Don’t write guest posts—unless you want to grow your competitor’s blog.
The “link juice” you get from guest posting is no longer effective.
Let me show you exactly why guest posting isn’t worth it and why I never write guest posts.
Who Am I to Tell?
I’m not someone who is just holding a grudge against everyone who rejected my guest posting pitch.
Instead, I’ve never even sent one because I think it’s just a waste of time.
I’ve grown my blogs to millions of reads without doing any SEO strategies like link building or guest posting.
Instead of guest posting, a much better strategy is to just write blog posts on your own blog.
Here’s exactly why.
#1 No SEO Benefits
Guest posting has traditionally been a key to getting backlinks to a website.
But here’s the thing. Building backlinks isn’t worth it anymore—no matter how you do it.
At least I haven’t built links to any of my sites and every one of them is getting a ton of traffic from Google.
Here’s the newest site at just 3 months of age:
Without a single backlink, it’s growing nicely and getting closer to 1k daily pageviews. 🙂
But why guest posting or link building isn’t effective anymore?
Google doesn’t want people to game the rankings.
The top search results should be good reads that provide value. Not just some “SEO hacked” fluff that ranks but helps absolutely nobody.
Someone who builds links is lying to Google into believing that the site is more credible than it actually is.
It’s like in real life someone claimed they’ve had 100s of clients while they’ve had none.
Google has already caught up to SEOs trying to cheat the system and is only getting better and better at it.
Thus, guest posting is becoming less and less of a use.
💡 Make sure to also read: SEO Is Useless for Blogs
#2 No Audience Boost
Another reason why you might want to guest post is to boost your traffic.
Just write a good post that gets traffic and then link a portion of that back to your site, right?
This is a good idea—on paper.
But here’s the problem: Very few people click through links.
I don’t have exact data but from what I’ve seen, the number of outbound link clicks is usually in the 1% ballpark.
To get 1,000 visitors from a guest post, you’d need 100,000 readers.
Sadly, most posts never do those kinds of numbers.
To put it short:
- If you write 100 posts to your own blog, you could get 100k visitors/month with a good strategy, of course.
- Write 100 guest posts and you will probably see less than 1,000 monthly visitors.
Obviously, those numbers are not exact.
But I truly believe that guest posting is at least 100 times less effective than just writing posts on your own blog.
#3 Hard to Find These Days
I get a ton of guest post proposals daily. Those pitches started to pour in around 10k monthly visitors.
So basically every website owner gets a ton of pitches—which makes it very hard to stand out.
I’ve agreed on a couple of guest posts in the past. Sadly.
The quality was so bad. Those posts are always written just to get those links. I think most just use AI tools like ChatGPT to generate those posts and to avoid providing at least some value.
So I never agree to do guest posts anymore.
I’m pretty sure most web owners don’t do it either. It’s just an extra hassle at no gain.
The point is that it’s hard to get accepted as a guest author.
Of course, there are guest posting sites you could try.
But those usually don’t allow (do-follow) links. Instead, they force all links to be no-follow. This is because they want genuine collaborations only.
Long story short, it can be really hard to get a guest posting gig.
#4 Inefficient
If you want to get your guest post published, it needs to be a top-notch piece of content.
Basically, every “rule” applies that would apply to your own blog.
It needs to have a ton of unique images, and visualizations, and overall be the longest and most detailed post about that topic on the internet.
This can easily mean a full day of work.
And for what? Just to grow your competitor’s website. I don’t think that’s a good business move.
#5 Google Penalty
These days, guest posting can do more harm than good, if you ask me.
Google knows that people do guest posting to try to manipulate search results by acquiring those links.
Then there are those guest posting hubs. Those are websites that agree on every guest post pitch and allow do-follow links.
You could for sure get your guest post there, right?
But this can actually cause more harm to your site.
A link from a site like that tells Google that your blog has likely been part of shady guest posting activity. This is super easy to spot, by the way.
You can already see sites with built backlinks get absolutely hammered by Google algorithm updates.
Google wants to get rid of sites that aren’t putting in the work and try to manipulate the search results instead.
When Guest Posting Might Make Sense?
Guest posting only makes sense if the collaboration is genuine and you’re trying to get absolutely no benefit from it.
Here are two scenarios when I’d consider guest posting.
#1 Help a Friend
If your friend just launched a blog, why not help them by writing a post that ranks on Google?
It can also help your friend know how to write quality content that has a chance to rank on Google.
I would’ve loved it if one of my friends would’ve shown me how to write blogs when I started as a clueless beginner.
#2 Genuine Collaboration
If you like networking with other bloggers, why not do a genuine collaboration?
A guest post exchange might be a funny idea.
If there’s some industry knowledge that your peer possesses that you’re not comfortable writing about, why not ask them to do it for you?
In exchange, you can offer something similar to your partner.
Notice that in both cases, it doesn’t really make sense to ask for a backlink. Unless it’s actually a recommendation for a truly useful read.
Wrap Up
Don’t waste time writing guest posts to get a backlink.
Google knows these strategies well and can see those from miles away.
I’ve never written guest posts because I want to focus on growing my own business instead of my competitors.
Instead, focus on writing a ton of quality content on your site and go the route that it actually takes to build a successful blog.
It’s a long grind, not a short sprint.
Regarding the same issue, I’ve written another post that might be interesting to you: SEO Is Unnecessary for Blogs
Thanks for reading. Happy blogging!