As you have probably already read on the various forums and blogs (2 of the blogs I regularly visit wrote some excellent posts on the subject here and here), Google recently hit back at public blog networks by de-indexing entire networks from the search engine. Thousands of IM’ers have been left in the shitter because of this and there is a mass cry for a new automatic hands off approach to link building. Luckily for some of us this has been an eye opening experience and I will tell you why.

Notice the emphasis on public.

That’s right, you see a lot of people calling these networks, “private blog networks”. I can assure you something that is advertised on 100’s of forums and blogs and something that allows anyone to sign up and use the network is certainly NOT a private blog network. ALN, BMR, SEOLM….these are all public blog networks, and that’s why they got de-indexed.

So Private blog networks are still alive and kicking?

Being in contact with a few people who own small private blog networks, that is, they are the sole proprietor of the network and only they use it, all of them have reported that none of their blogs have been de-indexed and the link juice is still passing along to their sites. It leads me to think that perhaps Google isn’t that clever at spotting blog networks after all.

The way Google handled its cull of public blog networks goes to show how little in control of the situation they actually were. Countless webmasters received the dreaded unnatural links email which asked them to report url’s they had used to gain these unnatural links. Blackmailing the webmasters into handing over the url’s used in the blog networks. This was Googles most boldest and blatant attempt in recent years at trying to devalue a process which tries to trick the ranking algorithm.

This leads me to think that Google really didn’t have a handle on these blog networks and their bots could not tell the difference between a site in a blog network and one that isn’t.

A private blog network is still something very powerful if used correctly. Building one does take some time but once you have a few high pr blogs that you can use for link juice (and you are the only one who’s using it) chances are you will not get de-indexed as the site in your network won’t look any different from any other website on the internet.

Lessons to learn?

I myself used blog networks (BMR & SEOLM), and, for most of the time, they worked very well. The reason Google had to take such drastic, blatant measures to remove them just goes to show how much of an impact these networks were having on the SERP’s.

Lots of people are crying about being left in the shitter now that these blog networks are gone. I too have lost about 30-40% of my earnings and its because of one simple thing we all did wrong.

We forgot to diversify.

Chances are, if you were also using other quality link building methods and obtaining traffic from other sources other than Google you probably didn’t see that much of a reduction in traffic.

The trap that most of us fell into was simply –

But there is one thing we forgot to do……Stick to the basics!

This is exactly what I did and now I’m paying the price.

For months and months I only used BMR and a few other link building methods. Blog networks made up about 75-80% of my links being built. I know this was bad and that I should have diversified my link building, but hey, I was enjoying the top 3 rankings for a lot of my keywords and also happy at the fact I was making $1200+ per month.

Luckily for me, money I make from the internet is a supplementary income. I have a job that is my main source of income, anything I make from the internet is a bonus, so even though now I’m making less, I’m still not too fussed. I can just use this as a valuable lesson to learn and not worry too much about the money.  I feel sorry for people who are not in this situation as you guys had to learn the really hard way

Organic is good but its not the holy grail

One thing I am (slowly) starting to realise is that organic traffic really isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of traffic. It’s fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but having too much of anything is always bad.

For most of my sites my traffic breakdown looks a little something like this

• Organic – 85-90%
• Referral – 5-10%
• Direct – 0-5%

What I’ve learned from the recent demise of these public blog networks is that to have a steady flow of traffic and also and steady flow of income you need to diversify your traffic sources. Don’t just rely on organic traffic, if you already have 80-90% traffic from search, concentrate on increasing direct and referral. It will soften the blow on any future Google update that decides to kill your rankings.

Of course if you are ranking high through search simply because you are an authority on your niche with amazing content, then feel free to concentrate on that as you are less likely to get hit by a future update. But for the most of us, we are not an authority in our chosen niches.

Link building should be seen as an investment for the future

Not just a quick buck scheme. The one thing that struck me after these blog networks had closed down and I started to see my rankings drop was the fact that I had just wasted months and months of hard work and money.

All that content (noted it was mostly crap), hours my workers spent creating it, and the money I was paying them to create the content and pay for the subscriptions had all just disappeared overnight.

I spent approx $1500 over the course of 5-6 months link building through blog networks. That $1500 has been completely wasted as all the links created are now worth nothing and nowhere to be seen.

I quickly realised that if I had spent that $1500 on even one piece of quality content (be it creating a wordpress theme to give away, a product, a guide etc) and got even 10 links from authority sites within my niche it would have been a better investment in the long run.

For example, lets say I created a quality, free theme and say Smashing Magazine picked it up and decided to share it to its readers. That would be one hell of a backlink right? Chances are Google are not going to de-index a site like smashing magazine and that link will like be permanent.

To me that seems a better way of spending $1500, even to get one link instead of having zilch.

Chances are it would create a few more backlinks than just one but you get the idea.

When link building you shouldn’t just think about how these links are going to effect your rankings next week or next month, you should be thinking will these links be here next year, in 2 years and so on.

That way you can decide if a link really is high quality and worth spending the money on.

It’s time we got back to basics

Simple SEO, none of this Auto-Submit-Spin-Retweet-Facebook-Spam-Bot crap. Get back to creating something your users are going to want to share themselves. That’s all you are trying to imitate by link building. The organic sharing of your site across the internet. Surely it makes more sense, instead of trying to imitate this process to actually try to create something that will initiate this process by itself.

I will create another post about ways of doing this as its something that I have been thinking about since the closure of blog networks. I am going to start to experiment with possible ideas for link baiting (creating stuff that people are going to want to share) and will see how it goes.

Ironically the basics cost the most

It’s expensive getting back to basics I will admit. And it’s not something a lot of people can afford. The example I used above regarding creating a free wordpress theme, if you are not a designer or programmer yourself, its going to cost you $1000-2000 to get a quality theme created.

But hey think about it like this. Most linkbuilding services that have any chance of actually changing your rankings cost around $50-100 per month. 10 months down the line you would have spent $1000. Now chances are there would have been a algorithmic change that devalued your links, essential negating that $1000 you spent. I hope you are starting to see the way you should be looking at link building, its not weekly or monthly, its indefinitely!

On a road to nowhere

The constant cat and mouse game of IM’ers creating new techniques to trick search engines and search engines changing their algorithms to counteract this is not a profitable long term strategy for us webmasters.

We spend money to get ranked, then Google changes something and we lose ranking, then a new technique comes out that tricks Google once again, they then change their algorithm again. This cycle will just repeat itself over and over and all you will be doing is wasting money. The quicker we see this and decide to change the better.

Let’s Recap

• Diversify traffic sources, don’t just rely on search traffic
• Diversify link building, don’t just stick with one technique because it works in the present, who knows what the future will hold
• Get back to basics, create something users will want to share naturally.
• Think of the long term when building links, ask yourself if what you are doing is ethical and likely to be highly valued by search engines in the future.

Putting it all into action

So after the blog networks died and I was left sitting there watching my rankings and earnings drop little by little. I used the time to sit back and think of a plan of what to do next. As you may have read in the About Paul section, it is my goal to do Internet Marketing full time, to do this I need a steady income. I don’t want to be waking up every day wondering if Google has changed it’s policy or something. I realised I must start building sustainable online businesses to make my goal achievable.

I soon realised that I was spreading myself too thinly across my sites. Whereas putting all my time and money into one site, I was spreading it over multiple sites, which in-turn reduced the quality of content I could afford and also the quality of link building services I could afford to backlink to this content. I’ve realised that I should be concentrating on one or two sites and invest to make them better.  Here is a very good interview speaking about this point  (http://imimpact.com/future-proof-sites-with-matt-carter/).

I should pad out my websites with lots of quality content and try to build some quality links in the process. My monthly budget on link building and content creation is approx $600. I have decided to stop spending this budget on quick-fix link building services and tools and instead go back to basics with this money.

What to do in the short term?

In the next few months I am going to be spending all my budget on quality content. I want to pad out my sites with lots of informative articles, not SEO articles, but articles that are simply aimed at providing the best information to my visitors.  This, should, on it’s own bring in a small amount of traffic as you will find you will rank for some long tail keywords that you never even thought of and even if not well at least I’m giving some more helpful information to my readers if they decide to click on one of my inner links.

After a few months I should hopefully have something that more resembles an authoritative website. One that covers a broad spectrum of topics in my niche. One that can hopefully provide answers to lots of different questions. Not just a website that has a few articles about some specific keyword.

After that I will begin to build links to my site. The reason why I cant do them both at the same time is because some of the services that I want to try out –

1) Only accept websites with lots of quality content (I’m talking 100+ articles per site)
2) Will cost me my entire monthly budget for one campaign

I have decided that if I want my site to be considered an authority in its niche then I’m going to have to start producing content and backlinking like an authority.

The types of link building I will be testing out on these sites are –

• Link Bait
• Blogger outreach services
• Guest blogging

These 3 types of link building are likely to give me the highest quality links I can get for my money. The number of links probably wont be anything like what you get from low quality spam services (although I could be wrong seeing as this is the first time I’m trying this), but as I said previously – 1 link from an authoritative source as opposed to 1000’s of spam links that are likely to disappear in the future sounds a lot better to me.

I will continue to run the rest of my blogs, but will leave as is. That is, no more link building to any of them. And perhaps just 1-2 articles per month posted to them.

The reason why I want to keep them is that I can come back to them in the future and when I do I will have a nicely matured, organically linked (if anyone does decide to link to it) website.

From that I can either try to push it to an authority site or incorporate it into a private blog network perhaps.

To sum it all up

• Stop spamming the net with crap.
• Start producing content that users are actually going to find useful.
• Don’t be fooled by 99.9% of the crappy link building tools and services people are trying to sell to you on forums.
• Look at the bigger picture, in years to come, where do you want to be, not just 1 month down the line.

I will be posting progress on the goals I have mentioned in this article so stick around, until next time.

Thanks for reading

Paul