Blog Networks getting the chop - impact you?

[AussieWebmaster]

hey many people have used them - they were part of getting links from niched content but now Google is dropping piles from the SERPs so what to do?

if your results have dropped it could be these links no longer passing impact

[JohnW]

Didn't use BMR et al here, but have seen clients sites that (on their own) used these networks drop. Doesn't appear to be a penalty, like you said, just a drop = to the links that vanished. I think the WMT messages about "unnatural links" was a scare tactic that tricked many webmasters to snitch on themselves which may be how those networks got busted.

What to do? Build links manually, stay diverse, don't overdo it ;-)

[AussieWebmaster]

no the warnings went out at the same time - there was already chatter about the next update at Panda and these networks were hit

the over optimization is yet to hit and I am thinking is about anchor text

[JohnW]

To me it seems there are 4 separate issues afoot-

1. New onsite OOP coming soon. I doubt the onpage OOP is going to be a problem for pro SEOs using common sense. Should wipe out a bunch of garbage though, hope it does.

2. Devaluation of some certain linking signal(s). As to what link signals have been dropping out I don’t think they drop anchor text but they may treat it differently. Personally I am more focused on the way an overall backlink profile is evaluated than a change in evaluating individual link attributes.

3. Deindexing of blog networks. About BMR and a few other networks – this is same-old-same-old stuff. They find a link farm, they kill it. Nothing new here.

4. Panda. Seems like their implementation is improving but the basics seem to be same as 1.0. It’s obvious that this is related to content thickness and uniqueness. However it’s interesting that some sites are immune to it - apparently you have to hit a certain threshold of page count, authority score, link count, a certain type of link profile, or whatever, to become eligible for this filter.

[AussieWebmaster]

John I agree there are a bunch of changes that too many people are combining attribution to one act - this will hurt them in the long wrong