Guest Blogging
Does Guest Posting Still Work?
Editorial guest posting works. The version sold by the link package still exists, and it is a different activity with a different outcome.
The question comes up because guest posting has been declared dead roughly once a year for a decade, and because two completely different activities share the name. One of them still works. The other has been a liability for years and is still widely sold.
The Two Things Called Guest Posting
The first is contributing an article to a publication because you have something worth saying and its readers are your audience. An editor decides whether to run it.
The second is paying for placement on a site that exists to host paid posts, priced by domain authority, with a link in the second paragraph. Nobody edits it and nobody reads it.
Google's position has been consistent: links in guest posts that exist to manipulate rankings are link spam. That describes the second activity precisely and the first one not at all.
Who Absorbs the Penalty
This is the part usually left out of the sales conversation. When a link scheme is identified, the site being linked to takes the damage. The site hosting the posts is selling to a hundred other buyers and can absorb losing one.
So the risk sits entirely with the buyer, while the seller carries none of it. That asymmetry is worth understanding before signing up for a monthly package.
What Editorial Placement Still Does
- Audience: Your thinking in front of readers who have never heard of you, with the publication's credibility behind it.
- Credibility: A byline in a title your buyers respect, which sales can point at.
- Links that count: Editorial links are the kind search engines have always valued, precisely because they cannot be bought.
- Relationships: An editor who runs your piece once will read the next pitch.
How to Tell Which You Are Being Sold
- Ask whether placement is guaranteed. Editorial acceptance cannot be guaranteed by anyone.
- Ask how sites are priced. Pricing by domain authority means the link is the product.
- Ask to see the target list. Sites with a "write for us" page selling posts are not publications.
- Ask what happens if a pitch is declined. If nothing is ever declined, nothing is being pitched.
A supplier promising a fixed number of placements per month at a fixed price is describing bought links, whatever the proposal calls them.
The Answer
Yes, if you mean writing something worth publishing and pitching it properly. It is slower, fewer placements land, and it holds up.
That is the version our guest blogging service sells, including the part where some pitches are declined.