Private Blogging Network
-
Is anyone interested in building a private blogging network of semi-related sites?
-
Is this still the case? because in the Moz 'learn' it talks about connecting with you customers who have blogs and get them to put links on the sites.
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links
*Manual "Outreach" Link Building
*Get your customers to link to you.
-
I think you just turned what might have been a harmless yet somewhat grey hat idea into a black hat paid link network.
-
It's fun but it makes it tough to pay the bills in a crowded and competitive market.
-
Most definitely! Google wants editorial links - that is, links that are freely given by a party that receives nothing in return. Blog networks, whether paid or unpaid, are intentional attempts to manipulate the rankings through a form of "reciprocal" linking, i.e. all parties are benefiting from links that don't exist for editorial reasons, but rather because they are part of an exchange scheme.
The webspam team certainly tries to shut these down, and while they're harder to find than the larger ones or paid networks (sometimes), there's still substantial risk and, recently, plenty of examples of them catching and penalizing those who engage.
Besides - white hat SEO is SO much more fun, valuable in the long term, and adds to lots of forms of inbound marketing, not just search rankings.
-
Hi Randy,
I thought Google was only talking about paid services. Have they come out with anything suggesting that a small private blogging co-op would be either blackhat or a no-no? If so, I think a lot of SEO firms will soon find themselves out of business because they don't offer much more value than link building.
-
Rand, that's a very interesting point about Google trying to find the details about the sneaky techniques a webmaster might have used. I see how that makes complete sense for them to find the source and get it off the roots like they did with BuildMyRank.com network.
-
Hey Jen - I'd be very, very wary of doing this, given how much Google's been cracking down on blog networks, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=private+blog+network&tbs=qdr:w
I've also seen Google's responses to re-consideration requests include statements to the effect that the penalties may be lifted faster if the abuser includes details on what SEO services, blog networks, and links they used/acquired. Thus, Google's creating a strong incentive for anyone penalized to share their acquisition techniques privately. My guess is this will mean lots more penalties and devaluation coming soon.
If possible, I'd urge you to consider spending the time, resources and energy you'd give to this project on something else.
I'd also probably say that SEOmoz public Q+A might not be the most ideal place to conspire to build black hat link networks (for obvious reasons)
-
Exactly. I'm in a field that really caters to many other industries including Legal, Medical, Energy, Technology, Humanitarian and Academic. If we put tight requirements on writing quality and evaluated potential members by what they have on their own blogs then maybe we could build a quality resource. We might even have some sort of minimum fee for members that would entirely go to offsite link building and social optimization for each of the member blogs.
-
I definitely think there's potential as long as it's not over used and instead of being semi-related, it's tighly related. See my response to a similar question here. You have to weight the risk and the reward and it's best done with bringing value to the user rather then just links (even though we all know the reason is links).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will these pages harm the SEO of my blog?
Hi there, If I put download pages and thank you pages on my blog, will it harm the SEO rankings? As these pages will be pretty thin and will have no links to them internally for obvious reasons, it has me concerned about the effect it could have on my blog. I want to build my blog up to drive traffic, so it's not just a case of throwing the pages up. What is the best solution? No index the pages -- will that be enough? Warm regards Colin
Link Building | | username670 -
Handling External links to articles in a blog
I have a blog that has it's own articles but then also want to feature third-party sites that have my op-ed content on them. Wondering what is the best practice for handling external links. The reason we want to do this: Make sure our followers and people who subscribe to our blog see all our content (especially when a third-party "high authority" publisher is featuring articles from our authors We also want to be able to get a ranking for the article title when someone searches for it on Search Engines. i.e I write an article for hubspot called "my article about something". When googling "my article about something" I want to see both the Hubspot listing (where my article originated on) as well as a link to my website where I show an abstract (original abstract) and then the link links to the hubspot article. For example: www.myblog.com/listing (renders a listing of articles with links to each individual article) If showing an "abstract" for the blog article and then linking out to the third-party source (where content is featured) www.myblog.com/category/post-title (renders actual article page) When showing an individual post-title page what are the minimum requirements (META TAGS, length or amount of characters ,etc) Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | dspete0 -
Blog Co-Op - Purchasing Links in Relevant Blogs
Hello, Our SEO company has recommended participating in a blog co-op, where we can purchase a link on a relevant blog, either submitting our own content or letting them find relevant anchor text in an article on their site and adding a link back to us. Links are running $40 - 100 based on Page Rank of the blog. I realize that it is BETTER not to buy a link, but is this going to hurt us if the blog content is relevant to our industry?
Link Building | | eastcoastchairandbarstool0 -
High Quality Guest Blog Swapping
I have tried checking out a few of the big guest blogging sites out there but every time I create a killer article the site that offers to publish it is normally some suspiciously spammy side with a low Moz score. Does anyone know any sites where guest bloggers can link up to swap high quality blog posts. Maybe one that requires some filtering of poor quality host blogs?
Link Building | | ross88guy0 -
Blog snippets on home page
Mozzes, We're running a real estate portal in which we have a pretty good news/blog section running on wordpress. It's placed into our LAMP site on a dash from our root URL: www.ourportal.com/news/ To attract traffic via our landing pages we publish article snippets from the blog, linked to the complete articles. What would be the optimal SEO here to lead the spiders to the orignal content? Follow, Noindex? Best Johan
Link Building | | PropertyPortal1 -
Paid Blog Posts getting Deindexed?
Hello, We've used a popular paid blog posts platform to get back links through blog posts. Recently, performed a link audit noticed a very interesting problem. 40% of the 49 sites we purchased paid posts from, have been de-indexed. These blogs are the kinds that would take money from almost anybody in any given niche to write a review and give a paid link to you. So, I assume most of these blogs had a high number of outbound links. Their page rank has also been demoted to 0 (obviously since they're deindexed). Now, our dilemma is that should still go ahead with paid blog posts, after checking for the following: 1. PR 2. Google Penalty The sites at the time of purchasing the posts were not penalized. But 40% of the sites being completely de-indexed is a staggering number. Can someone please suggest whether to go with paid blog posts techniques or not?
Link Building | | globaleyeglasses1 -
Blogging to add SEO value to site... recommendations
Hi Mozzers! A client has a high authority website in the travel industry, and needs any and all advantages to get ahead in very competitive keywords. The send out a newsletter bimonthly, but have no blog, so I recommended at the very least, they publish online their emailed newsletters to add informational and relevant content. The question is, for max SEO value, should they... create a blog as a subdomain or subfolder of their existing site? should they self host a blog with a separate domain? or should they simply use a blogger/wordpress.com free blog? Consider that just adding on a blog to their existing site isn't easy. It's some old CMS that's apparently a nightmare to deal with. Plus, branding a WP install to match the site isn't something they want to spend a lot of time on. Your insight is welcome and appreciated!
Link Building | | rosstaylor0 -
Free link on a Paid Link Blog
Hi there, I have been doing some outreaching, and managed to have a blog post accepted on a authority blog. They included links to my website, and I was very pleased with the placement. However, having browsed through the site, I was worried to see that they openly admit they allow 'reviews' of websites, with backlinks included, for $50 per review. I am worried I might be penalised without actually doing anything wrong. I did not pay for my link, but the link has been placed on a site which openly admits they accept payment for links. Should I be worried? Should I ask them to take it down? To date I have been told countless times by bloggers I am outreaching that if I pay $10, $50, $100 etc I can write a blog post. I have never accepted because of the risk of penalization. Now, unwittingly, I am linked to from a paid link site with a blog post that would look like I have paid for it because of the placement and style of back link. What do you think? Thanks,
Link Building | | giveacar0