This fascinating post set me off on my own exploration to see whether spam blog networks actually work.

I haven’t got to the bottom of it yet but I’m not even going to look any deeper, there’s no point.

I found one very credible site with links from splogs. It was a PR5 with an Alexa rank of 200,000 and it featured half way up the first page on Google for its main keyword.

Here’s what I think…

Spam blog networks work for other people. However, they won’t work for you and they won’t work for me – we’d be drop kicked from the search results quicker than you could spit.

 

Is the SEO community really surprised by the link revelations that have been in the news recently?

Anyone who is surprised clearly hasn’t done much (if any) link research lately. Because link abuse is rampant. For example, using Open Site Explorer I reviewed backlinks to a specific page for a top 500 trafficked site.

Lo and behold a very large percentage of those links came from splogs.

Splogs

What’s a splog? It’s a blog full of spam. A spam blog. You’ll know a splog when you see it.

They’re amazingly easy to spot because they have no topic focus, frequently contain large paragraphs of gibberish, have a ton of links and usually redirect about and contact pages to the home page.

Do Splogs Work?

Well, commonsense tells you splogs wouldn’t exist if they didn’t work. In addition, many of these splogs have posts dating back years. I doubt these folks would keep splogging if it wasn’t paying off.

Lets look at the 10 splogs I identified. I did a site: query to see if they were in Google, and if so how many pages were returned. I also captured the Open Site Explorer Page Authority and Domain Authority for each splog.

Out of the 10 splogs, 5 have been removed from Google’s index. 5 out of 10. Sorry, I just don’t think 50% is good enough. And look at the decent Page and Domain Authority for these splogs!

More to the point, there seems to be little to no consequence for those who acquire links from splogs. No one is even bothering to pull these people over and give them a warning.

Instead it’s akin to an empty police car on the side of the road. The first few times you zip by you might be nervous. But then you figure it out. No one is in the police car. No one is there to catch you.

Splog Success

The company receiving links from these specific splogs ranks 4th on a term with 1.2 million monthly searches and 2nd on a term with 60,000 monthly searches. So, this practice certainly doesn’t seem to be hurting them.

Read the rest here

Tagged as: internet marketing, link networks, spam blogs, splogs