The 'Google Storm' is at work - de-indexing Blog Networks | Photo: Pilbarra Storm by Peter Eastway, AU
In my years building my own niche websites, I have tested many “traffic getting” methods.
Despite my skepticism about Blog Networks, I was still tempted to at least trial these services on some of my own niche sites purely because of the claims they make on their seemingly plausible sales pages and videos.
I joined two different networks – one about two years ago, and another just before Christmas 2011.
After receiving fortnightly ambiguous emails all this year from the one most recently joined, and no proof of any ranking improvement from either, AND reading the article below by Zac Grace of Dejan SEO on Friday, February 3rd, 2012 – here’s an excerpt and link…
[features_box_paper_white width=”75%” + border=”2px”]Private Blog Networks – May Be Improved, But Still Far From Perfect
Ok, so you think they got smarter, no more websites hosted on the same server, they use different IPs for each website and they learned how to inner link those websites in a smart way Google can’t catch them?
Well think again, there are and there will always be ways for Google to know which sites are network sites and which aren’t. Just think about this, how many Google services do we use?
[/features_box_paper_white]…my conclusion was and is…
Real SEOs Don’t (And Never Did) Use Blog Networks (And For Good Reason)
…the article above, the ambiguous, double-talking emails, and the no proof of ANY results led me to cancel both subscriptions on March 12. At this stage I actually had NO idea of what was about to happen.
Here’s what happened, and is STILL continuing to happen… [this shot taken 27th March 2012]
Blog Networks Deindexed
More Proof Blog Networks Are Doomed
Matt Cutts (Google) 16th March 2012 (Twitter)…
https://twitter.com/#!/mattcutts/status/180392083427823616
And this from Google themselves (below) has been been around since 23rd July 2011
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
And here’s another excerpt from the 16th of March 2012…
[features_box_paper_white width=”75%” + border=”2px”]Cutts: Google To Target Overly SEO’ed Sites Within Weeks
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced as a side note during his panel at SXSW that Google is releasing an algorithm update specifically to target sites over doing their SEO.
Matt Cutts said this is Google’s attempt to “level the playing field” between webmasters that build quality content versus webmasters who are just really aggressive SEOs.
I just heard this by listening to the audio from the panel he was on at SXSW a week or so ago.
[/features_box_paper_white]Conclusion:
Get the heck out of Blog Networks. Now. And start publishing quality content (just like they always said to do) – there are now CONSEQUENCES for being contrary.
