9 replies to this topic

[lister]

Hi, I having been analysing my competitors SEO strategy and it seems that they have launched about 15 blogs with all seperate domain names. The articles are relatively well written but the sites/blogs seems very basic with closed comments and no indication or possiblilty to contact them.

My question is, do you think this is a good strategy? It seems very time consuming to create all these sites and content with the intention to link from them to your "main" site.

Has anyone else noticed people launching several blogs to gain SEO? Thanks

[Jill]

My question is, do you think this is a good strategy?

You tell us. Is it working for this other site?

Has anyone else noticed people launching several blogs to gain SEO?

Doing it for SEO wouldn't make sense. But if they are trying to reach a variety of target audiences, it might make sense. Difficult to say without knowing what their actual motivation is and who they're targeting in the blogs.

[bobmeetin]

Seems like a lot of work. Keeping up with a couple sites, keeping them active is work. 15 is more than a couple. I'm generally an advocate of one stop shopping, one site administration by clients, as opposed to many. Today is Monday, am I scheduled to work 3 and 11 today or was it 2 and 14?

It would seem easier, less expensive to build links to one site than a bunch. In your eyes, is it better to have 5 links on each site or 5*15 = 75 links on one site?

But then maybe there is a business reason we don't know about.

[Michael Martinez]

People have been experimenting with blog farming and related tactics for years. Blog farms, I think, are falling out of favor because they are basically just spam floods.

There are a variety of subscription blog networks people use for link building. Some of these networks appear to have been detected by Google and the sites that use them have been penalized. Some of these networks seem to accept whatever crappy articles people want to publish to them, so their blogs look pretty bad.

There seem to be a couple of higher quality networks where some standards are maintained.

However, I've noticed a slight trend myself where people -- perhaps stung by the blog network experience -- have begun setting up these little networks. Some SEO agencies have had large networks of Websites for years, but now just about anyone can set up 10-15 blogs and post to them.

There is nothing technically wrong with doing this. If you're publishing unique, helpful information you certainly have a right to distribute it in whatever way you wish. Search engines are going to look at Website behavior as well as content. If your 10-15 blogs only link to each other or only to a very small number of sites you'll probably get a little boost but not a whole lot.

Running 10-15 blogs is not the most efficient way I can think of to build links. One would hope your competitor is doing this for a real business reason, like targeting different audiences as Jill suggested.

[qwerty]

They may be doing it in an effort to own the SERP for some phrase. Someone I worked with years ago earned himself a pretty bad reputation -- search on his name and a couple of blog posts calling him a rip-off artist are at the top. So about a year ago, he hired someone to create a bunch of blogs on free platforms, Squidoo lenses, Knol pages, etc, all of them praising him as a leader in the marketing field and many of them cross-linked. Then he posted links to them on a bunch of bookmarking sites.

Now all of those pages come up on a search for his name... after the ones that label him a rip-off artist.

[polymon]

Seems like a lot of work. Keeping up with a couple sites, keeping them active is work. 15 is more than a couple. I'm generally an advocate of one stop shopping, one site administration by clients, as opposed to many. Today is Monday, am I scheduled to work 3 and 11 today or was it 2 and 14?

It would seem easier, less expensive to build links to one site than a bunch. In your eyes, is it better to have 5 links on each site or 5*15 = 75 links on one site?

But then maybe there is a business reason we don't know about.

I've noticed that one of my competitors seems to have turned to what I would call "blog farming"... the blogs are not at all related to their product, but seem to be written in almost English (maybe automated articles??) and as kind of friendly advice if they made sense.

For example:
"[Competitor] is very good for [keyword]. They have great [keyword-sub1]. They have great [keyword-sub2]." and on and on.

This really looks like blog spam to me - any human that knows how to write can tell the articles are not written to be read - so they must be for SEO purposes? (I'm not sure)

Can I or should I report these Bogus Blogs to Google? Would it do any good?
Where can I report them?

I'm trying to run an ethical business and hate to see these tactics.

[Michael Martinez]

Can I or should I report these Bogus Blogs to Google? Would it do any good?
Where can I report them?

I'm trying to run an ethical business and hate to see these tactics.

Unless the sites are packing malware, it's unlikely you would see any immediate impact on Google's search rankings. But if their engineers have not already seen the sites they would almost certainly take a look at them in the hope of improving their anti-spam algorithms in the future.

[Jill]

Can I or should I report these Bogus Blogs to Google? Would it do any good?
Where can I report them?

Sure, you can report them if you'd like. It's doubtful it would do any good.

If you want to though, you would do it through your own webmaster tools account. Be sure your own site is stellar and free from spam if you do, however.

[DJKay]

This smacks a little of Jill's recent semne talk where she talked about ethics. I believe Jill used the example of a limo company spamming the results, having multiple different sites that had the same phone number...

I can see where someone is doing reputation management and needs to employ this tactic. I have also come up against some of this kind of thing myself where companies create content sites in addition to their corporate site with something like keyword-phrase.org Get their competitors content up there, use no-follow links on competitor's content to the content site and link back to their corporate site.

I think its a lot of work to do one site well..let alone, 15 blogs. Just my opinion.

[Michael Martinez]

This smacks a little of Jill's recent semne talk where she talked about ethics. I believe Jill used the example of a limo company spamming the results, having multiple different sites that had the same phone number...

I can see where someone is doing reputation management and needs to employ this tactic.

By way of digression from the main topic: It's really not a very good tactic for reputation management, though, as it is a tactic that screams out "reputation management" -- and that can draw further criticism to people who are trying to recover from it.

It's a better practice for microsite gangbuster marketing campaigns, where agencies try to create buzz around different aspects of a new product/service.