Blogs That Accept Guest Posts: How to Find Them, and Which Lists to Ignore
By Michael Carter
Filed under: Guest Posting, SEO & Link Building
There are two ways to get a list of blogs that accept guest posts. You can download somebody else's, or you can build your own in an afternoon.
The downloaded list is faster and almost always worse, for a reason that has nothing to do with the person who compiled it: every site on a public list has been pitched by everyone else who downloaded it. The ones worth having stopped accepting submissions years ago.
This covers how to find blogs that accept guest posts yourself, what the search operators actually are, and why three phrases in particular — high DA, instant approval, and free — tell you more about a site than any metric on it.
How to find blogs that accept guest posts with search operators
This is the method everyone mentions and almost nobody spells out. Here are the operators, ready to paste, with your topic in place of the keyword.
`` "your topic" + "write for us" "your topic" + "guest post" "your topic" + "submit a guest post" "your topic" + "contribute to our site" "your topic" + "become a contributor" "your topic" + inurl:write-for-us "your topic" + inurl:guest-post-guidelines "your topic" + intitle:"write for us" ``
The inurl: and intitle: versions are the ones worth your time. A site that put "write for us" in a page URL or title built that page on purpose and still maintains it. A site where the phrase appears somewhere in the body might have mentioned it once in 2017.
Two refinements that cut the junk out:
Add -"guest post service" and -"buy guest post" to the end. That removes the vendors selling placements from your results, so you are left with publications rather than middlemen.
Search within the last year using Google's date filter. A page that said it was accepting guest posts in 2019 and has not been touched since usually leads to an email address nobody reads.
Run four or five operator combinations, put every result in a sheet, and you will have more blogs that accept guest posts than a downloaded guest posting sites list would have given you — and nobody else is working from the same sheet.
Four other ways to find sites that accept guest posts
Operators are the broadest net. These four are narrower and higher quality.
Look at who already publishes in your niche. Find someone who guest posts a lot in your sector and look at where their byline appears. Sites that published them are sites that accept guest posts, and you now know the format they want.
Check competitor backlinks. Run a competitor through a backlink tool and filter for links that sit inside articles with an author byline. Those are guest posts. If a site accepted your competitor, it is one of the blogs that accept guest posts in your sector — and you did not have to guess.
Ask in communities. Industry Slack groups, subreddits and forums have people who know which sites are accepting guest posts right now, and which editors are commissioning. This is the only method that gets you current information rather than indexed information.
Buy the placement. Paying for it is a legitimate route when you need volume on a schedule rather than a relationship. It is also the only one where you can see what you are getting before you commit any writing time.
Why "guest posting sites list" downloads disappoint
Search for a guest posting sites list and you will find spreadsheets with three hundred rows, a thousand rows, sometimes more. They share the same three problems.
They are stale. Compiled once, republished endlessly, never re-checked. A large share of the URLs no longer have a submissions page, and some no longer have a site.
They are saturated. A ranking list of blogs that accept guest posts is one thousands of people have worked through. The editors on it get forty identical pitches a week and have stopped replying to all of them.
They are unfiltered. The list tells you which blogs that accept guest posts exist. It does not tell you whether anyone reads them, which is the only thing that matters once you have the URL.
That does not make lists useless. It makes them a starting point you still have to filter, rather than the work itself. Treat a downloaded list as raw prospects and expect to discard most of it.
High DA guest posting sites: the metric trap
High DA guest posting sites is one of the most searched phrases in this category, and it is the one that costs people the most money.
Domain Authority is Moz's 1–100 estimate of how strong a backlink profile looks. Domain Rating is Ahrefs' version. Neither is a Google metric and neither appears in any Google ranking system. Both can be raised deliberately by pointing links at a domain, which is exactly what a site built to sell placements does.
So when a vendor advertises high authority guest posting sites, or a list promises DA 50 guest posting sites, the score is the one number they can guarantee — because it is the one number they can influence. A high da guest post sites list is sorted by exactly that number, and high authority guest posting sites is the phrase that sells it.
The fix is simple and almost nobody applies it: look at organic traffic beside the score.
- DA 60 with 200 monthly organic visitors is a domain someone built up. Nobody reads it.
- DA 30 with 8,000 monthly organic visitors is a real publication that happens to score modestly.
The second site is worth more, usually costs less, and sits lower in every list sorted by score. A high DA guest post sites list sorted that way puts the manufactured domains at the top by design.
If you want high DR guest posts specifically, the same rule applies with a different vendor's number. Searching for high dr guest posting sites sorts by Ahrefs' score instead of Moz's and changes nothing about the underlying problem. The metric is not the problem; using it alone is.
Instant approval guest posting sites: read that phrase again
Instant approval guest posting sites get searched a lot, and the phrase is doing the opposite of what people think it is.
Instant approval means no editorial review. Nobody reads your article before it goes live. Think about what that tells you about everything else published there — because everything else got the same treatment.
A site that publishes anything, immediately, is a site with no standard, which means no audience, which means a link from a page nobody will ever read. Every entry on an instant approval guest post sites list shares that one property. An instant approval guest post sites list is a list of sites selected for the single characteristic that makes a link worthless, and it is the one kind of guest posting sites list I would delete unopened.
There is a legitimate version of fast: a small publication with one editor who replies the same day. That is speed from a short queue, not from absent review. You can tell the difference in thirty seconds by reading two of their recent posts.
If the appeal was saving time rather than the approval itself, buying a placement on a vetted site gets you speed without the trade — which is the honest alternative rather than a pitch.
Free guest posting sites and what you pay instead
Free guest posting sites are free in money and expensive in everything else.
You still write the article. You still research the site, find the contact, write the pitch, and wait. On a genuinely good publication that work is worth it, because the placement is one a competitor cannot simply buy.
What makes free sites a bad deal is when the site is free and low standard — which is most of what ranks for the phrase. Then you have spent the writing time and got the worthless link anyway.
The honest comparison is not free versus paid. It is: what is my time worth per placement, and how many hours does each route take per link that actually counts?
Dofollow guest posting sites: check before you write
Dofollow guest posting sites is a sensible thing to search for, with one caveat: you cannot trust a list to tell you.
A site's link attribute can change between when a list was compiled and when your post goes live, and a lot of publications switched contributor links to nofollow or sponsored in the last few years without announcing it.
Check it yourself before you write a word. Lists of dofollow guest posting sites go stale faster than any other kind. Open a recent guest post on that site, right-click the author's link, choose Inspect, and read the opening tag. rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" means the link will not pass authority.
A nofollow placement on a site with real readers can still be worth writing for — referral traffic and visibility are real. Just know which one you are getting before you spend the afternoon. If the attribute vocabulary is not second nature, our explainer on incoming links and backlinks sorts it out.
Filter the list before you pitch it
Once you have a sheet of sites that accept guest posts, most of them will not be worth the pitch. Five minutes a site decides it.
The quick version: does it have organic traffic, does it publish on a subject your buyers care about, do the recent posts read like someone wrote them for a reader, and do the authors have names and histories.
Those checks matter enough that they have their own guide — how to vet a guest post site covers the full process, including how to spot a private blog network before you pay or write.
And if the plan was to work through free submission links instead, blog submission sites and the rest of them goes through what each type is actually worth. The short answer is less than the lists suggest.
What to do once you have the list
A filtered list of fifty blogs that accept guest posts beats an unfiltered list of five hundred, and the next step is the part most people get wrong.
Do not send the same pitch to all fifty. Read two posts on the site, pitch a specific headline that fits what they publish, and keep it short. Our guide to guest posting outreach covers the pitching process properly, including what to put in the first two lines.
If you would rather skip the finding and filtering entirely, that is what paid placement is for — every listing on our guest post marketplace shows Domain Authority, Domain Rating, monthly organic traffic, traffic country, link type and price before you order, so the filtering is already done and visible.
The short version
Build your own list of blogs that accept guest posts with search operators rather than downloading one, because a public list is a saturated list. Add inurl: and intitle: to find pages that were made on purpose and are still maintained.
Ignore the three phrases that sell lists. High DA guest posting sites are sorted by the one metric a vendor can manufacture — check traffic instead. Instant approval guest posting sites are advertising the absence of editorial review. Free guest posting sites cost you writing time, which is only a saving if the site is worth writing for.
Then filter before you pitch. Fifty sites you checked will out-perform five hundred you did not, and the checking is the part that takes five minutes and saves the afternoon.