Google and guest posts: What gets indexed and what doesn’t

Guest posts are among the first methods people hear about when learning about link building. 

There are definitely wrong ways to do guest posting.

But if done right, guest posts can also provide opportunities to get some fast wins for websites.

Why guest posting is still a worthwhile topic

Before we dive in, I want to express my hesitation about this topic.

Guest post link building is a small part of what our agency does for local SEO clients and I’m not looking to become known for it. However, we do have some valuable data to share about its potential as a link building strategy.

Ultimately, I know that there is a massive amount of money wasted each year on valueless links from websites picked from Google Sheets lists and popular marketplaces.

I’ve also seen that when done carefully, guest posts can help websites to rank better – in particular, the types of websites that lack the SEO budgets needed to do data-driven link building.

In short: guest post link building is usually a waste of time unless you’re doing it yourself.

By doing it yourself and following best practices in content marketing, you’ll increase the likelihood that your articles get indexed.

Guest posts from websites on marketplaces don’t get indexed

In March, I attended a session where Joy Hawkins shared a test she conducted. She bought around eight guest post links to see if they would boost the search ranking of the linked page.

After a few months, none of them were indexed.

This matters because it would stand to reason that if these posts do not even get indexed, they’re likely not passing PageRank, brand signals or any other benefit to your website.

Given that she purchased them from an online marketplace, they were likely of the lowest quality content and from content farms, which wouldn’t surprise anyone if Google didn’t index them.

What if, on the other hand, they were from thoroughly vetted websites?

Does Google index guest posts from ‘good’ websites?

We don’t do much guest post link building, but we do have clients where it makes sense. 

We’re also doing it in the least spammy way possible.

We vet potential host websites thoroughly – our blacklist is tens of thousands of websites long. We blacklist websites that:

• Have seen big fluctuations in traffic.
• Get all of their traffic from just a few articles.
• Clearly exist for the purpose of selling links.
  • Telltale signs: “Write for us” page, no apparent subject focus.
• Have seen a large drop in the number of pages indexed.
• Lots of keyword-rich anchor text in their “outgoing links” report.
• No social media accounts.
• Appear in the lists we get in spam “dear sir” emails.
• Appear on marketplaces where you can log in and view the domains (trust me, the spam team at Google has logins to these websites, too, you’re not fooling anyone).

Over the past 12 months, we’ve done between 500 and 1,000 guest posts on these vetted websites.

Some of them charged “editorial fees” for us to post them; some didn’t. 

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Of the guest posts we wrote, how many were indexed?

I’m embarrassed to admit that this was not something our link building team was tracking. So, I asked our operations team to build a system for tracking and reporting this (I’ll share what this looks like at the end of the article).

They figured it out and now I had indexing data on these 750 or so guest posts.

Only 65% were indexed: Why so few – or so many? (depending on your perspective)

I didn’t think that the issue was that they were guest posts (which I later confirmed; read on). When I reviewed the articles, I saw the kinds of issues that would have prevented them from getting indexed anywhere.

To start, many of the articles that were written suffered from the typical issues common with blogs that don’t know how to plan content that has a chance of ranking:

• They didn’t target a keyword.
• They targeted a keyword that was too difficult to rank for.
• The format was wrong (Google is showing “how-to” guides and this is a listicle of “reasons why”).
• In a few cases, the article was bad.

In other words, the same reasons why 94% of the blogs people write never get any traffic.

For the articles that did get indexed, it was largely because they avoided these pitfalls. A few of them had even earned a few backlinks themselves.

We made changes and now 95% are indexed

We started holding our guest post articles up to the same standards we hold our content plans to. 

This is really a list of best practices for SEO-driven content marketing that everyone should already know, but I’ll challenge you to look at the blogs of five local agencies in your market and see if they are following these guidelines even on their own blogs.

By doing the following, we started indexing almost all of our guest posts.

• Make sure the topic targets an actual search term.
• Make sure the format aligns with what Google seems to rank. If page 1 is all definitions and beginner’s guides and page 3 is all listicles, odds are they aren’t interested in ranking your listicle either.
• Make sure you’ve covered the topic thoroughly enough (this doesn’t mean it needs to meet a word count; this isn’t high school).
• Make sure there’s “enough” search volume for it to be worth your time to write about.

This isn’t that complicated, but surprisingly few marketers make sure their blog content meets these criteria.

Does the fact that they’re indexed mean they are helping?

I think it’s a fair bet to say that an article that isn’t even indexed is not likely to be helping your website. 

Does that mean that the fact that it is indexed means that it is helping?

One of the takeaways from SparkToro’s writeup on the Google Content Warehouse API leak was that Google is possibly using click data to determine whether a link is high value.

If this turns out to be the case, it may also mean that links no one ever clicks on are considered to be of low value. 

My view is that if you’re writing guest posts as part of your link building strategy, you need to do everything you can to get the articles ranking and driving traffic, but I don’t think anyone outside Google knows for sure.

However, I have seen cases where a couple of strategically placed links for a local business can make a difference.

I’ve seen anecdotal evidence that links in guest posts sometimes move the needle, but they often don’t and almost never will if they are from content farms.

How we tracked if the guest posts were indexed

There are certainly automated methods that would make this easier once you build it, but given the super low volume of guest post link building we do, it doesn’t make sense to build it just to save 30 minutes of manual work each quarter. 

This is why we’re using Google Sheets.

When you link to a URL in Google Sheets, it creates a tooltip. If the page is indexed, it looks like this:

If it is not indexed, it looks like this:

We created a script that compiles any placements from client timesheets into a Google Sheet, where this gets reviewed by the link building team. 

They also use it to add links to existing articles when writing new ones.

Very easy when all is said and done.

If you’re going to build links through guest posts, you should do it yourself

Hawkins’ test results didn’t surprise me because:

• The websites on those marketplaces are almost always content farms. 
• The articles are usually terrible, and Google doesn’t want to waste time indexing garbage that people don’t want to read.
• It isn’t particularly difficult for someone on Google’s spam team to create a profile on one of the marketplaces selling guest posts and nuke the value of all the outgoing links of these domains.

Doing this yourself, or working with someone you know is placing high standards for the websites you’ll write for, will almost always yield better results than what you can get from a website you can purchase links from, or even worse, a Google Sheet with a list of websites.