What is a Blog Network?

A blog network (sometimes called a blog farm) is a collection of independent blogs on a range of different domains and IP addresses that are created with the intention of quickly growing backlinks. It’s very common to see link sellers selling blog posts on a blog network who offer to post a single article of yours containing links to your site for just a few dollars. The network might consist of tens or hundreds of blogs that get exactly the same article posted on them using some automated script. The idea is that you then get hundreds of backlinks to your site very quickly and easily.

The old adage applies though… if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Issues with Duplicate Content

The problem with having exactly the same article on hundreds of blogs is duplicated content. Most popular search engines, most notably Google, will de-index websites that have a significant amount of copied content. This is designed to protect copyright holders from content being stolen in large volumes. Let’s consider the lifecycle of a blog on a blog network:

1) Blog is created by the network owner. The owner spends time ensuring the blog is indexed by the major search engines.
2) The blog owner ensures that content can be uploaded to the blog from a single location. This saves them posting the content manually on each blog.
3) After a few weeks, all of the blogs in the network are showing identical content.
4) Google notices and starts to de-index (i.e. ban) these blogs.
5) The blog is worthless and any backlinks gained are ignored.

So although the idea of a blog network sounds great, its actually pointless and a waste of money. This is because creating unique content on a hundred blogs is exceptionally time consuming and dull, and not practical when done by hand.

Therefore the easiest technique is to use exactly the same article on all of the blogs. As we’ve just explored, this results in the blog being banned. Therefore the whole network will become banned, and thus your links are completely worthless. You just wasted your hard earned cash!

Cranking the Handle - Scripts that Create ‘Unique’ Content

As we’ve now established that creating unique content on hundreds of blogs by hand is impossible, what about automation with a script? Search engines are primarily engaged in content based on syntactical comparison, i.e. if you’ve copied and pasted whole sentences or paragraphs of content. Search engines have not yet moved towards semantic comparison (i.e. content that means the same, but uses different sentence structure to say it), and are unlikely to do so for a long time. Semantic comparison required detailed language analysis that’s simply beyond any practical applications at the moment.

Based on these assumptions, if you changed the content of a website by just replacing different words, then surely the content will be seen as unique by the search engines? You’re correct! However, the content is likely to be convoluted and difficult to understand by a human reader. This process is called ’spinning’, as you spin different words into the article to make it unique. However, there are only so many iterations you can perform before the articles are virtually the same (around 10 or so).

This can kinda work, but articles with a high degree of similarity in wording e.g. 70% of a sentence structure. Sentences that are very similar in nature can easily be spotted by search engines. And a subsequent de-indexing can follow. However, this process does lend itself to scripting. It’s very easy to script this, but with poor results. It’s difficult to automate this with great results, and the latter is exceptionally rare.

So what does this mean?

Blog networks can have their place on the web if they are done exceptionally well, i.e. that the content on them is completely unique. However, if the content has a high degree of duplicated content, the blogs in the network will quickly get flagged and banned. Therefore the vast majority of blog networks are a waste of time and money.

Focusing on high quality websites that have 100% unique content to have your links (such as sponsored posts) is the way to go. Unique sites will never get banned as long as they are not doing something naughty. Something that I have personally found is that a post on a carefully chosen blog will give me significant traffic and do more good than any number of links on a blog network could ever do.

About the Author

Dan Harrison is an experienced blogger, and is the author behind the popular Spy Review spy gadgets blog. Dan’s Peep At Life is an example of of blog used for paid posts that focuses on quality posts, rather than quantity from blog networks. Dan once had his own network of blogs, and quickly learnt that duplicated content leads to de-indexed blogs!

Other posts that you might find interesting:

• 5 Reasons Why I Will NOT Read Your Blog
• Some Questions for Bloggers
• Be Productive Even if You’re Out of Blog Ideas!