How to link guest posts to get the most author trust rank

Guest blogging is a hot topic now. There is much unclear with it: some of doing guest blogging get penalized, other are up and about spreading guest posts, and do it fearless and en masse. Ok, the life keeps moving, and incoming links must be acquired, whatever comes, cause they remain one of the strongest signals for the site ranking. In the last article about guest blogging i've written about guest post markup, which helps you to create an additional trust signals in it. Shortly, reading an article from Bill Slawski about Google co-occurrence patent and keyword relationships i got an idea about utilizing of co-occurrence for guest blogging.

What are main problems with guest blogging from Google's point of view:

• guest article hasn't topically to do with the whole publishing site
• guest article author is rewarded with (highly) keyword-enriched link anchor text from the guest article to author's own site.

The topical relation's issue is the business of an author alone - only author decides, where to guest post. But what is the motivation to guest post if not the keyword-enriched anchor in the backlink? It must be any kind of threading relation from the guest post to the own site. Let us look, how to set the thread without penalty fear:

Keyword preparation

The first in the To-Do list is the keyword research. Lets assume, the keywords are already selected. My advice: rephrase your keywords so, that they become entities. Not important from where: Wikipedia, DBpedia, Freebase, other structured vocabulary. It is to ensure, that the keywords are definitely known by Google, and not only known, but uniquely defined and, in the best case, URI-approved. If in doubt, which keyword to take: one more matching, but not "entitized" or lesser matching but defined as entity... In this case i would create an entity by Freebase for the better matching keyword:) And then use it.

Preparing posts for publishing

Presumed there are 3 sites, which will publish our guest posts, are selected and the owner agree with our suggestions about markup used in our guest posts. Then go to work: write our posts down, enrich them with researched keywords. Use semantic markup and metadata on writing, especially those, which help to make machine readable the key concepts of our posts:

• use entities,
• verify them with URIs from Wikipedia and Freebase,
• use Dublin Core property "subject", Schema.org properties "about" and "mentions"
• place author info in your posts and describe it with semantic markup.

After posts are done, let them be published. Don't forget to write an article to the same topic, optimized for the same keywords, and publish it on your main site. This article will play an important role of a thematic anchor.

Link structure

Now we have to do with the principal task: how to establish relations between guest posts and our main site?

1. We link our guest posts between each other. Link with keyword-rich anchors so, like it would be done if these sites were yours.
2. Add to each guest post text a visible authorship link to your Google Plus profile.
3. Add to the post on your site, which you've written to the same topic as the guest posts, keyword-rich links to all guest posts.
4. Add to the post on your site a visible authorship link to your Google Plus profile, which contains keywords both in the title and in the link anchor.
5. Publish in your Google Plus profile messages about each article release.
6. Publish all of guest posts, post on your site and release messages at Google Plus time-displaced, that the whole job is done within a month. 

Doing so it is important, that

• your own site with the thematic post is your main site and has a dofollow link from your Google Plus profile, from the "Story" area.
• sites, where are published your guest posts, are in the Google Plus list of sites, where you are the contributor.

This approach establishes a topical continuum with clear defined attributes, and creates indirect but reassessed and through keywords anchored relation between your site and guest posts. Google Plus profile serves as filter of unwelcome effects of direct keyword-rich linking of guest posts. But it accumulates the topical trust and your authorship carries this trust forward to your site. This approach complies with Google's approach to measure, whether your and your publications are trustful regarding defined topics. If you give Google what it want, you can't be wrong :)

The don't fear of guest posts - write good posts, link them correctly and enjoy the summer!