Is there money in blogs?

[Halfdeck]

How would that work Bill?

It's not gonna work.

Cheap trackback links have very little weight SEO wise and if you get aggressive then the network becomes exposed. You need a link from a trusted site to rank high - I asked 3 bloggers link to a post of mine - one link from a TBPR 6 blog but it didn't have much impact. I asked a well-known SEO to link to me from the domain root of a few of his old, trusted sites and that boosted my ranking from 9th to 3rd.

A group of splogs linking to each other is not gonna outrank tens of thousands of recip links pointing to LLs. Why? Because you can only trump quantity with quality - so unless you're ready to publish 10,000 posts and trackback every one of them its not gonna happen. Now, you can build up link popularity that way, but higher PR just by itself won't translate into higher rankings. Plus if you have only a dozen bloggers swapping links the entire network will be flagged as spam or links devalued for excessive reciprocal linking, especially if you're blogging shit no one wants to link to in the first place. If you do it with a real blog, you're just going to piss off RSS subscribers. If you avoid that by linking less aggressively, you minimize your ROI.

[Bill]

It sure won't grab any top positions for good keywords.

But splogs and 99.4% of adult blogs ain't gonna do that anyway, and anybody who thinks they will is gonna be dissapointed.

Splogging and adult blogging isn't an "I'm gonna get TONS of great google traffic." strategy in the first place.

It's a long tail strategy, a low cost way to generate pages, each with a very small possibility of catching a surfer.

If you've already decided to create a few splogs, you should know this.

There are millions of "real" crappy blogs that never get a trackback, so it won't take a humongous effort to do enough trackbacking to lift an adult splog into the realm of shitty unimportant blogs that might get a longtail position.

Then, every adult blogger should have their "best" blogs, with the most original writing and flavor - and their own strategy for getting traffic to those "best" blogs. Those have an even better chance of getting longtail traffic, and could benefit from a few trackbacks too.

If your point is, there's no point in making splogs, you're right, there is no point, and everybody should stop.

If your point is, once you've made a splog, you should do nothing, stare vacantly into space, and dream about making a mainstream bizop blog and selling ad space on it, then go ahead, do it.

I imagine you already understand what's going to happen to a shitty little se domain with all the incomings pointing to the index alone.

[Halfdeck]

If your point is

My point is trackbacks are not gonna help you unless you do it en masse - and if you do do it en masse those links will be devalued. A bigger point is that at the end of the day, bending over backwards to please Google isn't going to win a blogger any brownie points. Build a blog for surfers - Google traffic is just cream on top. Lastly, if you want to build traffic off thousands of long tails publishing stuff no one is ever gonna bother reading, why not just buy a spam script? Even spending 30 minutes on chasing a low traffic long tail just for the sake of traffic to me is way too much work.

The real strength of a blog is what Karen said - getting organic links from sites like Fleshbot - sex blogs is probably the only "sector" in adult that's freely linking - and those are the type of links that will boost your rankings.

[Bill]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

why not just buy a spam script? ...getting organic links from sites like Fleshbot ....

Splogging is more ethically acceptable to me than a spam script. I have the rights to the content I'm using and making, I'm just using wordpress and and a few plugins to create long tail content without scraping and without creating near duplicate pages on the blog domain (unlike a spam script).

Since a splog has about the same chance of getting a link from fleshbot as I have of screwing a celebrity, it doesn't make any sense to talk about splogs trying to get links like that.

You've already said google can't tell the difference between no trustrank minor pages and notrustrank spam - splogs take advantage of that in the longtail.

I haven't been splogging for long but I'm fully in the black, and earnings can be expected to increase. I've gotten surfer comments on splogs, much to my surprise. I make the most signups on my anchor blogs, but the splogs are sending a nice stream of hits to the sponsors, and while it;s sometimes hard to tell where FHG sales came from, there are at least a couple I'm sure are from the splogs, and more that I think could well be.

But I'm totally with you on one thing, people shouldn't splog.