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When it comes to outsourcing your company’s seo, nothing’s more important than understanding what goes on “behind the scenes” with your website.
After all, this is meant to be your livelihood, and taking a “no hands on deck” approach is tantamount to suicide, especially in this day and age of manual website reviews by google.
The sad reality is, when it comes to small business seo services, most seo practitioners outsource their client’s seo needs to “link or blog networks.”
It’s the fastest (and cheapest) way to rank a website in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and drive organic traffic to it.
In layman’s terms, a link network is a grouping together of High Page rank websites for the purpose of providing “link juice” to your website.
On the internet, many webmasters band together, offering some of their somewhat ill-acquired websites into a network where… the adage “strength in numbers” holds true.
Within this network, any member is allowed to publish blog posts (read “articles”) on different websites that are linked together via some form of automatic content distribution system.
For example, if I wrote an article called “5 Killer weightloss diet secrets”, I could then submit that article to a blog network and, in theory this article would then be published to sites within the network related to “weightloss”, “paleo diet”, “healthy eating” and other blogs of that nature.
That said, it’s also known that Google has been on a rampage de-indexing blog/link networks left, right and center.
This onslaught has been going on for the past 2 years, with the real witch hunt reloaded, if you will, having started shortly after Google’s Panda 3.3 update, on February 27 2012.
Anyone celebrating their birthday on Feb 27th?
I digress.
Even big article networks such as ezinearticles, squidoo and ehow had to offload some of their article content written by hardworking internet marketers as their rankings and authority in the search engines was taking a real hard knocking.
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This is the nature of seo in the post panda world. You either adapt or simply wither away in your office, biting at your fingernails until there’s nothing left to bite.
Sure, a fetal position would work, but this is not business as we know it, so you have to come up with innovative ways in the hope of “duping” google.
But we all know it’s easier to dupe the World using a false sign language interpreter than it is to dupe google.
Some internet marketers thought they would come up with a quasi private blog network… one similar in concept as other previous blog networks that have since been laid to rest, – Build My Rank being one of them.
Just google “Build My Rank” etc to read all about its ultimely demise.
Why are blog networks being targeted by Google?
I see three principal reasons why Google has started to crackdown on blog networks, so let me run you through them:
Blog networks are a form of paid link building. Google’s policy on paid link building is crystal clear, especially the fact that “buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.” The purpose blog networks is to facilitate link building, and these links are most definitely paid for in a slightly less obvious manner. Google penalized the website of their own Chrome software when it was revealed that a marketing company they used had employed paid backlinks; Google were hardly going to think twice about penalizing other paid link users were they?
Blog networks are a form of “link scheme”. Just like paid linking, Google’s opinion on link schemes leaves no room for confusion. They are not a natural form of link building, especially once blog networks developed the technology to allow you submit a spin-ready article to hundreds of different blogs in a short space of time. Nobody submitted to blog networks just for the sake of getting content published – it is and always was about generating links. Blog networks sold themselves on this basis of being a way to get unnaturally large amounts of links quickly, and it was only a matter of time until Google caught on.
Articles posted to blog networks tend to be low quality. The vast majority of articles posted to blog networks were low quality “filler” content that was only written to get backlinks. That might sound harsh, but the unfortunately the truth hurts. If the Panda update of 2011 wasn’t a big enough wake up call, then hopefully the newest of Google’s changes is. Google wants quality, unique content to populate its search index. Google wants you to create and distribute content for the purpose of providing value to readers, not just to build links. If you want high search engine rankings then you need to focus on providing value first, and link building/SEO second. I simply cannot stress this point enough!
To get back to the crust of this article… small business owners strongly rely upon the expertise of their “seo guy” to rank their websites.
It’s simply the nature of business… small business owners simply do not have the time, knowledge nor resources to do their own inhouse seo.
To add injury to salt, or is it salt to injury, I simply forget, many “seo guys” with tasks from small businesses to rank their websites simply ceeded their “expertise” to one big blog network in the hope of fast ranking results.
That blog netowork WAS called Anglo Rank.
How Anglo Rank (a public blog network that advertised its services on a blackhat site for all to see), managed to survive for any amount of time and get websites in its network to rank, without feeling the google hammer, is indeed a mystery.
Sadly, that mystery finally came to a screetching halt as Matt Cutts, Google’s Anti Spam Head Honcho, mocked the demise of Anglo Blog Network via twitter on December 6th 2013.
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When you see an authority figure such as Mr Cutts stooping to such low levels of mocking a blog network, and rejoicing in its demise, then perhaps you can understand the love-hate relationship seo’s have with him.
To end this article, if you’re a small business owner who relied heavily on a seo guy for your small business seo, and Christmas became a kind of bland affair for your sales and website standing in the search engines, chances are your seo guy may have submitted your website to Anglo Blog Network, which has since been de-indexed by google, and all websites found with links pointing back to them from this network, have either felt the pain, or are in the process of experiencing this cold hard reality!
If your website has as much as a single link from Anglo Network, then your website is about to be de-indexed, simple as that.
Sure, ignorance is bliss – Kids believe Santa is alive and well.
We all know how this tale ends as kids grow up and start smelling them roses.
Don’t hand the livelihood of your company to any seo company.
There are no second chances when it comes to SEO, once your site is de-indexed, the only option is to buy another domain… sure, Google has said if you “remove” all those links you’ve built or unknowingly had someone build them for you, then you can be in good standing once again…
I’ll leave the ramifications of telling google about the source of all those backlinks to your imagination.
SEO is dead, long live SEO!
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