Back in the day (a few short years ago), blogs were the kings of link juice. All it took was a cross-linking strategy and you’d be the recipient of some major PR, which you could redirect throughout your network. That’s not the case these days, as blog networks appear to be virtually drained of much of their PR.
Now, there seem to be a few blog networks that are still getting by. But I’m sure they have a number of links from outside of their own network. In the past, it was relatively easy to have a blog network that consisted of a few “anchor websites”, which would then pass sufficient PR to all of the other blogs in the network. Now, that strategy seems to be dead in the water. Now it’s much more unlikely that blog networks will seek to expand their ranks.
From a searcher’s perspective, this is probably a good thing. Basically cross-linking blogs is a reciprocal link scheme in the classic sense of the term. If the easy money is out of blog networks, then you can expect a slowdown in the proliferation of blogs.
Blogs have long been one of the spammiest sectors in the search index, so it’s interesting to see if they end up being targeted for more penalties in the future. Of course a blog is just a form of content management system, but that doesn’t mean there are certain patterns concerning the business models of most blogs.
Blogs lost much of their status with the introduction of paid reviews and a massive proliferation of paid text link advertising. Of course bloggers flocked to these new programs because they wanted a way to monetize their content. Advertisers also flocked into them because they saw a way to manipulate the SERPs using the power of “the conversation.” Now, Google does what they always do: they implement a ham-fisted patch to react to the problems. Or at least it looks like they have.
As usual, when we speak about what Google is doing, we’re forced to guess. That’s what happens in a unilateral relationship.
