face it; if you are putting your site’s link onto 5 posts a day, you are officially a spammer. There is no other description. You may not have the intentions of being a spammer, but that is what you have become. There is a loophole around this, however, and it is to create what I am coining as “cyclical linkage.” Cyclical linkage is creating a link system that is developed due to having multiple interconnected sites that commonly and uniformly link to each other in multiple ways.

Many talk about the benefits of having multiple blogs, but who in their right mind grew up thinking that it would be a great idea to have 4 blogs? The goal is to spread the wealth in one aspect, but in another aspect we can focus directly on the issue of avoiding spam. To Google, it looks like you have your readers from your guest post discussing SEO written by you along with a link to your personal blog, but you have actually inconspicuously taken them there to connect them to a secondary link to your SEO site. Then on the next post, you write another great blog post discussing SEO and send them to your actual SEO site. By doing this, you are taking the focus off of the overuse of that one particular link but still keeping your audience linked up. The key is to make sure that all of your sites are so interconnected that a potential client wouldn’t miss the link to your other site(s).

Although this is not a perfect approach, the key here is to remove the potential of being downgraded due to having too many backlinks for one particular site. By interconnecting your sites, you are creating cyclical linkage between your own sites (which can enhance sales and traffic on all of the sites), and avoid the degradation of your site at the same time.

Get the content right, already.

This should not even be a discussion anymore, but it seems to still be the everlasting issue. Even the guest posts that discuss “how to become a guest blogger” have the same, repetitive content issue. Without fail each one will discuss how you should have great, new content. There are plenty of posts discussing how to become a guest blogger and few that discuss how to be a great guest blogger.

One key to get the content right is to create relatable, interesting, fresh, and most importantly, longer content. The lengths of posts are beginning to shift because if it is necessary for you to write 2000 words instead of 750, there very well should be some decent content to keep yourself writing for that long. Tim Ferriss, bestselling author and writer of “The 4-Hour Workweek” writes on his website, “Nearly ALL of my most viral posts are more than 3,000 words.” Enjoy the days of 1000 word posts while they last.

Get the word out, and keep it out.

Let’s be honest. It takes a couple of hours to put this post together. By the time I formulate my ideas, get them on paper, beef them up, edit them and re-edit them, it’s easily about 2 hours. Then I spend my time emailing sites to get the post posted. Depending on how long that takes, I could easily have invested 3 hours into a single post. If you don’t spend at least half of that much time promoting your post, I would argue that you are wasting your time. Can you imagine what kind of effect your post could have if you were (hardcore) promoting the post for an hour and a half? Now your link is becoming more valuable because you’re getting more traffic from more sources to that post. On top of that, when the site manager sees how much traffic you have brought to their site, you can almost guarantee another writing opportunity.

Be sure to follow up with comments and spend time talking to fellow readers on twitter, Google +, and Facebook. The discussion should be taking place all over the internet. I promise you, if you are taking the writing process seriously, the link process seriously and the social process seriously, your ROI will pay out.

Chris Gunn is the owner of Guest Post Sharks, a guest-blogging company developed to help businesses build successful internet marketing campaigns. He enjoys traveling with his wife Jessica as well as pouring into others in ways that help them further their strengths. You can find him on Facebook, Twitter, or Google +.
If you would like to write for bloggertrix, check our guest posting guidelines.