How Important Are Contextual Links in Guest Posting?

As in how much weight do they really hold when you are trying to outrank your competition for valuable keyword phrases?

The answer is they are pretty darn important! I mean, if you are an affiliate gateway site, and your sole purpose is to get at the top of the SERPs so that you can recommend these products to people. That is why these companies create affiliate programs in the first place is it not?

People are always trying to say that guest posting is a terrible way to build links, that perhaps we are diluting the Internet world with too much raggedy content. This isn’t the case with everybody however – there are a lot of white hat guest posting techniques being demonstrated all throughout the Internet.

The fact remains: Google’s algorithm loves links – especially contextual links, and even ones that can be built through guest posting. This gets proven time and time again. And Google is going to have to come up with something much smarter than Panda to try to solve the guest posting phenomena (if it even needs to be solved).

But Just Exactly How Valuable Are They?

Guest posting is extremely valuable in the field of affiliate marketing. Number one, because it is very hard to write many authority articles when the topic of your website doesn’t really permit you to unless you are a highly creative person – which everyone on this planet just isn’t.

With a good SEO strategy, affiliates are able to outrank many of their actual product providers for very valuable and lucrative keyword phrases. Two distinct advantages that affiliate gateway websites usually have over the companies that actually provide the products, that come with the fact that the owners are a lot of the time a lot more schooled in the game of SEO than the companies are, are that they usually know exactly which keywords they include on each and every page (and where to include them), and they usually have one word or more of the main keyword phrase in the domain name.

Side Note: It is amazing how many companies out there do not include the best keywords on their home page – it just goes to show that there is a lot of money to be made still in the world of White Hat SEO, and the ability to offer high-quality link building services

That being said the company that provides the products usually has a few advantages over the affiliate website as well. For starters, they usually are able to generate way more natural links that the affiliate site. This is what can propel them to the top of the SERPs for keyword phrases, or at least give them a pretty high page rank.

This is where guest posting comes in for affiliate websites. Guest posting gives affiliate websites the advantage that it needs to be able to perform extremely well in the SERPs.

To Summarize Guest Posting

In short, guest posting will allow your website (for instance) to jump from page 11 to 6 in the SERPs in just a couple of weeks with a little bit of hard work and perseverance, and it will allow you to jump from page 3 to page one in just a couple months.

Now depending on the niche and the level of competition – you may or may not have to work a lot harder or longer than you would in other niches.

The Lifespan of Guest Posting

My initial thought is that the only way to eliminate guest posters is to eliminate links as a way to pass a value to a website. Now, Google may find a way to eliminate guest posting in certain different ways, but there is absolutely no way they will mathematically be able to eliminate the value of every single link that was ever created by a guest posting opportunity. They resemble natural links way too much, and doing so would definitely be detrimental to many great websites.