Are Paid Blog Networks Worth The Money?

You’ll find lots of blog network services that promise to provide you with unlimited backlinks and better search engine rankings, with little work on your part. You can find services costing as little as $30 a month and as much as several hundred per month – are they really worth it? Let’s look at a few of the pros and cons of these services.

These networks are set up with the intention of creating backlinks to other websites. Some of these services started out as private networks while others were set up to be sold as a service from the beginning.

The theory behind them is that you can post your own content to the blogs in the network, including links back to your other websites. These links will help get your site indexed faster as well as provide you with “link juice” over the long term.

The main selling point is that you don’t have to do a lot of hard work searching for sites that will link back to you. As long as you stay within the terms of use for the blog network, you have control over what you post and where it links back to.

The fact is, you’re going to see varying degrees of value from these types of networks. Some blog networks, especially the lower-priced ones, often have a lot of low-value blogs that won’t really provide much benefit in the links to your websites. Others have stronger sites in the network that will provide more benefit, but you’ll pay more for them.

It’s also debatable whether links on blog networks offer much value, regardless of the quality of the sites. They generally get crawled regularly by the search spiders, which can help speed up the indexing for your site. Generally, your link winds up on a page with little or no PageRank once it works its way through the first couple of pages of the blog, as more people post.

Another concern with these networks is how transparent they are. If a search engine employee could sign up for the service and identify many or all of the blogs in the network, it would be easy enough for them to just discount all those links automatically.

Blog networks can be an effective part of an overall traffic strategy, but if you use them as your primary method you’re probably going to be disappointed with the results.

If you do decide to join one of these networks, try to find one that doesn’t share all the sites. The best ones let you submit your content and link and then they post it to a blog behind the scenes.