How Google Deindexing Blog Networks Will Change Backlink Building

As most people with an interest in search engine optimization will be aware, Google are constantly working to improve the accuracy of their search results, usually by making amendments to their algorithm. This is to ensure that people who are searching for a term find the website or page which is most relevant to their search quickly and easily. Because of the competitiveness in trying to secure the top spot for popular search terms, search engine optimization has become a huge industry, with firms paying out huge sums of money to rank at the top of the results for their chosen terms. Many of Google’s algorithm updates are smaller amendments to change the way a website’s on-page SEO affects the search engine results, and the majority of updates go unnoticed by the masses.
As well as on-page SEO however, Google must also monitor the effect which backlinks will have on the search results. Backlinks have a significant impact on websites’ rankings within the search engines, however most SEO experts agree that Google’s algorithm does not count all backlinks equally. This is another area where Google’s algorithm is updated – reducing the value of certain types of backlinks, and in extreme cases removing them from the equation altogether. Blog comments, for example, have been abused and spammed by those with automated tools to such an extent that backlinks built by commenting on blogs are believed by many to be virtually worthless during an SEO campaign. The value of other forms of backlink building which is easily automated, such as article marketing and forum profiles, are believed to have been similarly reduced in value in Google’s algorithm.

Contextual Links

One type of backlink which is believed to hold a lot of weight in the algorithm is a contextual backlink. This is where a backlink to a website is created within an article which is relevant to the topic of the website. The reason these types of links are believed to be so valuable is because they’re very difficult to automate – the only real way to automate the process is to create many backlinks from the same domain, and most SEO experts agree that large volumes of backlinks from the same domain are nowhere near as valuable as backlinks from different domains.
There are two main ways in which people can create contextual backlinks to their website – one of these is to write a guest article and ask the website owner to publish it on their website along with a contextual backlink. This benefits both parties and works well for the purposes of SEO, however the number of websites within your niche which accept guest posts is likely to be fairly low, so only a limited number of backlinks can be built this way. The other method is to create other websites yourself just to create links to your main website, however this can become very costly as well as time consuming. Because of this, some internet marketers have come up with another way of building contextual backlinks.

Blog Networks

A blog network is a collection of blogs which can be used for posting articles which contain contextual backlinks. A blog network can be as basic or as complex as necessary – some blog networks contain hundreds of individual blogs, hosted on separate hosting accounts. The article is usually spun to ensure that each blog posts a completely unique article. When posting the article to a blog network, the blogs which publish the article are usually selected randomly to make it more difficult for Google to establish which blogs are part of the network.

Google’s Reaction

It is no secret that blog networks such as these have frustrated Google. While it was fairly easy to amend their algorithm to reduce the value of blog comments or forum profile backlinks, there isn’t a similar way to reduce the value of backlinks from blog networks. These backlinks appear identical to backlinks from other blogs which are not part of a network, so any attempt to reduce the value of these backlinks in the algorithm would most likely affect a huge number of genuine backlinks as well.
However, this doesn’t mean that Google do not have a solution. Rather than changing their algorithm to reduce the effect which backlinks from blog networks have, they have simply removed these backlinks from the equation altogether. Over the last few days, there have been many reports of blogs which were part of blog networks having been removed from Google’s search results, meaning that they will not come up when searching for any term, but also that any backlinks from these blogs will no longer count towards a web page’s search engine ranking.
The feedback coming from users on webmaster forums over the last few days is that many of the most popular blog networks have been completely removed from Google’s search engine index, meaning that backlinks from the blog networks no longer count towards websites’ rankings. There have been reports of several of the larger blog networks being deindexed, sparking concerns that Google are manually targeting and tracking these networks.
If Google continues to deindex entire blog networks, a lot of people’s SEO efforts will have been in vain, and there may be vast changes at the top of the search results, particular for terms which are commonly targeted by people who use black hat SEO techniques.
Those with a quality website who have dropped down Google’s search results for their keywords will have a lot of work to do in order to recover their rankings. Quality backlinks will need to be created to replace those which have been lost, and quality backlinks are not easy to find. For those using purely white hat SEO techniques however, they may just have achieved the search engine ranking which they deserve, thanks to Google’s intervention.