TL;DR
I stopped selling guest posting years ago and I still write guest posts. Google’s policy does not name the format, it names payment and optimised anchor text. So the test is simple: would you still write it if the link were nofollowed? If the answer is no, it is a link buy with extra steps, and the cleanup is yours rather than the vendor’s.
I stopped selling guest posting as a service a long time ago. I still write for other people’s sites. Those two facts are not in tension, and the distance between them is the whole of this post.
Read what the policy actually names
Google’s spam policies list, under link spam, advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit, or links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites.
Look at what is doing the work in that sentence. Payment. Optimised anchor text. Distribution at scale. The words “guest posts” appear inside a description of a paid placement, not as a category of their own. The same page names creating low-value content primarily for the purposes of manipulating linking and ranking signals, which is the same idea from the other direction.
Writing an article for somebody else’s audience has never been against anything. It is one of the oldest ways to reach people who do not know you exist. What the industry built on top of it is the problem.
What is being sold
A list of sites with domain ratings next to them. A price per placement. A slot for your keyword-rich anchor text. Frequently a writer who has never used the product and a site whose only editorial policy is an invoice.
That is not adjacent to the policy. It is a line-by-line match for what the policy describes, and the fact that it is marketed as content rather than as links does not change what it is. If the deliverable is measured in links and priced per link, it is links.
The test I use
Would you still write this if the link were nofollowed?
That question sorts almost everything. If you would still write it, the audience is the point and the link is a byproduct, which is the arrangement that has always been fine. If you would not, then the article is the price of the link, and you have bought a link and written six hundred words of receipt.
Since 2020 nofollow has been a hint rather than a directive, which some people read as making the test weaker. It makes it cleaner. The tag was never the thing being judged. Intent was, and the test asks about your intent in the only way that gets an honest answer.
What is left, and it is not nothing
Three versions that still work
- Writing where the audience is the point. An industry publication your buyers actually read. The anchor is your name or the bare URL, because you are not there for the anchor.
- Original data somebody wants to publish. This is the strong one. If you have numbers nobody else has, the link follows the data rather than the pitch, and it keeps following it for years.
- Relationships you already have. A supplier, a partner, a client who would introduce you anyway. Slow, unscalable, and the only version that survives contact with a policy update.
The common thread is that the piece would exist even if links did not. That is also why most content does not earn links, incidentally: not because it is badly written, but because it was made to be linked to rather than to be useful, and the difference is visible from a distance.
Where I will not pretend
Paid placements still move rankings sometimes. That is why the market exists and why the prices have gone up rather than down. I am not going to claim the tactic never works, because anyone who has watched a profile after a campaign knows better.
What I will say is that the downside is not symmetrical. The link is worth something until the day it is not, and on that day the vendor is not the one holding the problem. You are, along with several hundred placements you now have to explain or decide whether to disavow, which is its own bad afternoon. I am not willing to put a client in that position for a gain I cannot guarantee and cannot measure cleanly.
That is a judgement, not a rule, and it belongs alongside the other recommendations I have stopped making. The reason for writing it down is the same one each time: the old advice is in documents clients still have, and quietly changing the template does nothing for somebody holding a proposal from four years ago.
The short version
- The policy names payment and optimised anchors, not the format. Guest posting is not banned. Buying links dressed as articles is.
- Ask whether you would write it if the link were nofollowed. That sorts almost every case.
- Priced per placement with a keyword anchor is a line-by-line match for what Google describes.
- Original data is the version that keeps working. The link follows the numbers, not the pitch.
- It does still work sometimes. Pretending otherwise is not honesty, it is marketing.
- The downside is not symmetrical. The vendor keeps the fee; you keep the cleanup.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Link building covers the off-site half, including what not to bother with, and an SEO audit is where you find out whether links were ever your constraint.
