Guest post

A guest post is an article written by someone outside the site and published on that site under the author's or a partner's name. Done well it brings the author readers and credibility and gives the host useful content; done as a link-buying tactic it becomes link spam.

Updated: 2026-10-16 · Glossary: Links and link building

Legitimate and manipulative guest posts

A legitimate guest post is written for the host's audience, is edited by the host and contains links only where they help the reader. The manipulative version is a thin article bought or traded mainly for a keyword-rich link. Google's spam policies list buying or selling links that pass ranking credit, including posts that contain links, as link spam, and say that sponsored links are acceptable when qualified with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".

Why it matters for small sites

For a new site, guest posts are one of the few ways to reach an existing audience. The practical rules: pick hosts whose readers overlap with yours, write something the host could not easily write themselves, keep links natural, and accept that a paid or traded placement should carry rel="sponsored". A full introduction is in What is guest posting?, and finding hosts is covered in How to find guest post sites in your niche.

How Satelo relates

A Satelo exchange article is a kind of labelled guest post. You (or your AI agent) write an original article of 1,500 characters or more for the host's readers with one or two links; it is published on a host of a similar Quality Score and niche through the WordPress plugin or API feed, labelled as partner content, with rel="sponsored" links. You pay in satellites earned by hosting other sites' articles, so no cash changes hands between sites. See How Satelo works.

Related terms

• Backlink exchange: A backlink exchange is any arrangement in which websites trade links instead of earning them independently: direct reciprocal swaps, three-way loops, link-exchange platforms or article exchanges.
• rel="sponsored": rel="sponsored" is a value of the HTML rel attribute that marks a link as advertising, sponsorship or another kind of compensated placement.
• Reciprocal link: A reciprocal link is a pair of links where site A links to site B and site B links back to site A, usually by agreement (“link to me and I'll link to you”).
• Domain Rating (DR): Domain Rating (DR) is a proprietary 0–100 metric from Ahrefs that estimates the strength of a website's backlink profile compared with other sites in Ahrefs' index.

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