What is Google's stance on manually reviewed/approved unique Guest Posts with dofollow brand (domain.com) links (in the author bio) since this unnatural link warning/penalty phenomenon that has swept the web? Any thoughts?
Rules are not too clear on guest posts, but they have added more information to this page in the last week:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
They state that it needs to be relevant content with a relevant author profile in the link, and you
can not do something like this as an author profile:
"Make sure you check out "life insurance deals" by jono jones who sells "best life insurance" and "buy online now" from his website lifeinsurance.com for example.
I would use the same methodology as Mashable for example in the author profile below the article:
http://mashable.com/2012/10/08/intel-romantic-video/
ClickZ is a Mashable publishing partner that provides marketing news and expert advice. This article is reprinted with the publisher's permission.
Where "ClickZ" is a branded link to the website, I mean even looking at SEOmoz they follow a similar trend where they have 1 branded link in an author bio. You can also feel safe linking to social profiles even link it up to G+.
But overall the stance is to attract natural links via content marketing and social.
