Guest post

A guest post is an article published on someone else's site under your byline or containing a link to you, most often bought as a link placement rather than commissioned editorially.

Guest posting is standard link-building vocabulary and a large paid market operates around it, priced by the linking site's authority metrics.

Publishers and editors use the same term for genuine contributed articles, which is the practice the paid market is named after.

A commodity guest post is bought at scale on a metric. A contributed article is commissioned because someone wanted the writing. The output can look identical and, under the book's model, read very differently to a machine.

Wire syndication distributes one release to many sites at once. A guest post places one article on one site. Both appear on the book's stop-buying list.

The book replaces the old test of domain metrics and a followed link with a harder one: would this placement corroborate my entity even if the link were removed. It puts commodity guest posts on general blogs at the top of its stop-funding list, noting a placement surrounded by casino, CBD and crypto content is testimony from a witness no court would seat, and argues a dozen genuine placements a year beat a hundred commodity posts for about the same money.

Read about the book's argument.