Are Paid Blog Networks Worth The Money

There are a lot of paid blog networks out there that promise unlimited backlinks and much improved search engine rankings, all for very little effort on your part. They can cost anywhere from $30 a month to several hundred a month but are they worth the money? Let's look at some of the pros & cons.

These blog networks are generally set up by someone for the purpose of creating backlinks to other websites. In some cases, they were originally set up for private use and then opened up to other internet marketers while in other cases they were set up from the outset to be a paid service.

The idea is that you can post your content to these blogs and include links back to your various other websites. This will help both with indexing for newer sites and with increasing search engine rankings with the additional backlinks.

The big benefit, of course, is that you don't have to go 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.

In practice, these blog networks have varying degrees of value. Some of them, especially on the cheaper end of the price spectrum, are made up of low-PR sites that don't really have a lot of "link juice" to pass along to your site through the links you place there. Others have stronger sites in the network that will provide more benefit, but you'll pay more for them.

Whether or not these types of blog links provide much long-term value is debatable. 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 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 can be an effective part of an overall traffic strategy, but if you use them as your primary method you're probably going to be disappointed with the results.

And if you do sign up for one, make sure they don't share all the sites in the network. The best ones keep the sites hidden so you don't know exactly what site your link will wind up on - their system handles that for you.