Guest posting on Rankbank

A guest post is an article you write that another site publishes, usually with a link back to you. The writer gets a link from a site they do not own, which is the kind of link search engines weigh most heavily. The site gets an article it did not have to write. Rankbank sits between the two and keeps a record of what was agreed, what was submitted, and what actually went live.

The deal, in plain words

You write the article. Someone else publishes it. The link inside it points back to your site.

That trade breaks down in ordinary ways. The author writes 1,500 words on a topic the site never covers. The editor asks for changes in an email thread nobody can find two weeks later. The article goes live with the link stripped out and nobody notices for a year. Every part of the flow described here exists because one of those things happened to somebody.

The four steps

Rankbank tells the story the same way on your empty My Guest Posts page, and it is worth reading once before you start:

1. Write it. "Bring in a Google Doc or write in the editor. Everything saves as you go — a draft is never lost."
2. Check the links. "Rankbank lists every link in your article so you can confirm each one is intentional before anyone reviews it."
3. Send it for review. "The receiving site's editors read it against their published rules. You'll see their decision and any change requests here."
4. It gets published. "Once approved, the site publishes it and the article's status updates on this list."

If you are the writer

You pick the site you want to write for, agree to its published rules, then either import a Google Doc or write in Rankbank's own editor. When you are done you go to Review & send, look at your article and every link it makes side by side, and send the package to the site's editors. From then on you watch it on My Guest Posts: reviewed, changed, approved, published, checked.

You do not need an organisation or a website of your own to do any of this. An account with no workspace is a guest author account, and the sidebar labels it Guest Author. See Writer view and Site owner view if you have both jobs.

If you own the site

You turn on guest posts for your site, write the rules you want authors to follow, and publish them. From that moment your site is findable by authors and your /submit/{slug} link works. Submissions land in a review queue. You read the article, leave comments tied to the exact sentences you want changed, and approve, request changes, or reject. After you publish the article on your own site you paste the live URL back into Rankbank, which fetches the page and confirms the links are really there.

Articles 8 through 12 in this category are the owner's half of the story, and they say so.

What Rankbank does differently

Three things, and they are the reason the flow has the shape it has.

The rules come before the writing. An author sees the site's published guidelines on the submission screen, ticks a box to say they have read them, and that exact version of the rules is pinned to the submission. If the site rewrites its rules next month, your article is still judged against the version you agreed to.

Every link is shown to you before anyone else sees it. The Review & send screen renders your article with each outbound link turned into a chip, next to a table of the sites you link to. Nobody is checking up on you. The point is that you notice the stray link to a competitor before an editor does.

The live page gets verified. After the site publishes and submits the live URL, Rankbank fetches that page and compares it against the approved version: the links, their anchor text, where they point, and whether the page is indexable at all. A passing check is what turns a post Verified live and files it in your Content Library.

Where things live

Under Guest Posts in the sidebar:

• Submit Guest Post starts a new article and asks where it is going.
• My Guest Posts lists everything you are writing and where each one is in its journey.
• Content Library holds the posts that went live and passed their check.

Site owners get one more: Articles under the admin section, which is the review queue.

Where to start

If you are writing, read Submitting your first guest post. If you own a site and want submissions, start with opening your site to guest posts.