Categories do not provide more information or value; category page links are used to game the system and work against you. Categories will rank naturally when the rest of the website is trustworthy.
For guest posts and backlinks to feel natural, you should be referencing your own brand and homepage.
The alternate is if you have a resource, and the site you’re pitching does not have an equal one, get the link to your resource as it is original and the only one available.
Longer Explanation
I always recommend homepage links off of the brand when it comes to link building, especially with guest posting.
Being a brand that people search sends a very strong signal you’re an authority to algorithms.
When people search for your site by name, they’ll likely also add modifiers to the query, such as colors, sizes, adjectives, brands, etc.
These modifiers signal why people go to your website.
It could be the best recipe for brownies for health conditions like diabetes, which color of paint makes sense for a contemporary living room, or the right brand of servers and racks are needed for a data center.
These modifiers with your brand let the search engines know that if they want the person searching to keep using their engine, they need to crawl and index more of your website to find the specific page or category their searcher was looking for.
If the search engine only had your homepage indexed, but the person wants a specific product line, the search engine makes their user work harder than other search engines by having users search for the pages.
Here’s an example. If you sell wall paint, and the search engines only had your homepage, they would give that result as people search for your company by name.
Suddenly, the color you developed became the color of the year; now, people are searching for your brand plus the name of the color or the numeric mix to find it.
By not crawling and indexing your site, it cannot surface that specific page, but other search engines do.
If other search engines surface that specific color, they win the user. When more users search because the engine has better results, the search engine can show more ads.
The more ads they show, the more money they make. So, build your brand + modifiers.
When someone adds your brand plus “blue,” “washable,” “kitchen,” and other modifiers, the search engine will know it needs to explore further to keep the searcher coming back.
In the above scenario, winning the award or recognition will naturally build backlinks because your product or service won something of value. The same with the photograph of the year, holiday toy of the year, etc.
There’s a lot more to it, and this is where branding comes into play.
Once you’re a known brand or destination site that consumers trust, there’s a better chance that bloggers, journalists, and others will link to your category, review, blog posts, and comparison pages naturally.
If you do it from a guest post, it may count for a while, but it will also likely backfire, as you are giving yourself a backlink, not something earned.
Linking off of your brand gets that branded search going.
Search engines make their money by selling ad space. They can only sell ad space if users are searching. If they give bad results, fewer people will continue using their search engines, which is why they need to focus on quality.
Guest posting for backlinks is a bad idea.
Yes, it works until you get caught, so if you’re doing it for backlinks, always have a second and third strategy to offset the guest posting links.
If you want to do a churn and burn site where you grow it to sell fast, guest posting and PBNs can be a great strategy for you, but it is at the buyer’s expense who will pay the price.
When you want a website that makes money and generates steady revenue, go with evergreen and quality links instead of gimmicks and easy-to-trace techniques like guest posting.
I hope this helps.
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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal