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But I see many blog pages PR4 and higher. Many of these are close related to my site theme.
So I wonder if starting my own blog or getting backward links from those is a good move?
What about exchanging links with blogs?
I avoid being in Blogs since Google cleaned blog links time ago.
Could someone explain what that means?
Google cleaned blog links
I missed that, I guess. That happens when I take a weekend off...
In other words: If or when G changes status of blog links, if you have a PR5 site with 50 quality inbound links, appearing in 200 low quality blogs might have a bad impact on your PR.
Still debatable?
Again, what would stop your competitor from saying ok, they have 100 links and getting your site 400 incomings from blogs and "ruining" your ranks or PR?
200 "low quality" links are 200 low quality links - coming from blogs or not. You can't control who links to you. Like I said, whether or not 200 blog links will have the same impact as 200 quality inbounds is an argueable issue - but being "penalized" for them is not smart, not practical and would be a downright useless and highly abused penalty.
Google "cleaned" blog links
Unless they did it selectively, I'm definitely not seeing it.
If or when G changes status of blog links, if you have a PR5 site with 50 quality inbound links, appearing in 200 low quality blogs might have a bad impact
That would require a substantial change in modern search engine algorithms. And I'm not sure where the benefit would be.
Find: "guestbook" / Replace: "blog" at -
[webmasterworld.com...]
#10 - We always (6 months average) get a substantial new update to the G alg.
Find: "guestbook" / Replace: "blog"
Wrong. No one discusses the hot new movie, CD, or viral website by signing a guestbook. Blogs have their place, and it's not as easy of a decision to auto-filter as you suggest.
You're entitled to your opinion, as I am to mine. I don't agree with your theory - blogs and guestbooks are no where near the same animal, so we'll have to agree to disagree.
Where do all those rumors re "build a blog and rank high" come from? A blog's not a magical tool.
I am sure this is temporary though. Google can't keep this "let's highly rank pages with lame linking" algo too long.
So, if you want to rank well the next few weeks, get in every blog you can. After that, it likely will not be nearly as helpful.
They can be valid, but are often pure garbage, and getting garbage links from blogs right now is extremely valuable.
MOST stuff on the web is garbage, and blogs certainly aren't exempt from that rule.
Despite the fact that blogs DO exert a noticeable impact on the SERPs (my opinion only, not really a proven fact), it's only a tiny percentage of blogs that are doing this. Probably only 1% of blogs are responsible for the lion's share of the blog effect.
And the 1% I wouldn't call garbage, they got to a level where they can impact the SERPs because they have inbound links, and they got links because people found a reason to link to them.
I think a lof of SEO guys are just jealous that bloggers get links so easily while no one wants to link to their spammy sites about real-estate, viagra, and web hosting.
My questions now are:
1) Are Blogs treated in different way than guestbooks?
2) Is there something wrong with being linked from several blogs?
3) Did you notice some improvement for being linked from blogs? (or any negative impact)
And sorry for not explain what happened with the G cleaning time ago!
I don't think you have an understanding of the issue. It has nothing to do with some blogs having inbound links and certainly not because people found reason to link them. No one has reason to link to this garbage, except the garbage peddlers of course who not only link to their money sites from the junk blogs, but to the other blogs that carry their links.
The issue is blogs that exist merely to send anchor text links to other domains. The blogs have no content (or almost none) a human would actually read.
Blog spam is hugely successful right now because low PR links are being quite heavily valued at the moment. Google seems to have taken the position that they will combat buying links from higher PR domains by devaluing links from all higher PR and authoritative sites. This has led to a very significant increase in the value of trivial links, specifically from forum pages and from blogs. Irrational decision by some Google desicionmaker, but that seems to be where we are now, back in the summer of 2003 when seo was about getting as many anchor text links as possible -- but now we have the added twist that low quality links are better than high quality links!
Is it so?! where does this statement come from? (unless you meant "high relevance low PR links are better than low relevance high PR links" - this is not an added twist though)
Please elaborate.
The issue is blogs that exist merely to send anchor text links to other domains. The blogs have no content (or almost none) a human would actually read.
I don't see why this is different than what "black hat" guys have been doing for years. Make a lot of different websites with junk and link them together.
"Blog" is meaningless.
What does that have to do with anything?
The point is the phenomenon, and how Google reacts. Just because it is an extension of a longstanding practice doesn't have any relevance to the existence of the phenomenon.
Silverbyte,
"3) Did you notice some improvement for being linked from blogs? (or any negative impact)"
I think I can possibly answer that. :(
This last backlink update on the 30th or so had a big surprise for us. We literally had hundreds of blog links. And they were obviously spam. Not sure at all how this happened because I know we didn't go to all that work(nor would I). Now the sad thing is that on the same day that the backlinks were updated, our index fell from page 1 in the serps to page 3 for our main keyword. Our secondary two word keyphrase also went into a nose dive. This site had been stable on page 1 for both keywords(phrases) for almost two years. The blog spammer did all of this in 3 days starting August 3rd. He also left links for three other very related sites right in the vicinity of ours on all these blog pages. And at least two of the three domains were created the same day that he started his spamming.
Not sure what to do about this. We now look as spammy as they come backlink-wise. Question is, would Google have taking us down in the serps for this? I can't easily imagine as it would be a great way for the competition to wreck a domain's standing in Google. On the other hand, it's a mighty strange coincidence.
Any idea where I can report this to Google?
GuinnessGuy
