Thanks for this helpful information. In the future, it'd be great if you could add the links that cite your sources, and indicate which portions of your answer have been reproduced from existing content.

Thanks for letting us know Jeff, that's great to hear!

Hi Vikas,

That may be a tough one. I can speak from the other side of things. I don't submit guest posts, but I do review them for YouMoz so I get to see a lot of submissions from people wanting to post on the SEOmoz site.

You may have a difficult time finding a place that posts high-quality posts, allows followed links, and posts them quickly. The higher the quality blog, the more submissions there are to go through, and the more time it takes before something gets published.

At YouMoz, we try to not outright reject posts, but to spend time to help people craft a better post that will be a success on the blog. Some of our best authors are ones who had posts initially rejected, but were given suggestions for improvement. This does take time, and makes for a longer queue, but also makes for better posts.

When you are looking to submit a blog post to any site, I would highly recommend having the post reviewed by at least one other person before you submit, running your text through Word to look for spelling and grammar errors, making sure that all of the images you use are OK to use (you either have permission to use the copyrighted image, you've included proper attribution to a Creative Commons license, you developed the image yourself, etc.), and that you've followed all of the guidelines for the particular site to which you are submitting. Time spent upfront making a post can help reduce time spent in a review queue.

Agreed. I'd spend the time writing content for your own site and building up your own site's authority, rather than building up the authority of another site.

Keep in mind that is the toolbar pagerank of the home page. If you can get a link on www.wordpress.com that's great! But you're not going to get the same value out of brandnewsubdomain.wordpress.com.