Guest posting sites in 2026: 65 checked write-for-us pages

If you handle marketing for a small US business, you've probably found lists that promise 1,000 guest posting sites and wondered how many still work. A guest posting site is a blog or magazine that publishes articles by outside writers, usually with a short author bio and a link back. Our own 2022 list made that 1,000 promise, and when we counted its tables, it held 520 unique sites.

So we start with how to pick a site and how to spot a link farm, then quote what Google says about guest post links. The checked list follows, grouped by niche, and the last section shows how we checked 616 sites and why 551 were dropped. Our view: pitch five sites your customers already read, and skip any page that quotes a price for a link.

How to pick a guest posting site from this list

A site from the tables is only worth a pitch if your customers read it. So start with readers, not with a score or traffic figure. A home-services company, for example, may get more from a parenting blog read by homeowners in its own region than from a national tech blog with ten times the traffic. Reader fit is also the first link step in the off-page SEO checklist we keep for small businesses.

For each site on your shortlist, we'd run four checks in this order:

1. Open the guidelines link in the table and note the topics, the word count and the link rules the site states.
2. Read the five newest posts. Look at the bylines, the dates and where their outbound links point.
3. Confirm the page still answers before you pitch; paste its address into the HTTP status checker on our site and look for a 200.
4. Pitch one specific idea that fits the guidelines, with a link only where it helps the reader.

Then there's the link itself. That's where most guest posts go wrong. Google's link best practices page says "Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to". In practice, that's your company name or a page title in your bio, not a phrase stuffed with keywords. If the editor adds nofollow, don't push back. You're there for the readers and the mention, and a link the host is comfortable with is one that's likely to stay up.

Once a site says yes, our guide to writing a sponsored post readers trust shows the tone we'd aim for.

How do you spot a link farm?

That's where most old lists fail, and it's not always obvious. A link farm, as we use the term here, is a site that publishes posts mainly so the buyer gets a link. It often hides behind a "write for us" page. Our checker dropped 11 sites on four signs, and you can spot each one yourself. The counts are from our October 30, 2026 run:

No guidelines page used the exact words "guaranteed dofollow," but our reread found four close cousins. One charged "a fee to make do-follow links," and three promised a dofollow backlink for every post they published, in return for the article.

Other signs need a person, not a script. One is a blog where every recent post has a different stranger's byline and two or three commercial links pointing at unrelated businesses in different states. The other is an old domain that now lands on a different business. Our redirect checker shows each hop, and 27 of the 616 domains we checked redirected to another site.

Google's spam policies call "Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links" link spam.

What Google says about guest post links

Those policy pages don't ban guest posting. They name the kind of guest post link that gets sites in trouble. Google's Search Central blog post from May 25, 2017 put it plainly. It "does not discourage these types of articles in the cases when they inform users, educate another site's audience or bring awareness to your cause or company". The problem, the post says, starts "when the main intent is to build links in a large-scale way back to the author's site".

Today's rule sits in Google's spam policies for Google web search, which showed a last update of August 28, 2026 on the day we checked. Its link spam list includes "links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites". The 2017 post named the same habit: "Stuffing keyword-rich links to your site in your articles".

What does breaking them cost? Google's spam policies and its March 5, 2024 spam update post both say such sites "may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all".

Paying for a post is a separate question. Google's answer is about the link. The spam policies say "Google does understand that buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes". It's allowed when such links are "qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value". Google's Qualify your outbound links page adds: "Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid links) with the sponsored value". US disclosure law is a different rule, explained in a Q&A on Endorsement Guides from the FTC; our sponsored blog posts guide covers that side.

Two more points matter. Nofollow is a hint, not a hard block. Google's September 10, 2019 post on nofollow made the link values ranking hints that day. For crawling and indexing, it said "nofollow will become a hint as of March 1, 2020". And the site reputation policy covers posts placed on a strong host mainly to borrow its rank. It "applies where third-party content is published on a host site mainly because of that host's already-established ranking signals", in the spam policies' words. The March 2024 post announced it.

Our take: write for readers, keep one link in your bio with your company name as the anchor, and accept nofollow without arguing. In our view, one good post on a blog your customers already read is worth more than ten on sites that publish anything. The first can send people who might call you; the others mostly add risk under the policies above. No paid service is needed to get that link found, either, as the guide on how backlinks get indexed explains. With those rules in mind, here's the list.

The checked list of guest posting sites, by niche

Now the list itself. Every site below passed the checker and our reread of its page on October 30, 2026, and the guidelines link is the only link in each row. We mark those links nofollow because we're pointing you at a page, not vouching for the site. Google's outbound link page says to use nofollow when "you'd rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site". Site names are plain text, and the groups follow what each site's own homepage title says it covers.

Tech, marketing and SEO (18 sites)

11 of these 18 use a plain /write-for-us address. The rest name it their own way.

A couple of rows work differently. Electronics For You runs a contributor network page with its own rules, and WriteUpCafe calls itself built for writers and bloggers. Read its page to see who edits what you post before you count a piece there as an editorial placement.

Business, education, law and home (9 sites)

This group mixes a national legal magazine, a home-equity platform for homeowners, two education sites and small-business blogs like Young Upstarts. Attorney at Law Magazine and Online Clothing Study both title their pages "Article Submission Guidelines," so expect formal rules, not a contact form.

Parenting and family (6 sites)

Parenting had the most candidates on the old list, 49, and only 5 passed; CafeMom joined from our other list. On 8 of the dropped ones, the pages we reached were old guest articles, an archive or a contributors list. None asked for new posts.

Lifestyle, health, food and pets (13 sites)

From Peruvian and paleo recipes to pet tips and mindbodygreen. Note that 30Seconds links a contributor agreement, which is terms you accept, not a style guide.

News, opinion, sports and culture (15 sites)

It's the largest group, and it isn't all American. Australian Times, Football Talk and North East Connected on UK domains, Daily News Hungary and Zero Tackle write for readers outside the US. Zero Tackle covers Australia's NRL rugby league, for example. Pick those only when your story fits their readers' country, because a Florida plumber's tips won't land with readers in Sydney or Budapest.

Travel and outdoors (4 sites)

Four travel sites passed. Three are outside the US, including GTP Headlines for Greek tourism news. SunCruiser, an RV and snowbird site, explains how to submit articles and photos.

A list like this goes stale fast. Check the guidelines page again on the day you pitch. If it's gone, or it now shows a price list for links, drop the site; both happened on our own old list. Pitch the sites you'd actually read yourself, write the piece as if no link were allowed, and let the editor decide where your one bio link goes. Once your post is live, the plan for promoting a business blog post covers sharing it. To hand off outreach, our SEO service pitches editorial sites under Google's rules (it's a paid DigitalTreed service).

How we checked 616 sites, starting from the old list

That list is a script's output, not a pick by hand. Here's exactly what the script did. It ran from one machine in India on October 30, 2026, and every request and decision is in the run log. The candidates are the 520 unique domains in the 31 tables of our 2022 post, plus 96 sites named in two of our other guest post list posts. We didn't add anything from search engines, and a named site didn't count unless its homepage title carried that name.

For each domain, the script checked that DNS resolved, then made a plain GET request to the homepage. It sent an honest user agent, DigitalTreed-check/1.0. It waited 1.5 seconds between requests to the same site and gave up after 10 seconds. It tried each URL twice at most: https, then http if https couldn't connect. It read robots.txt first and obeyed it, though RFC 9309 notes that those rules "are not a form of access authorization". On 4 sites, robots.txt ruled out a guidelines path for our user agent, so we skipped it.

It looked for a guidelines page only on the site itself. That's links on its homepage, four common paths (/write-for-us, /contribute, /guest-post and /submit), its own sitemaps and links on its /about and /contact pages. A page counted if it answered 200, stayed on the same site and named itself as guidelines. Single articles, tag pages, contact forms and ad pages didn't count.

We didn't work around anything. In total, 78 sites answered 401, 403, 429 or 503, or showed a bot check, and we dropped them rather than retry with a browser's user agent. A 403, in the words of RFC 9110, means "the server understood the request but refuses to fulfill it". Many of those blogs may open fine in your browser, so if one you know is missing from our tables, check its page by hand. Here's every result, with its count, from the final run on October 30, 2026, after both the wider search and our read of the page titles:

Our first run was far too loose. It kept 67 sites, because WordPress quietly sends an unknown address like /guest-post to the closest matching article. Old articles, such as a 2012 post titled "Guest Post At Hotelcoupons.com," passed as guidelines pages, so our first count looked healthier than the web really is today. We tightened the rule, and that narrower run listed 56. Then we searched wider on each site and added our other list's sites, and 88 passed the script. Reading the page titles removed 6 that were articles or forms, such as a yarn cheat sheet. Another 40 sites reached only articles, tags or other pages and count under "no guidelines page."

Then we reread every kept page the same day, opening each with the same plain GET and reading what it asked writers for. All 81 still answered 200. That didn't make them all guest post pages, though. In all, 16 failed on what the page said. Nine weren't guest post pages at all; a publisher's generative AI policy and a staff team page had slipped through on their titles. Two said they're no longer taking submissions. One charged a fee for a followed link and three promised a dofollow backlink in return for the post. The last opened with a block of spam search terms. Each drop and its reason is in test/review-recheck/editor-drops.json.

If a listed site stops loading, our DNS lookup tool shows whether its domain still resolves.

What we tested

We tested whether each of the 616 sites still answers a plain, honest request with its own guidelines page. These are the commands, run from the post's folder, with the final count:

python3 test/candidates.py && python3 test/c_candidates.py   # 520 + 96 = 616 candidates
python3 test/check_sites.py   # -> test/results.json, test/run-log.txt
python3 test/review.py        # title rules + niche groups -> test/final-list.json
# script keep 81; our reread of those pages dropped 16 more -> 65 listed (October 30, 2026)

Raw results for every site, with each URL tried and its status, are in test/results.json. Of the 65 listed, 46 came from homepage links and 8 from a common path. A sitemap gave 8, and an about or contact page gave 3.

FAQ: guest posting sites

How we made this guide: Google's rules here are quoted word for word from six Google Search Central pages; an FTC Q&A and two IETF RFCs cover the rest. Then we ran our checker on 616 sites from the old post and two of our other list posts, and we reread every single page it kept. We signed into nothing and sent no pitch. Facts checked by the DigitalTreed team on October 30, 2026.

First published October 2022 as a list of 1000+ guest posting sites with authority scores. Rewritten October 30, 2026: every site rechecked by script and reread by hand, 65 kept.

Sources

• Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search
• Google Search Central: Qualify your outbound links to Google
• Google Search Central: Link best practices for Google
• Google Search Central Blog: A reminder about links in large-scale article campaigns (May 25, 2017)
• Google Search Central Blog: Evolving "nofollow" (September 10, 2019)
• Google Search Central Blog: What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies (March 5, 2024)
• IETF RFC 9309: Robots Exclusion Protocol
• IETF RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics
• FTC: FTC's Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking