Joining a blog network these days has become a less attractive option due to the recent penalization of blog networks by Google. The whole idea of joining a blog network after all is to supposedly help you position either your blog or yourself in a way that will increase your reach and build your link profile. Instead, due to the countless low quality (even downright spammy) blog networks in existence, joining a blog network indiscriminately may lead to disastrous results.

If you plan on joining a blog network, either as a blogger for existing blogs on a network, or to have your blog added as part of the network, you’d better exercise caution so that you end up with a network that will truly help you reach your goals.

Some warning you should watch out for when joining blog networks include:

• Poor content – If the blog network offers poor content, stay away. You don’t want to be associated with anything that will diminish your reputation instead of build it up. Read the actual posts and you can easily see whether they are publishing spun content or are using ghost bloggers that do not even have a good command of the English language. In addition to these, many of the blogs are not even thematic and will write about any topic, which is a sign that they are accepting payment to link to sites, and as we know they will get penalized if caught.
• Ugly pages – Most link farms disguising as blog networks use templates that they do not bother to customize at all.
• No information about the people behind it – You will find that the best blog networks have “real” people behind them. Stay away from blog networks without decent write ups on the authors/bloggers and do not even provide proper contact information.

Image via CrunchyNow

Originally posted on March 30, 2012 @ 3:24 am