I followed a Twitter link to this article: PBN Sites De-Indexed, How Bad Were We Hit?
While I do not claim to know all things about the web I was kind of surprised I had no idea what these things were and why Google is going out of its way to stop them.
It sounds like they are a scheme to game the Google system and crank out ad revenue without providing much in the way of real content.
That said I really can’t tell. Anyone have any insight on this?
A blog network is a collection of blogs that may appear to be all independent of one another, but have some sort of common ownership and lots of links between them to try to trick Google’s ranking algorithms into thinking they are popular.
These networks are used to link to other sites to then (try to) artificially improve their search engine ranking.
That’s about it. If you put up a site and cram it with content related to keywords and get yourself ranked at the top of Google for the keywords you get a lot of views on your site and your ad space is profitable. Google also takes in to account the number of other sites that link to your site as part of your ranking, and it takes those other sites’ rankings into account too so that’s why it’s more profitable to have a “network” instead of just one site.
I do believe these are MLM-like schemes too. If you notice on the article you linked to (it is an article written by a company that runs these private blog networks) there is an ad to join their “intership” and you get to pay for the privilege:
So even if their highly profitable sites get shut down because Google gets wise to them, they have hundreds of such sites and Google can’t find them all (part of their strategy is to make sure they can’t all be found at once) and also people are paying them to learn their secrets.
But yeah…they are just a bunch of sites that exist purely to place ads on, and collect money from the ads.