Guest posts and backlink exchanges on your blog

Two other parts of Rankbench are about somebody else's writing appearing on your site, or your pages appearing in somebody else's plan. Both know about a blog we host, and both are less work because of it.

An approved guest post

Guest posting ends with an article you have reviewed and approved, and then a question: where does it actually go? For most sites the answer is a copy and paste into their own CMS.

If your blog is here, the review screen has a publish button named after your blog instead, such as Publish to Redmonark. <!-- example -->

What it does: creates the post, credits the writer as an author on your blog rather than as a Rankbench account, keeps every link exactly as the two of you agreed it, and records the published address back on the exchange so both sides can see it is done.

That last part is the one that used to go wrong by hand. A published guest post with no recorded address leaves an agreement that never completes, and both sides chasing.

What is stripped. A guest post is sanitised harder than your own writing. Embeds and media come off it entirely. Every anchor and its rel attribute stay exactly as approved, because those are the thing that was actually negotiated and the validator checks them against the agreement.

If the writer resubmits after publication, the same rule applies as everywhere else: if you have edited the post since, their new version arrives as a suggestion rather than overwriting you.

Your blog in a backlink exchange

A backlink exchange works from a list of your pages: what you have, what it is about, and what you are willing to link from.

Pages on a blog we host join that list automatically, the moment they are published. They do not have to be found by a crawl first.

Each page carries what a partner needs to judge it: its title, what it is about, and whether you have marked it as one you will link from.

Adding a link somebody agreed to

When an exchange gets to the point where you owe a link on a specific post, the exchange screen has an Add this link to the post action for a post on your own blog.

It inserts the agreed link into the post, in a sentence that makes sense rather than in a list at the bottom, and saves it. If the post is published, the change goes live; the link is then visible to the check the other side runs.

It will not insert the same link twice, and it will not touch a post somebody is in the middle of editing.

What the flags do not change

Neither of these features can publish to a blog that has been paused or whose plan has lapsed. The blog answers 503 in that state, and putting a post on a site nobody can read would satisfy an agreement on paper and not in fact. The screens say so rather than appearing to succeed.

Deleting a blog, or a post, that a partner is using

Worth knowing before you tidy up.

Deleting a post takes it out of the list of pages you offer, so an exchange that was relying on it stops offering it.

Deleting a blog takes all of its pages out, in one move. Both sides see the change in their own dashboards rather than finding out from a broken link months later.