Private Blogging Network

[jenadams]

Is anyone interested in building a private blogging network of semi-related sites?

[JoshuaKersh]

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.

[menachemp]

I think you just turned what might have been a harmless yet somewhat grey hat idea into a black hat paid link network.

[jenadams]

It's fun but it makes it tough to pay the bills in a crowded and competitive market.

[randfish]

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.

[jenadams]

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.

[NakulGoyal]

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.

[randfish]

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)

[jenadams]

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.

[NakulGoyal]

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).