It is a known fact that guest posting helps with increasing a company’s SEO. But it has changed drastically and immensely over the years since the time that it had just made its appearance on the digital scene.
Digital marketers have always relied on buying guest posts as a means to increase brand authority and secure backlinks to help with their content ranking. But today, there have also emerged certain competitive niches that were not to be seen even at least a few years ago.
We have therefore summed up the various ways in which guest posting has seen a change over the years.
1. Improvement in Content Quality
At one point in time, even a terribly worded guest blog post used to be posted as long as it had the ability to secure a link that could help the company market. As a result, a lot of the blogs were accepting any and all kinds of content. That was until Google intervened and put a stop to the effectiveness of these articles.
This led to filtered and good-quality content finding its way through. Google mandated that posts that get approved must have real readers rather than just be a tool to generate links.
The advent of smartphone usage has also been a contributing factor. Now that almost everyone has a device in their hands, it has led to visible growth of content consumption. People have become selective with the content that they choose to spend time on, and clickbait titles gradually lost their appeal on the way.
2. The Importance of Social Media
As opposed to earlier times, the amount of engagement and interaction with the content on a website impacts its ranking. This makes the role of social media extremely important as nothing else helps in promoting your content better to reach as many people as possible.
3. No More Black Hat Techniques
One black hat technique was the practice of hiding codes in infographics that were a part of guest posts. This technique was practiced in abundance till Google and other search engines penalized the websites that used to do this.
Yet another thing that was in practice was paying for a post to be published without the readers having any knowledge of it. This went against the FCC guidelines and was also attempted to put a stop to, but some bloggers are said to still participate in it.
4.Development of Strategy Tools
Earlier, websites had to rely heavily on guesswork as to if something might end up working in their favor or not. Nowadays marketing departments are easily able to identify the type of content that is supposed to bring them traffic.
This has been possible only for the tracking tools available these days. The data collected for these tools are from Facebook shares or guest post visits, which in turn help them to understand how the information can be turned into an actionable and executable content marketing plan thereafter.
buying guest posts is one of the most important tools that company websites try to use to their advantage in order to generate backlinks. Due to this reason alone, it will continue to be an essential part of the marketing tool that companies will continue to use for years to come. However, the guest post niche of marketing is a constantly evolving process. Therefore, this also means that with time we are also sure to witness even more changes in the nature of guest blogging as we have been seeing so far.