You like that stupid title? Yeah, I know you do!

Today I’m going to talk about blog networks. To be more specific, I’m going to talk about services offered that include multiple blog posts over a network of blogs all owned by the same person/company, with the aim of acquiring quality, in-content links from various web properties. As with pretty much all SEO services, there is plenty of garbage to separate from the gold. I’m going to talk about some qualifying factors I look for before choosing to use or not to use (or continue to use) a blog network service.

Footprints
If you’re buying 100 blog posts, the whole dang point is to make it appear to Google as if 100 different sites decided your site was worth mentioning. I cannot say with certainty exactly what factors are analyzed by Google in order to determine the uniqueness of any given group of sites. Anyone who tells you with certainty is either a liar or in breach of their NDA with Google and soon to lose their employment. However, we can use logic to determine what criteria should be met to ensure that the posts look unique in the eyes of Googlezilla:

• •Unique IPs – Most all services offer blog posts on sites hosted on unique C-class IPs (if they want to compete)
• •Unique Themes – Does using a small handful of themes over multiple sites necessarily make a blog network worthless? I’m my opinion, no. But I’m definitely willing to spend more money on a network that uses lots of unique themes.
• •Unique Content – Whether the articles are all hand-written (super expensive) or they are spun, you obviously want the articles to be unique.
• •Anchor Text/URL Diversity – This is very important to me. Not all blog network services offer a lot of flexibility in spinning your anchor text or URLs. In some cases you might not want to spin your URL, because you are only targeting one particular page. I understand that, but you should still be spinning your anchor text to some extent to make your links appear more natural.
• •TLD Diversity – Not a make or break quality, but I’m not willing to spend as much on a network of blog posts that are all on .info domains.

Shit That Pisses Me Off About Crappy Blog Networks
Obviously the goal of anyone who creates a blog network is to make money. That is all fine and dandy. The trouble comes about when sharp corners are cut to make the network more profitable. Here are some red flags that the blog network you are working with/considering working with is a steaming pile of poo:

• •Minimal Inbound Links – How hard is it to at least drip feed some links to your blogs so that those of us paying for posts on them might actually get a tasty drop of link juice out of them?
• •Pray for Indexing – Related to the above gripe, there are many crappy blog networks that simply do not get crawled because Google doesn’t give a flying fig about them. Why? AINT GOT NO LINKZ. Or worse yet, the domain was blacklisted a long time ago.
• •HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DOG AND MAKE HIM LOSE WEIGHT AND GROW HIS PENIS WITH MONEY MADE FROM FOREX INVESTING – Okay, if the network has a ton of posts not even remotely relevant to each other or the title of the site, I might still use it. But a niche specific network or a big network that gives you the flexibility to decide what category of sites you want your content on is worth infinitely more. Nobody wants their well written article posted right above some gibberish post about dick pills.

I have used a lot of different networks, this is true. Definitely more bad than good. To share all of the good ones would be shooting myself in the foot, but I will mention one that I used just recently that I’m quite satisfied with, offered by LinkMason. Visit the link for the details.

So, basically I got this far in the post, then got distracted by YouTube videos about that homeless guy with a radio announcer voice, and then got involved in a heated email thread with some friends, and now I’ve completely forgotten where I was going with this post (if anywhere), so I guess I’ll just stop now.

Happy New Year!