If you buy guest posts at any volume, you run into a wall of vocabulary. Some of it is genuinely technical. Some of it exists mostly to make a cheap thing sound like a sophisticated one. Here is a plain-English guide to the terms that matter, with honest notes on the ones that should make you slow down.
What you are actually buying
Guest post. An article published on someone else’s website under an arrangement with them. In practice, the term now usually means a paid placement, even when nobody says the word paid.
Sponsored post. A guest post that is openly paid and labeled as such. In the US, the FTC requires a disclosure, usually a line reading “this content is sponsored by [brand].” A site that includes paid links but refuses to disclose the payment is cutting a corner that is not theirs to cut.
Bulk guest posts. Buying placements in volume, 20 or 50 or 100 or more, usually at a per-post discount, often across several clients or an ongoing campaign. The word says nothing about quality. Bulk can mean a hundred careful placements on real sites or a hundred careless ones on junk. The number is identical.
Site run (or duration). How long the post stays live. This varies more than buyers expect. Some sites remove posts after a while; some offer a fixed term. The Good Men Project, for example, runs sponsored posts for eighteen months, renewable, which is a specific and honest number. Be suspicious of anyone promising “permanent” placement for a low price, because nobody can guarantee permanence for the life of a website.
Anchor text. The clickable words a link is attached to. Over-optimized anchor text, the exact keyword you want to rank for repeated across dozens of placements, is one of the oldest and most detectable footprints in the business.
Do-follow / no-follow. A tag on a link that tells search engines whether to pass ranking credit. Do-follow passes it; no-follow tells engines to discount it. Buyers care a great deal about this and many sites are vague about it, so it is always worth asking a site directly which kind of links it gives.
The numbers people shop by
Domain Authority (DA) / Domain Rating (DR). Third-party scores, from tools like Moz and Ahrefs, that estimate how strong a site is. Useful as a rough filter, dangerous as your only one. Worth knowing: Google has said plainly that these third-party scores are not its own signals and do not come from Google. Buying by DA alone means optimizing for a number Google never promised to reward.
Traffic, real versus reported. Whether actual humans visit the site. A high authority score with no real readership is a warning sign rather than a bargain. A link on a site nobody reads does nothing for an audience and, increasingly, little for the algorithms either.
The words that should make you nervous
PBN (private blog network). A cluster of sites, often built on expired domains, secretly owned by one operator to sell links to each other and to clients. When it is discovered, and it usually is, the links get devalued and the association can rub off on you.
Link farm / content mill. A site or network that exists only to publish high volumes of low-value content and sell links. If you cannot tell what a site is for besides selling placements, you are probably looking at one.
Niche edit (or link insertion). Paying to slip your link into an existing, already-published article instead of commissioning a new post. Cheap and fast, and often a tell that the “editorial” relationship is a fiction.
MFA / ghost site. “Made for advertising,” a site with no real audience: plausible-looking pages that exist to carry ads and links and are read by almost no one. Your content can be technically live there and functionally invisible.
Parasite SEO (site reputation abuse). Publishing third-party content on a reputable site with little real oversight, purely to borrow its ranking power. In March 2024, Google gave this a name and a policy and began acting on it. What used to be a clever tactic is now a documented liability.
The new AI vocabulary
AI Overviews. Google’s AI-generated answers that sit above the traditional results and cite sources. They shifted the goal from being ranked to being one of the sources an answer engine trusts enough to quote.
GEO (generative engine optimization). The newer practice of trying to get cited by AI answer engines rather than only ranked by search. In plain terms, making sure the AI knows who you are, trusts the company you keep, and has a clear reason to mention you.
E-E-A-T. Google’s shorthand for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust, the qualities it says it wants to reward. Not a dial you can turn, but a fair description of what real publications have and content farms do not.
That is most of the vocabulary you need. The through-line, if there is one: the terms that describe real publishing, editorial oversight, a real audience, honest duration, clear disclosure, tend to age well, while the terms that describe shortcuts tend to turn into liabilities. A glossary is a small thing, but knowing which words are warnings is most of what protects a bulk budget.
For agencies, resellers, and brands who would rather buy the kind of placement that fits the good half of this glossary, The Good Men Project offers paid guest posts and bulk guest post programs on a real editorial publication. For pricing and to find out more, email [email protected].
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Photo credit: iStock.com
