Are Blog Networks Still Effective?

cterao
Posts: 647
Joined: 18 Aug 09
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09 Jun 10 1:56 pm

Hey everyone,

I've read a few posts recently saying that blog networks like AMA are not particularly as effective as they used to be because:

Most of the sites your articles are published on have very low PR and it takes an eternity for articles to get indexed
Most of the sites are never actually promoted and never actually get real visitors
Most of the sites are low quality and will be ignored by search engines
Most of your articles will eventually be deindexed from these low quality sites and you will lose your backlinks

This is something I've had a sneaking suspicion of myself. I thought it would be a good idea to have a real discussion on the topic.

Any long-term AMA users out there with an opinion on this?

Clayton
I did AffiloBlueprint for one year - http://www.journeyofmyown.com/welcome-affilorama-friends/

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namllets
Posts: 40
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09 Jun 10 9:01 pm

I've been using AMA for about a year now and have come to that conclusion and am now suspicious of all these similar types of services. I'm probably going to quite it soon.

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jmpruitt
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10 Jun 10 7:12 pm

I think I have made my point pretty clear, especially since i have said every one of your bullet points. :)

for me, it does help short term, but long term, you have to keep writing and submitting to keep the link juice flowing. Now, you may say you have to do that anyway, but in my mind that is not a real "set it and forget it" strategy. if i am going to pay almost $50/month or more, since many of these services are raising their prices, i want those links to still be there months from now.

carlmasure
Posts: 55
Joined: 24 Nov 09
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11 Jun 10 1:49 am

Clayton,

In all honesty, I think AMA has not been a very good investment. I was able to push only a few of my not very competitive keywords to 2nd and 3rd pages of google using AMA and forum back linking with good on page SEO. After that, I was at a loss, so I built up my 2.0 presence using lots of my own free properties in a chaotic fashion so as not to give away any link wheel strategy per se. I was able to get to #6, but it has fallen off and never sold, which makes me think the product sucks.

To be fair though, I have a full time bricks and mortar job, so I don't get to put anywhere near the amount of time I want to into this business.

cterao
Posts: 647
Joined: 18 Aug 09
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11 Jun 10 3:19 am

This is something that's been on my mind for a while. Honestly, most of my rankings seem to come from articles I manually submit to high PR article directories (Ezine Articles, etc.).

I was hoping to get more positive feedback from AMA (or UAW or SEO Linkvine) users to avoid having a one-sided discussion here.

I'm also curious about what Mark Ling (or Affilorama) thinks about this since he has recommended blog networks in the past, and I highly respect his opinion.

Clayton
I did AffiloBlueprint for one year - http://www.journeyofmyown.com/welcome-affilorama-friends/

Make $100 commissions by being my affiliate - http://exsolutionprogram.com/affiliates/

jmpruitt
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12 Jun 10 5:17 am

I know Mark has said that AMA is large part of his success, and I know he is good friends with the owners.

most of my rankings come from posting on social sites like hubpages, blogger blogs, multiply, tumblr. etc... I use more social sites than anything else. But I also spend at least one day a week doing nothing but logging into those sites, commenting on other peoples pages, adding fresh content, building backlinks to those sites, etc...

I try to spend a little time building links to my links. mainly through bookmarking, but also by articles. Also, I use forums a lot. Many of the forums have a blog feature now, and some have a content section where you can post articles. Look at the forums in your niche. if they have these features available, use them.

sonitin
Posts: 152
Joined: 26 Apr 07
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30 Jun 10 10:53 am

I think James got it right for most of the part. I advice doing bookmarking/link buildling for each of the page backlinking you. The sites in AMA network are too small and really don't have much authority. You need to provide links to your pages out there so that your pages stay indexed else they will get deindexed soon for sure.

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elink
Posts: 37
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30 Jun 10 12:23 pm

Hey Guys, when it comes to SEO and backlinks nothing beats the timeless and tested formula for getting organic search Engine traffic. The following old school ways of getting backlinks are what I believe are timeless and effective:

- Directory Submissions
- Bookmarking
- Article Directory submissions
- Blog Commenting
- Last Resort : Get HIGH PR Links from your own Farm Blogs or your own self built network of sites to totally crush your competition.

Blog networks and say forum backlinks are just an icing on the cake, but I prefer to get links from a variety of websites like the plan I have above. It always works. I just follow the above plan and get all the backlinks I need for a particular keyword and move on. I also use SEO Elite to find out how many links I need to beat my competition while taking into consideration his linking page age of links, PR of links, number of anchoring keywords etc.

You have to build links to each and every page of your website, i.e, for each and every keyword you are targeting. No shortcuts here. If you have 30 pages like the Affiloblueprint sites, you have to do the above steps for each of the 30 keywords or webpages. A Majority of people do not deep link to inner pages, they just do the index and expect to get high rankings for all keywords. Take advantage of that and get real targeted search engine organic traffic, and make money.

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sirmatts
Posts: 67
Joined: 07 Oct 09
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02 Jul 10 11:14 am

The Question you should ask yourself here is. How easy is it to detect spun content with a link always pointing to same site from paragraph 1,2 and 7 from 100 of blogs?

For a Google Programmer that has a salary of 1m $ a year and is as clever as a Rocket Scientist!

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elink
Posts: 37
Joined: 17 Mar 08
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02 Jul 10 2:07 pm

SirMatts wrote:The Question you should ask yourself here is. How easy is it to detect spun content with a link always pointing to same site from paragraph 1,2 and 7 from 100 of blogs?

For a Google Programmer that has a salary of 1m $ a year and is as clever as a Rocket Scientist!

Easy footprint if you ever get a manual inspection. Get a variety of links to naturalize your links.

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sirmatts
Posts: 67
Joined: 07 Oct 09
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02 Jul 10 5:47 pm

Yeah If I knew little about programming myself and had no better to do, I think i could program a bot that could detect 99 % of spun content comming out of blog network services. Count paragraphs and check from what paragraph the links are comming and count the amount of blog posts pointing to exact same site.

It´s a interesting question in general if its worth it to use those services I think its actually really close. In my personal view point they are too old and none flexibile all these blog networks. They are built around a plattform that is ages old. And Search Engines upgrade their detection systems all the time.

I mean if they can detected even quality of content with complex LSI algorithms. It must be too easy to detect content comming from an article network just with programing some simple functionality into GoogleBot.

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cterao
Posts: 647
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02 Jul 10 8:41 pm

Sounds like a lot of people aren't too keen on blog networks. This is kind of how I've been feeling lately myself.

I guess I need to start branching out into other means of getting traffic and links.

Thanks for you input y'all.

Clayton
I did AffiloBlueprint for one year - http://www.journeyofmyown.com/welcome-affilorama-friends/

Make $100 commissions by being my affiliate - http://exsolutionprogram.com/affiliates/

digiblue
Posts: 239
Joined: 29 Apr 09
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03 Jul 10 3:20 pm

I am still in love with blog networks, I have achieved great rankings with using a mixture of paid services and my own blog networks. In my opinion blog networks are only effective if the owners give all the sites in the network some good old fashion blog loving! This means original content regularly added, aged domains, regular link building and promotion, and regular maintenance.

Not many of the blog networks do this! The majority of them rely on marketers to add their sites into the network and the members usually do not give any type of love to these blogs once added. So when you sign up for the service and post your spun content it goes out to sites that may not be indexed and even if they do they most likely suffer from low page rank and authority. So not much value.

Another problem, it does not matter how many sites your article gets blasted out to if once they are posted they cannot be found and indexed by the search engines. So are blog networks effective? Yes they can be if the owners do a lot to maintain their own sites that they add to the network. No if the blog owners are only relying on sites to be added by members only.

This topic was started on Jun 09, 2010 and has been closed due to inactivity. If you want to discuss this topic further, please create a new forum topic.

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Are Blog Networks Still Effective?

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