Guest post backlinks, as the name suggests, are the inbound links that you earn courtesy of the guest articles published on external websites. Our post on the 15 Types of Backlinks You Need for SEO explains how they’re structured. You basically write articles for other blogs as an external contributor, and they’re ultimately published with links that point toward your site. This whole process is known as guest blogging – and it’s widely praised not just for its link building capabilities, but also for the engagement it drives through content marketing. That said, it’s worth noting that guest post backlinks come in the form of either Dofollow or Nofollow types of links. “Dofollow” is the default type. These are the inbound links that search engine crawlers would interpret as “votes of confidence”. Referral domains publish them to point out your web page as an authority in the selected subject, which then leads to improved search engine rankings. “Nofollow” links, on the other hand, are the hyperlinks that are formatted with a rel=”nofollow” HTML tag. This tells search engines that although your site might be somewhat relevant to the subject, they shouldn’t count the attribution as a direct authority vote. As such, Google’s PageRank algorithm doesn’t directly factor the links into its computation of search rankings. They are, instead, used to drive referral traffic and increase brand awareness. That notwithstanding, however. these two types of guest post backlinks happen to have the same appearance. They are both published as hyperlinked anchor text, which you’ll typically find highlighted within the body of the article or as part of the author bio. Consider, for instance, this guest blog article that was recently published on HubSpot. If you scroll to the fourth subheading under “Viral Marketing Strategies”, you’ll see that the author formatted the anchor text to place a strategic guest post backlink to the dove.com website. And just like the rest of the links on the page, it’s highlighted in blue – but with “Dove Real Beauty Sketches” as the anchor text.