Building my own blog network with backlinks - bad?

This sounds like a lot of work, and it isn't clear how much rankings boost your main sites would get. You would need to register the new domains under different names with different registrars and use privacy protection, and even that might not prevent Google from seeing a connection between the sites. Also, you would need to find some outside links to the blogs just to get them indexed. It might be better to start on a smaller scale and see how it goes.

It's tough to be smarter than Google when it comes to building your own network of sites. Be concerned that you'll either get ignored or penalized.

Everything aristotle said, the site ownership needs to be discrete as well as the hosting as well as the content as well as the nameservers as well as everything else.

But on top of that, those sites are probably mostly worthless unless they have their own set of strong backlinks. And if you're having to build backlinks to those secondary sites why not just build them to your main website and save yourself the effort?

One thing I think that may be useful is doing all of the above, but buying websites that have existing backlinks. That's one way to build a hopefully unrecognizable yet still useful network.

Yeah, a lot of work, as aristotle said.

It probably wouldn't take much more to build a *real* blog network. A couple of folks have done so (I think one used to be a WebmasterWorld member) and have sold them for a few mil or so.

Ok, but you see I also own my own articlenetwork which consist of about 200 domains. Some of these domains will point to some of the blogs in the blog-network using different links.

I have already written 50 articles, spin-ready, and the content from those will be 90% unique. The originals which also are unique of course, will be used as content on the moneysites I want to optimize.

I was thinking about starting out with 5 different blogs in the network, and point links to one of the sites, and then build the network from there (To avoid having a sudden mass-linking of 200-300 links to my money-sites) These are well established sites with domain age of 5 years+

Regarding the unique-ness:
The blogs will be hosted on different c-class ip's
With the same registrar, but with privacy protection
And the nameservers will also be unique because of the seo-host I'll use.

You STILL don't think this is a good idea?

Yes, it's still a poor idea, you seem to be overlooking a big issue. Keeping them discrete is only incidental. Unique content is also part of the problem but incidental. The problem is that each of the feeder sites needs their own backlinks. Otherwise all you have are 300 worthless domains pointing at your main site. And even THAT is going to scream network loud enough that Google can hear it.

Ok, I hear you loud and clear..
That's why I asked the question to get inputs.

Put it still makes me sit here as a question-mark, because what does SEO companies do? How can they get NEW sites listed within days, and also at the top of serps.

And another question would be how can article marketing work? Because I know for a fact that article marketing does work!

And all the blognetworks out there... let's say article-exchange + contentfx.. these guys actually list at the top, but do they sell crap? How do they get their sites to the top?

How can they get NEW sites listed within days, and also at the top of serps.

SEO companies have few if any secrets that can't be found or figured out from reading here. Most SEO companies I've seen actually do less than what I've seen here.

You can build a list of directories and submit to hundreds of them. You can build a list of article sites and submit to hundreds of them. You can build a list of press release sites and submit to them all. You can buy thousands of blog articles. And so on.

But you're making what I would say is a rookie mistake. You're treating this like an automating/secret algorithm problem. SEO companies have to do this because they need to cookie-cutter their solutions. You don't have to. You should treat this as a marketing problem. How can you - as the site owner and expert - get people to link to you from great quality sites?

Those are the ideas you want, and can get from the link development library here.

Quite frankly, I wouldn't use most (not all mind you) SEO companies. As time goes on their skill set seems less unique and I'm liking what they're doing less and less. You need to find someone so good that they are able to market (not optimize) your site better than you can.

Thank you for the reply, it's a great discussion actually.

Just for the record, I have several sites, which all of them are doing very good in the search engines. I have top rankings for most of my best niche keywords, and I have from #3 to #1 position on search terms with 4.000.000 results.

All of this has been optimizing and tweaking for many years, and of course marketing on directories and article sites.

But you are very right when you say it's a rookie mistake - I DO feel like a rookie all over again - because lately, some of my sites have been dropping a few positions, because of new sites popping up. And I have held these top positions because I did what I did when I first started.

So I've been really lucky. It hasn't been much of an effort to keep these positions for a long time. Such a long time that I don't have a clue anymore.. My old good working methods seems to be outdated, and I have to find new ones - which takes up plenty of my time.

I have so many sites now, and so much to lose on getting squeezed out of the top position, so I need to find a way that works good. The reason I need to have some of the things automated is because when years have passed, I've got (lucky me of course) more and more to do - and I don't have the time no more to do this kind of tweaking as I did before.

I will do a little research, and try to optimize for a nishe which is far away the niches I actually do business in, just to check if my methods work.

And if they do - Whooohooo!
And if not - I haven't lost anything, and I'm one experience richer :)

It's a doable thing, again frowned upon as Wheel mentioned.

However, don't necessarily take everything you hear verbatim. I know of many established authority networks that interlink websites, and have from the onset. Those websites did it in a fashion where it provided value to the user, and the links between stores / sites were related and useful to the user.

But, *totally* not done to influence search engine rankings, I'm sure :P