Building a blog network for SEO purposes
With cheap hosting allowing multiple domains to be hosted for a few dollars a month, it can be relatively inexpensive to build up a stable of websites in different niches. Using a network of sites you can link to your key, money-earning sites to boost their performance in SERPs.
The biggest barrier to building up a network of (say 20) sites is time and effort. Each site will need content and for each site you will need to build external backlinks. The easiest type of site to create when building a network is a blog. On each blog you can post an article every day or two to build up the content to 50 or so posts. The blogs can then go into a maintenance cycle with a new post each week.
Over at forums like DigitalPoint it’s possible to purchase articles to post on your blogs. The price of an article depends on whether it’s unique or already posted somewhere else on the internet. the content for your blogs needs to be unique to avoid getting hit by a Google duplicate content penalty. Unique articles might cost $10 each, but for the same money you can purchase PLR packages containing thousands of articles in a host of niches. If you buy PLR content, you’re going to need to reword/ rewrite the articles to make them unique. In fact, even if you think you are buying unique content it’s best to check the content really is unique using CopyScape before going live.
Two other problems arise when building a network of sites:-
- Can you interlink the sites?
- Do you need to hide the identity of the site owner?
The answer to point 1 is yes, interlink the sites where it makes sense, i.e. the blogs are on a similar theme. However, don’t do mass link exchanges between sites, e.g. in a network of 20 sites all sites linking to one another. See this Matt Cutts interview where he recommends interlinking no more than 10 sites.
The answer to point 2 is yes, of course. Interlinking too many sites by the same domain owner is a bad idea and may result in a penalty. Don’t rely on whois or nameguard protection to hide your identity, change the domain owner’s identity - ideally purchase the domains in different names. Change the owner ID before you even begin posting content or interlinking sites.