Guest Post Guidelines: How to Create Them for Your Site

Guest post guidelines are the house rules you pin up so contributors know what gets through the door: topics, quality, links, disclosure and how to pitch you. Get them right and your inbox stops being a daily game of whack-a-mole, and your site keeps its good name with readers and with Google.

I sit on both sides of this fence. Linkscope matches publishers with buyers all day, and I run a couple of sites that take sponsored posts myself. The publishers I see in a muddle are rarely the small ones. Usually they just never wrote down what they’d publish and what they wouldn’t.

Why Your Site Needs Written Guidelines

Time is the boring reason, and it’s a big one. With no guidelines, every pitch becomes a little haggle over word count, links, topic and money, and you end up typing the same five replies. With them, you send one link and save your patience for pitches that are actually any good.

The sneakier reason is protection. Google’s spam policies now spell out what its reviewers weigh up when outside content lands on a site: presentation, quality, authorship, and whether the same piece pops up elsewhere. Rules covering all four keep guest posts looking like your own.

What to Put in Your Guest Post Guidelines

Nobody needs a ten-page legal document here. What you want is a page a harried freelancer can skim over a coffee and know straight away whether their idea stands a chance. These are the bits that, in my experience, head off nearly every question before it lands:

• ➜ A line or two on who you are and who reads you, so pitches land with your actual audience.
• ➜ Topics you’re after, plus the ones you won’t go near, with a couple of examples of each.
• ➜ Your quality bar: original work only, a rough length, and how much sourcing you expect.
• ➜ Your link policy. Honestly, this is the section I’d spend longest on.
• ➜ Author bio rules, including whether you insist on a real name and photo.
• ➜ Your right to edit, and a note that accepted pieces can’t pop up elsewhere later.
• ➜ How to pitch, what to send, and roughly how long you take to reply.

Sell sponsored slots as well? Say so in a line and explain how they’re labelled. I’d keep prices off the public page, mind. Plenty of publishers quote privately once they’ve seen a pitch, and it stops your site turning up on every grubby vendor spreadsheet going within a week.

Your Link Policy Matters More Than Anything Else

Nearly all the risk in guest posting hides in the links, so get specific. How many outbound links do you allow? Must they be relevant? Which kinds of sites are flat-out banned? Woolly wording just tempts people to poke at the boundary and see what gives.

Then be straight about money. Google’s guidance on qualifying outbound links asks publishers to mark paid links with rel=”sponsored”, and its spam policies count paid links passing ranking credit as link spam. Take cash for a post? Then spell out how those links get tagged.

Pop in a line about anchor text while you’re at it. Most seasoned editors bin exact-match money keywords jammed into a paragraph, because readers spot them a mile off. Asking for a brand name or a natural phrase protects your article, and frankly does the contributor’s link a favour too.

Disclose Sponsored Posts Properly

Disclosure isn’t only Google’s business, either. Over in the US, the FTC’s guidance on native advertising says paid content dressed like your normal articles generally needs a clear label, with wording such as “Ad”, “Advertisement” or “Sponsored Advertising Content” given as examples readers grasp.

My habit is a visible label at the top of every paid piece, and a note in the guidelines saying so up front. That way nobody is caught off guard on launch day. A buyer who kicks up a fuss about the label is usually telling you something.

Which Buyers to Accept, and Which to Turn Away

Every publisher learns sooner or later that no is a perfectly good answer. The pitches worth a yes tend to rhyme: a relevant brand or writer, a topic your readers would actually click on, a real human author, and someone relaxed about your edits and your labelling rules.

And the ones to bounce? Casino, payday or CBD pieces on a site that’s never covered any of them. Pure “insert my link” jobs. Articles already living elsewhere. Demands for permanent dofollow links with exact-match anchors. Or anyone cagey about who the end client actually is.

Those aren’t merely irritating. Off-topic, duplicated or nameless commercial content sits uncomfortably close to what Google describes in its site reputation abuse policy, and once a section of your site looks rented out, that section can lose its rankings. A month of easy money isn’t worth that.

A Guest Post Guidelines Template You Can Copy

Below is a starting point for your own guest post guidelines that you can paste onto your site and bend to fit. Swap the bracketed bits for your details and strike anything irrelevant. It’s short on purpose, since long guidelines go unread by precisely the people who need them most:

Where to Put Them on Your Site

One page linked from the footer or contact page usually does the trick. Give it a plain name like “Write for us” or “Contributor guidelines”, and tweak it whenever your rules shift. Stale guidelines cause more muddle than none at all, so give them a once-over every few months.

Still pondering what to charge for sponsored posts? Have a read about typical guest post pricing before settling on a number. Go too cheap and you attract exactly the requests you’d rather refuse. Price sensibly and you get fewer, better pitches from people who value the spot.

Selling Without the Inbox Chaos

With guidelines sorted, the next headache is volume: chasing invoices, vetting strangers, juggling a dozen threads. That’s half the reason marketplaces exist, and our guide on how to sell backlinks runs through the options. Plenty of demand comes from agencies buying on behalf of clients, who tend to like clear terms.

Whichever way you go, the guidelines do the same job. They show decent contributors how to get published and politely point everyone else at the exit. Write them once, keep them honest, and they’ll claw back more of your week than almost anything else you do as a publisher.

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