As someone who operates a successful network of blogs and microsites, I can assure you from extensive experience going back almost 20 years that there is absolutely no inherent danger involved in building and promoting these kinds of Websites. That anyone in the Web marketing field should believe otherwise by now is worse than disappointing: it’s embarrassing to all of us.
There are way too many international corporations that have built their own successful networks of Websites, including thousands of brand-specific microsites, for anyone to justifiably argue that operating private blog networks and microsites is ineffective or dangerous. There may indeed be some inefficiencies involved in running a network. You should see what happens behind the scenes here when a critical WordPress plugin we depend on breaks something in a new update.
Ideally you want every Website to be different but in reality that doesn’t always work out. We publish a lot of distinctive content on our networks but there are a lot of “(near) duplicate content” issues that creep into the process. I have never had to deal with a search engine penalty or downgrade because of those issues. The only time I have ever decided to respond to any significant change in Google’s algorithms with my own Websites was in mid-2011 when I cleared a Panda downgrade from Xenite.Org in 2 months. And at the time I didn’t really have to do that. I just wanted to see what would happen. And, frankly, Xenite had become a low-quality Website through neglect by that point.
But all these attacks on microsites and private blog networks from the Web marketing community have got to stop. I know very well you people are talking about the spammy kinds of microsites and private blog networks, but you don’t make that clear and your message has created a false picture that (fortunately) is largely ignored by the major online business community and (unfortunately) just makes all Web marketing experts look foolish.
There Is Nothing Wrong With Microsites
I have written about microsites a few times through the years:
- Why Create a Microsite about Yourself?
- Succinctly Microsite and Concisely Manifest
- How Many Microsites Are Enough?
- Going Nova: How Websites become Networks
- How to Build a Microsite
- The Microsite Mistake: Mistaking Microsites for Mistakes
The short version is that microsites are good for SEO, good for Web marketing, and often times just plain good. If there is one thing I hate, it’s a single site that tries to be everything to everyone because someone is cowering in the corner afraid to trip over a search engine algorithm.
There are no search algorithms that specifically target microsites and blog networks. At least, neither Bing nor Google has ever mentioned any such algorithms. You all should stop and think about that, because I know most of you are thinking, “What about Penguin?”
Penguin was about Web spam, not about blog networks. The two are very different things. I still see plenty of blog networks in the search results and they get a lot of traffic. Why? Because they are not violating search engine guidelines.
There Is Nothing Wrong with Blog Networks
There are no search engine guidelines that forbid the creation of microsites and private blog networks. Frankly, if either Bing or Google decided to outlaw all blog networks and microsites I would just ignore them.
I have written about blog networks through the years, too:
- Why Reports of PBN Death are Greatly Exaggerated
- The Paradox of the Norm (see the comments)
- How Space Aliens Stole My Blog Network
- New Adventures in the Magical Land of Blogs
- Blog Farms and Black Hat SEO
These are just random examples of articles where I have delved into the topics. I name my Websites in some of them. I have never logged into a search engine webmaster account to find a notification that my blogs were being penalized. I haven’t had to worry about losing traffic to Google’s Panda algorithm.
These are Not the Dangerous Microsites and Blogs You Are Looking for
Are there bad blogs, evil blog networks, and really dumb microsites out there? Sure there are. But I never met a Website that could not be saved if you gave it enough love. I can think of a couple of Websites I gave up on because I could not love them enough, but that is different from curing the ills of lazy Web marketing.
The real problem with private blog networks and microsites is that they are ubiquitous. You can find them everywhere in every shape and form and if you dig hard enough and deep enough you can dredge up plenty of data that shows people have burned their Websites down with links from private blog networks and microsites.
And that is where the problem with ubiquity comes in: people can all too easily cherry-pick their facts. There are too many biased, poorly designed, unscientific SEO case studies running amok, muddying the waters of fact with plentiful fantasies about the perils of promoting published content with private blog networks and paid links.
Although not everyone may have received the memo by now, most people who have been active in Web marketing for at least five years understand that the search engines do not like manipulative links. And the manipulative links are the reason why cheap, spammy blogs keep popping up all over the place.
The microsites that critical Web marketers deplore are hard to classify because they come in all shapes and sizes (and all topics). What makes a microsite a bad idea is the fact that it’s a bad microsite, not the fact that it IS a microsite.
If you want to teach other people proper Web marketing then please distinguish between the good things (microsites) and the bad things (badly designed, poorly implemented, ill-purposed microsites). The bad things require a lot of qualification to distinguish them from the good things. That means the trope that microsites are bad for your Web marketing is just plain false. Worse, it’s absolute nonsense.
You’re Thinking about Domain Authority Again, Aren’t You?
Despite the fact that no major search engine has ever admitted to using Domain Authority, about 90% of the Web marketing community talk about Domain Authority as being important to SEO. Domain authority has nothing to do with SEO. It’s a third-party metric based on third-party data and it has been disavowed as a ranking factor by Google.
So here you are in 2015, talking to people about how microsites split up Domain Authority. You have no justification for doing that. You look incredibly uninformed when you say it.
And here you are in 2015 talking to people about how microsites hurt crawl budget. I have never seen an SEO practitioner who could correctly state how much crawl budget a Website has been awarded by any search engine. Not one of you can compute, deduce, identify, reverse-engineer, or diagnose crawl budget. None of you (and that includes me).
And here you are in 2015 telling people that splitting up their content across multiple microsites means you are dividing your PageRank across multiple domains. The problem with all these hysterics about PageRank is that none of you seems to understand that PAGERANK FLOWS. You cannot stop it from flowing. So what if PageRank is divided between 10 or 50 microsites? That’s the Web, baby. There are more important things for you to be worrying about and fussing over in search engine optimization.
PageRank, Domain Authority, these are things that no Web marketer should spend any time discussing with clients or business decision-makers. It’s your fault for bringing them into the conversation and turning all the decision-makers into Chicken Littles running around decrying the dearth of PageRank and Domain Authority. You never did have the ability to track and measure PageRank and you have absolutely no reason to bring Domain Authority into any well-informed discussion about search engine optimization.
Crawl budgets exist. And crawl problems exist, too. SEOs need to fix the crawl problems and stop agonizing over crawl budget. You have absolutely no way to track and measure crawl budget, so imagine how foolish and inexpert you look when you tell people how to manage it.
New Websites and Websites with few to no links have very little PageRank. When you see that problem you know the solution: get more links. Websites with huge canonical issues ARE splitting up their PageRank among their own pages. When you see THAT problem you know the solution: canonicalize the content. But, DAMN, you don’t need to go on ad nauseum about PageRank and Domain Authority to do that.
This Is Really about Link Building Again, Isn’t It?
Why can’t people just say, “You’re taking on a great risk if you create microsites and blog networks for the sake of pointing links at your main site?”
You know, some marketers do these things quite well and the search engines don’t care in the least. So while I agree that everyone should have the “risks of spam” conversation with clients and decision-makers, I think you all need to calm down and focus more on creating fair and well-informed presentations instead of building these ridiculously biased and incredibly wrong arguments against using microsites and private blog networks.
My blog network is private. I receive emails from marketers every week who want to buy links, place content, or somehow incorporate my sites into their spam empires. They cannot get in. They are uninvited. They are wasting my time (and sorely tempting me to file a few spam reports). Just because I have a private network of Websites doesn’t make me a spammer. One becomes a spammer by spamming, not by owning microsites and private blog networks. You have to use them for spam for them to become bad things.
I build microsites. Sometimes I let them sit and vegetate for years before I develop them into anything great and useful. The search engines and I have a very intimate understanding: they won’t reward any crap I publish with great traffic and I won’t whine about how cruel they are because my vegetative Websites aren’t seeing any traffic.
If I want traffic for a Website I make it into a useful and informative resource. That may mean I have to put up to 5 pages of content on it. It may mean I’ll just keep publishing content on it on a random basis and in about 10 years it will have hundreds of useful, interesting articles on it.
In the greater scheme of things a Website with a few hundred pages of content is probably small. A microsite can be terribly useful, earn lots of traffic, and drive plenty of sales.
Believe me, no one would be investing time in microsites if they could not reasonably expect to make money from them. The people who fail and whose microsites are being penalized and ignored are just following the wrong advice. Or they are following the advice they want to follow because they believe in churn-and-burn SEO.
But microsites in and of themselves are neither bad nor dangerous.
And private blog networks in and of themselves are neither bad nor dangerous.
They are perfectly legitimate tools of Web marketing and plenty of people know how to build these kinds of resources without getting into trouble with the search engines.
I have no problem with people dissecting bad spammy practices and calling them out. But when it comes to microsites and private blog networks you all need to add a few more qualifying points to your case studies.
Want more information? Watch this video where Kent Yunk of Roaring Pajamas and I discuss Private Blog Networks, SEO correlation studies, Penguin algorithm analysis, and link analysis.
Someone send this over to the kids at Hilton. I’m tired of their BS emails to our clients demanding we shut down the vanity sites for our hotels — because they MIGHT hurt Hilton’s brand . com site.
My first impression from the title was in fact that you were somehow saying that private blog networks are good for SEO by virtue of not being dangerous and by proxy the links in them or building them for links, which is why the vast majority of SEOs would build a microsite or PBN.
But seems you are not just headline bait!
Yes i agree with you. Private blog networks are really good for SEO.
I agree with the bulk of what you say. However — there is a huge risk that blog networks present, if done improperly. Google has patents that identify content that isn’t diverse (like re-written or badly spun content), blogs that have same outgoing link footprints (linking to same sets of pages), content that is structurally the same, and either discards them or penalizes the money site.
While that is a bad content problem, and not a “private blog network” problem (it doesn’t affect PBNs with great diverse content), it’s still an issue that most people who construct PBNs face if they take shortcuts and produce lower quality content. Example of the diversity filter patent at SEO By The Sea: http://www.seobythesea.com/2015/06/how-google-may-classify-sites-as-low-quality-sites/
Check out SEO By the Sea’s “Low Quality
Agree with your opinion. I personally don’t feel any harm with microsites and private blog networks as private blog networks helped me with my SEO.
Should we live and die by what Google says or their guidelines…….no! Because you never know what the WorldWideWeb landscape might look like in 5 years. So go forth and build microsites!