One-way links through blogs

Would it be a black hat technique to use blogs to get one way links

[khatan27]

I understand getting one way links from relevant sites is important. Would it be a Black Hat (penalty worthy)technique to set up 2-3 blogs with original content and send one way links to my e-commerce site?

For example, I am selling furniture, and I want to optimize for bedroom furniture and office furniture. I launch bedroomfurniture.blog and officefurniture.blog with content added weekly. I know it might not be practical as far as the time/resources needed. But, is this a safe SEO practice?

Thanks.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], khatan27!

more like grey hat.
if all your "help" comes from the same neighborhood, it starts looking spammy and will probably be discounted if not necessarily penalized.

[daveshap]

I also think it has to do with how often original content is updated to the blog. If it's a blog with 3 posts and 5 links in each post to your site it might raise some flags. But if you link out to other industry related sites that are not direct competitors to your own as often as you link out to your own site I don't think there would be any problems.

A quality blog can not only help with link building efforts, but it can also help a bunch with branding and promotion if done well.

[HStiepel]

It might help, as a matter of fact, I've done similar things in the past and have seen some positive results with it.

Personal opinion now, the time it takes to write and update the content on those blogs may be put to better use by hosting a similar blog on your own ecommerce site. If the content is well written it will probably attract more links from other sites than the few links from the 2 or 3 blogs you will be able to maintain yourself.

[minnapple]

Any link that is recognized my google with have a short term effect. Sometimes is it positive and some time it is negative depending on the "tipping point" of the page.

The tipping point is something that most webmasters do not understand. It is relatively new in google algo, and needs to considered when adding links of any type.

Any new link to a page, triggers events once google finds it. The amount of links, the anchors, and the current status of page can vary the immediate results.

After that, the effect of the [link/s] on the page position with changes after multiple fetches and page cache updates.

The variables are endless, but you will see the greatest variation between new and established pages.

[Juvie]

We have a blog (hosted by blogger) where we post a few times a week with store news, industry trends, some other writing I do, etc. We link almost exclusively to our ecommerce site, and it does bring us some traffic, which is really the point. The funny thing is that I haven't ever sought backlinks for the blog, so we only have a handful. BUT the blog now has the same PR as the ecommerce site, which has about 1,000 backlinks and has been around longer! I guess it's a long, long way from PR 3 to PR 4...

[khatan27]

I really appreciate everyones feedback.

Juvie, has it helped increase your e-commerce sites rankings?

Open to anyone that reponds;
Do you think it would be better if you just added the blog content to your site directly?

[idolw]

Well, this is one of the techniques, I'd call it "support sites building".
Build loads of sites, get them indexed and link to your main site. This is how link schemes such as #*$! or Carramba.net work.
Now the problem is in these support sites - if you want them to really make a difference, you need plenty of these with pretty many pages indexed. That leads to creation of spammy sites that Google's PR Department (and Matt Cutts) does not like but Google's algo is still unable to punish.
So, if you are able to create many support websites that do not are too spammy you should be fine.
You should not be punished for driving a Mercedes, so the fact that you have multiple sites that link to another site of your should not be a reason to punish you, too... unless you link without relevancy and user's interest in mind ;)
If you want to be 100% safe use your boyfriend's / girlfriend's credentials and another cheap hosting server to register and host domains.

[Juvie]

Khatan27, it is impossible to know if our blog is "the" thing that has increased our site's ecommerce rankings, because it is just one piece of link-building that we do. It has certainly contributed visitors to the site, which is fantastic considering that it is no cost (well, there is my precious time). And it does contribute to our users' experience and overall company branding and promotion. So, as long as your blog isn't spammy and you write it with your customers in mind instead of the search engines, I say go for it. As far as hosting it on site vs. offsite, I don't know which is better. It's easier, certainly, to use an offsite package.

[tokey666]

Wowie. So many different frames of thought and points of view here. Its hard to tell which of it is real and which is BS. No offense to any of you of course. But we can all admit (and I hope everyone isn't big headed enough to agree) that we JUST DON'T KNOW. Right?

We can learn and learn and speculate and conclude, but its ever so hard to pinpoint a good "EURIKA!" when it comes to search engine marketing.

At any rate, keep the advice and schools of thought going. I love reading it! Thanks again.