Do Paid Blog Networks Help You With Getting Website Traffic

There are a great deal of paid blog networks out there that advertise boundless backlinks and much improved search engine results, all for minimal effort on your part. You’ll find services costing as low as $30 a month and as much as several hundred every month – could they be really worth it? Let us take a look at some of the pros and cons of blog networking.

These blog networks are generally set up by someone for the purpose of creating backlinks to other websites. In some cases these networks started out for personal use of a select few people while in other cases they were created specifically to be sold as a service.

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.

Of course, the big benefit is that this is all handed to you on a silver platter – there’s no searching for sites that will link back to you. You have control over what you post and where you link to, as long as you do it within the rules of the service.

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. Some networks will have more valuable sites with higher PR, but you’ll usually pay a lot more to join.

It’s also debatable whether links on blog networks offer much value, regardless of the quality of the sites. There’s no question that they will get picked up quickly by the search engines, and can help speed up indexing. But in most cases, once your post drops off the first page or two of the blog it winds up on an archive page that has little or no Pagerank to pass through the link.

Another concern with these blog networks is how transparent they are. After all, if a Google employee can sign up for the service and easily identify all the blogs in the network, it wouldn’t take much for them to completely discount all the links on those sites.

Blog networks will work well as part of a larger overall strategy, but they’re not particularly effective on their own.

And if you do join a network, look for 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.