Blog Networks for Link-Building (RQR Basics)

Search engine marketers are always on the lookout for ways to build backlinks to their sites. And not just any kind of backlink, either. As I have discussed in a previous post, not all backlinks are equal and ideally, the links pointing to your site should be coming from diverse sources, have a targeted anchor text and come from within site content (rather than from comments or sidebars).

In terms of these requirements, blog networks may just be the perfect link-building tool. In this article, I explain what blog networks are, how they work and what their benefits and drawbacks tend to be.

Note: Among the Web2Mayhem videos, there’s also a brief explanation of blog networks.

 

What is a Blog Network?

As the name implies, it’s a network of blogs. These blogs are all connected to one central hub, your “blog network provider”, if you will. This is usually a fairly expensive paid service that you need to sign up for (more on that, later).

What the blog network does for you is that it allows you to publish articles to lots and lots of blogs.

It usually goes like this: You log in and submit a new article, after picking an appropriate category, entering some tags and inserting a few links into the article body. This article is then sent out to and published on lots of blogs that match the subject of your article (i.e. a health-related article is posted to health-related blogs).

Using a blog network for link building is a bit like article marketing using free article directories, then. Except that it’s way better.

 

Benefits of Blog Networks

Here are the major advantages that blog networks offer over other kinds of link-building and article marketing:

• Full Control Over Anchor Texts
  You get to choose the desired anchor text and link location and you can also set up different variations of the anchor text (using spinning syntax) to make your link profile look more natural.
• Fewer Restrictions
  Many article directories are very strict about what kind of content they allow. They also usually don’t let you place links within the article body and are restrictive about what you’re allowed to put in your author box, where links are allowed. On blog networks, there are also rules about what you are allowed to post, but it’s much easier to “get away” with salesy content and there are generally fewer restrictions.
• More Links
  Submit your article to an article directory and you get one, maybe two links from the resource box. Submit an article to a blog network and you will see your article published to dozens, if not hundreds of sites, receiving new backlinks every time.

 

The Receiving End

You might be wondering where all those blogs in the network are coming from. The answer is simple: Each blog network allows you to “plug in” your own sites as well, to receive content from others.

The benefit of doing this is that the sites you plug into the network will then have lots of new content posted to them, all of it relevant to the subject of the sites. In other words, it’s a form of auto-blogging. Of course, those posts contain links to other people’s sites, but you can still monetize the surroundings of the post contents (with AdSense, banners,…). This way, you can conceivably set up a few dozen auto-blogs that will eventually generate some passive income thanks to the constant influx of fresh content.

 

Downsides of this System?

There can be a few drawbacks to blog networks, but this depends greatly on the network in question. For example, poor moderation and quality control can lead to a network being spammed by very low-quality content with links to porn-sites, viagra-spam etc. This makes the network as a whole suffer, since the auto-blogging end of it only works as long as the content is decent.

Conversely, the quality of the backlinks can suffer if there is poor moderation going on. Links from a bunch of sites that have been flooded and bogged down with spam will likely not help your sites at all (especially if the sites get de-indexed because of the spam).

In short: For a good blog network, good moderation is crucial.

 

In Conclusion

Blog networks provide a very powerful way to build backlinks and as long as the quality of the network is good, this is definitely a top-notch SEO tool to make use of.

Cheers,

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