Guest Blogging Bylines: #MyBlogGuest Rules and Best Practices

We have this topic come up again and again: People just can’t write good guest blogging bylines: This is one f the most abused and misunderstood part of the guest article.

Let’s see MyBlogGuest stance on that:

(Reminder: Our Twitter chats are each Thursday 11 a.m. EDT / 3 p.m. GMT. To join, simply follow #myblogguest hashtag and include it in your tweets. Here are a few easy ways to participate described)

First Things First: Keep Your Bylines Unique!

Author bylines are part of the article, so the most important rule applies: They should be *original* in each of your articles.

By keeping your bylines original, you achieve two really, really important (for you!) things:

Your links always appear in the original environment (that translates in better chances for them to have no problem to be included in Google’s index)
You leave fewer footprints: Sometimes, all you have to do to track sown your competitor’s guest blogging tactics is to simply search for some long phrase in the bylines using the “exact match”. Don’t repeat that mistake!

Don’t Get Link Greedy!

It is obvious that a linky byline can put off a good publisher. Don’t risk your reputation and your contacts!

Read this: Guest post bylines: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Now, most important thing: NUMBERS

The general practice is to have no more than 2 links in your byline (one of them is your social media profile):

*** Avoid keyword-rich exact-match anchor text as, per my experience, when you start using keywords in anchor text, they stop looking natural. Link as if Google didn’t exist (i.e. forget about keywords)!

At MyBlogGuest we started by only allowing self-serving links in the bylines (3 years ago). Now, after many Google updates, here are our updated best byline practices:

Link from the byline if you are unable to make your self-serving link flow naturally in the body (Number of links allowed: 1) To get an idea of what a naturally-flowing link looks like, please: (1) read this chat script on natural in-body links (2) take a look at these good examples of naturally-flowing links we discussed one week after that. In short, for an in-body link self-serving link to look natural, it should not be obvious (even for the human reviewer) that’s your link.

Make it “ABOUT THE AUTHOR” Part

We start seeing more and more advertorials instead of bylines: People invite to sign-up, visit or buy. Please don’t do that.

The byline is about the author!

A good idea is probably to also claim your authorship in Google Plus to get more authority to your author profile and also see your picture in the search results.

For that:

Make sure your G+ profile is your headshot (Google won’t display logos in search results)
Link to your G+ profile with ?rel= at the end
Link to your guest post from your G+ “About” -> “Contributing to” section
Use this tool to check you did everything right
Wait for a couple of weeks.

Again, MyBlogGuest now supports Google Authorship

We ask mods not to count this link as a separate link and we request publishers to encourage that as well as authorship markup makes our tactics transparent!

Next Thursday let’s return to this question looking at actually good bylines and sharing our own experiences. Nothing works better than examples! See you next Thursday 11 a.m. EDT / 3 p.m. GMT

https://twitter.com/seosmarty/statuses/266586129774542849

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