Google’s campaign against black-hat practices continues with its manual crackdown on private blog networks (PBNs). In September 2014, Google sent out a notice to all webmasters about its intent to take action against these blogs for having “thin content” that includes, but is not limited to, automatically-generated content, duplicates, scraped content, and doorway pages.
The question now is: Are you at risk?
Defining PBNs
PBNs are different, interconnected domains—usually blogs—under one name. However, their only purpose for existence is to serve as bait for inbound links, leading them to money-generating websites and, eventually, to the client’s site. The domains are either expired or no longer uploading content regularly for a long time.
Often, PBNs use the former because of their age and backlink profile, according to Niche Site Project founder Doug Cunnington:
Ideally, we would want to see a number (more than 10) of natural links from related websites. For example, if the domain was about home improvements, we hope to see many links from home improvement blogs with varying anchor text. It is ideal to see high authority and quality websites linking to the expired domains.
Stay Active
If you have to maintain so many websites, then keeping them alive with regular content updates is a safe bet. Using expired domains doesn’t necessarily guarantee getting axed by Google, but new domains are a safe bet, as well. Google won’t have a problem with healthy sites receiving inbound links, provided their content follows all guidelines.
Search results change hands all the time, so it’s safe to say SEO is a long-term methodology. A six-month SEO package may grant your website an additional six months of life (1 year in total, for the record), but traffic may slide down without follow-up. For this reason, you’d want to maintain site activity if you wish to benefit from long-term Temecula SEO.
Temecula search engine optimization companies like 5 Star Brand will keep your websites alive for as long as you need them to. Such a company can also use a combination of optimized website design, social media marketing, pay-per-click, and other services to ensure you get optimum exposure online.
(Source: “Google Targets Sites Using Private Blog Networks With Manual Action Ranking Penalties,” Search Engine Land, September 23, 2014)
