Blog Links for SEO

Blog Links for SEO

The third series of mailing …

How blog links work What is a “blog”?
The word “blog” comes from the abbreviation of the English weblog, that is, “network diary”. The first blogs were ordinary sites, and they took a special position only after the appearance of large sites like LiveJournal and integration with the RSS format, ideal for “portioned” delivery of content to search engines.

How are links from blogs different from regular ones?
From the point of view of the search engine, a blog is a site whose main page is made up of the content of the latest pages-records – full or announcements. Information is added to the blog by creating separate new post pages (posts). Any modern blog can present data in the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) XML format. This means that an “interested” service, for example, a search engine, can receive ONLY NEW data on the first request in a format that has already been processed and is optimal for indexing. It is this ability to request only updates via RSS that led to the highlighting of the main feature of blogs in terms of SEO – very fast indexing by search engines.

Everything is logical: instead of reindexing the entire site every time in search of changes (which is exactly what a search engine has to do with ordinary resources), the search engine receives a very small “portion” of updated data and adds them to the blog index. Thanks to this, blogs that are updated quite often are checked by Yandex every 5 minutes! So far, this figure is unattainable for regular sites: updating the index (update) of such resources occurs much less frequently.

Obviously, this is a huge plus in terms of SEO – if you need to get indexed links to any page as soon as possible, then there is no alternative to blogs. This is usually used to speed up the recipient page (the page to which links from blogs are bought) gets into the search engine index.

Types of Blogs
Blogs fall into two categories: standalone and hosted blogs.

Standalone blogs are separate sites on separate domains that have one of the popular blogging “engines” installed, that is, a CMS (content management system). The first place among CMS for “stand-alone” blogs is confidently held by WordPress, although some use Movable Type and regular CMS for sites – almost every one has the functionality to create a blog lately.

Advantages:

• independence from the politics of blog sites;
• the ability to more fully apply SEO methods to promote the blog and increase its parameters as a donor site;
• huge opportunities for customization and customization.

Flaws:

• a flawed mechanism of social interaction (only through commenting, as well as the ability to notify another standalone blog about the presence of related material: for example, a post with an answer to an article – Trackback);
• the need to understand the intricacies of working with hosting, installing and configuring the distribution;
• require payment for hosting and domain.

Platforms for blogs (blog hosting, blog services) allow you to easily and without any special knowledge to maintain any number of blogs. Many sites provide blogs with third-level domains – for example, blogblogblog.livejournal.com , which allows you to work with them (that is, optimize, promote, increase parameters important for SEO) in almost the same way as with regular sites.

Now the most important thing: in terms of SEO, the difference between links from standalone blogs and blog hosting blogs is small. If the resource is not a splog (splog = spam blog), links from it contribute to fast indexing and pass a certain “weight”. The advantage of standalone blogs is a second-level domain, the advantage of blog services is initially debugged and does not require any gestures from the blog owner (for example, configure pinging blogs.yandex.ru , etc. using the ” Ping Monitoring ” service) interaction with search engines ).

Heterogeneity of the link mass is a plus for promotion
Search engine ranking formulas give preference to sites with incoming link mass, which has a high degree of “naturalness”. It is logical that if a site has links from pages of other sites, from articles, from various blogs, and so on, then it is either really popular or well promoted. The heterogeneity, (heterogeneity) of the link mass helps the site being promoted to quickly increase its positions and more stable to stay in the won places.

SEO or Audience?
It should be clearly understood that attempts to bring a real target audience to the site by buying links on blogs is a thankless task. Yes, many really popular bloggers are not shy about publishing ads, but any work with the audience should be thoughtful and based on the principles of marketing. Trying to attract people from blogs directly is in the realm of your own experiments and is not SEO related. A link or an entire post bought from a blogger with a real, live audience will have both a PR and SEO effect, but their cost is orders of magnitude higher than a link with similar parameters and efficiency, which can be purchased through a special blogging exchange.

Services for buying links from blogs
Obviously, you should not “manually” buy links from blogs by writing off or otherwise contacting their owners. Usually, for a noticeable effect, you need to buy several tens, or even hundreds or thousands of links. Fortunately, there are special blog link exchanges: blog owners who want to earn income add their sites there, and people interested in buying can easily select blogs with the right parameters and buy the right number of links.

Among the blog exchanges, BuyPost can be singled out – a system that was originally “sharpened” for SEO. BuyPost provides very interesting opportunities both for blog owners (full automation, placement of links in old posts, very fast redemption of all places), and for buyers of links (manual blog moderation, high-quality and cheap links). You can work with this exchange both directly and through promopult – users of the system have the opportunity to buy links to promote their projects and on BuyPost (if necessary, purchases on any of the exchanges can be disabled, although analysts’ experiments show that this should not be done – with links from blogs, sites really move better). As an example, we can cite the data of an experiment set up by promopult analysts during the launch of the current version of the Yandex algorithm – Snezhinsk 1.1. The graph below shows that sites that were promoted exclusively by links from blogs improved their positions after the algorithm update. Obviously, the role of blogs has grown, and their use in the overall promotion strategy is more than appropriate.

Among the leaders in the Internet promotion industry, Blogun should also be mentioned, but this system positions itself more as a PR tool: the service’s policy is aimed at automating audience acquisition, but not at selling relatively cheap links for SEO.

Conclusions
So, links from blogs are useful for search engine promotion, but it is necessary to clearly understand the difference between “SEO-links from blogs” and “links that theoretically could lead to the target audience.” In the context of search promotion, it is obviously worth buying inexpensive SEO links, carefully monitoring their quality (or entrusting this to the moderators of the BuyPost specialized blog exchange).