Contents
Why Is Guest Posting Crucial For Your Seo Campaign?
Guest posting is a method for acquiring high-quality links to your website. You can find relevant blogs in your niche and submit the article based on your expertise and experience. It’s a great opportunity to share your case study research, opinions, and news in your industry. When you receive the dofollow link, it’s great for SEO purposes; nevertheless, a nofollow link or even your brand mention is good for your Digital PR activities.
How to Find Sites for Guest Posting?
There are many ways to find sites to publish your guest post. Google searches and competitor analysis allow for the first prospect list to start outreach. You can learn about a strategy to find sites to publish your guests here.
What Sites Are Valuable For Your Link-Building Campaign?
Let’s review a list of signs of a good site for a guest posting campaign
- Niche Relevance
The site publishes posts relevant to your industry (technology, education, logistics, etc.). Also, you can review universal sites like News or Business-related to publish your post.
- Relevant traffic
The site has traffic relevant to your business. Sometimes you can mark “relevant” the site based on the Home page information, but when you check keywords and top pages, you can find keywords like “7405202492”, “mutf_in: axis_mult_dir_1z038cw”
When you publish the link to your site on one of the “spam” sites, it can have a negative impact on your SEO results, and often, such sites don’t last long, and you lose your efforts.
That’s why it’s important to form a checklist to avoid spam sites that accept guest posts. Below is a list of fast and deep checks to bypass spam sites.
How To Identify Spam Sites?
There are two ways to notice that the site has spam links. The first one is a visual check of the site’s content and deep research using SEO tools or Google search operators.
💡 Sites that actively sell links can invest in the design of the site and content, at least for the home page, to increase the authority of the domain.
Check The Site Manually
Let’s start with the fast checking of the visual site of the site that accepts guest posts.
Look at the content and Design & UX
The first impression is important, so when you scroll through the pages of the site and notice:
- the home page links to essay services or casino sites;
- poor layout;
- missing “About us” page or no contact details on the site.
All mentioned signs point to avoiding this domain from your guest posting prospecting list.
Check the site’s niche
When you find a niche-relevant site, you do not hesitate to reach out to it. How about News, Business, Marketing sites? You can check via Google search operator site:[domain name] and [your keyword]
Use Google search operators
Here is a list of useful Google search operators to help you determine if the site is valuable for your guest post outreach campaign.
Indexing
Write to the Google search field site:[domain name] and review how many pages are indexed by Google.
Check if the site publishes casino, CBD, and adult content
It’s high risk for the site to be penalized by Google for publishing a casino or other prohibited content. That’s why you can easily check if the site publishes grey niche links.
SEO Tool Checks
Imagine that your site passed all manual checks and you are ready to submit the guest post. Nevertheless, you should check the site via SEO tools and estimate the traffic number and quality.
Ahrefs Top Pages check
The main check is to review which pages generate the most traffic to the site where you are going to submit the guest post.
That traffic should be:
- Relevant to the site’s category
- Relevant to your niche
- One page doesn’t generate more than 30% of the total traffic
- Normal distribution of the traffic
Let’s review samples of the sites
When you publish the auto-related post, the mentioned site is a great example to submit the post. We can see relevant keywords, no specific page that generates more than 30% of total traffic, and during the last year, there was no such drop or fall in traffic.
Here is a sample of the site that doesn’t pass the traffic relevance check. We can notice that it is not relevant to the site’s category keywords, and one page generates more than 60% of the traffic to the site. We can’t recommend this site for an outreach campaign.
Is high DR a quality sign?
Essentially, DR (Domain Rating) is calculated to assess the quality of a site. Nevertheless, there are a lot of ways to screw up the indicator artificially. That’s why we pay attention not only to the DR number, but also to estimate traffic quality and manually review the site for further guest posting outreach.
PBN check
A PBN (Private Blog Network) is a collection of websites created by a single entity to build backlinks and improve the search engine rankings of a particular site.
Why should we avoid PBN sites? These domains in a PBN are used to manipulate the authority of other domains. That’s why it’s not a good strategy to invest your time and money in publishing guest posts on such sites.
How to check if the site is included in the PBN?
- sites use a similar layout
- same IP Address
Conclusion
Guest posting is an effective way to acquire high-quality backlinks for your website. Nevertheless, links on spam sites can damage your site. That’s why it’s crucial to select sites for your link-building campaign carefully. Take your attention to PBN sites, domains with irrelevant traffic, and link-selling farms, and publish your guest post on quality sites.