Everyone has seen the wide variety of online blogging sites out there, but did you know they can play a huge role in your SEO campaigns and help you vault up the search engine rankings?
Blogging sites have been around almost as long as the modern Internet has been. They are the fastest and easiest way for individuals, organizations and businesses to establish a web presence. If you know how to operate a browser, mouse and keyboard you can have a website of your very own in minutes.
Gutenberg’s moveable type ain’t got nothing on these! In your face ,Johannes!
Yes, access to this level of publishing and communication technology means the amount of pointless, bottom-of-the-barrel and mind-numbingly stupid content will be astronomical. However, that doesn’t mean these platforms are useless.
Used correctly, blogging sites can help you own more real estate on the search engine results pages and funnel link juice to your main website while protecting yourself from algorithm updates.
Chances are you have been on blogging sites before and may not even known it.
These online publishing platforms allow users to easily and quickly post their content on a webpage that they control and manage. While there are top blogging sites that focus their platforms on different content types or specific niches, they all have similar features:
Since you’re reading this blog post, I’m going to assume you have at least a passing interest in Internet marketing, making money online, SEO and all of that other fun stuff. And the first thing we learn in this business is build your own site.
But getting hosting, picking a CMS platform, dealing with FTPs, customizing your theme and doing everything else needed to make your site functional and look like someone older than 7 created it, can be a real pain.
Now, most of us look at those challenges as learning opportunities. However, there are people in this world that just want instant gratification. I know, I know… your mind has been officially blown!
They have the afternoon to set up a family reunion website. They have an awesome idea for the most epic T-shirt company ever, bro. The world just needs to see these pictures of cute animals. The reasons are endless.
Beyond those types of users, many companies have established websites that were built on systems that are not conducive to blog style updates. In that case, it’s easier to set up an external blog on one of these sites than it is to rewrite their code.
As the so-called "Web 2.0" movement took hold, more and more online blogging sites started popping up. Some have come and gone, been absorbed by other companies or just never caught on.
As of the publishing of this post (April 2014), here are some of the most popular blogging sites you can use to show the world your genius:
Beyond the top blogging sites that are specifically focused on letting users post content in this format, there are many bigger sites that offer blogging-like functionality for free.
Other platforms with blogging features include:
Beyond your technological or strategic content needs, there are many great reasons to use blogging sites. There are some pretty hefty benefits to using these sites as part of a well-rounded SEO campaign.
Here’s what properly utilizing blogging sites can get you:
Off-page SEO revolves around creating links to your site and that is just what these blogging sites can help you do.
Not only are you creating inbound links to your site, but you have full control over the linking content so you can make it as relevant as you want. One challenge of link building is finding sites that have relevant content but aren’t so relevant that they are competitors.
With online blogging sites, you control the content, the link placement and the anchor text of the link so you don’t have to worry about someone else’s content needs and strategies.
The links you create aren’t just sitting amidst relevant content—they are also high quality.
While the page you just created (mypage.wordpress.com) may not have any sort of juice yet, it sits on a domain that does. Google and other search engines know and trust these domains and once you help your page along with some additional link building, you’ll see that its authority quickly increases.
Nothing sucks more than spending hours making links only to find out a month later that Google hasn’t crawled them.
But when you make links on top blogging sites, indexing is never a problem. The search engine bots are crawling these sites all the time because there are so many updates. This means your links get indexed and "counted" faster than they would if they were built somewhere else.
One of the signals that Google and other search engines look for when deciding on how to rank a site is the number of IP addressing sending links.
If your site has 10,000 links and 9,000 of those links are coming from three IP addresses, it looks fishy. Search algorithms use backlinks as a judge of the popularity and trust worthiness of a site. Which site would you rank higher: the one mentioned above or one that has 10,000 links from 8,000 websites?
By creating blogging sites on different platforms you spread around the IPs of your backlinks and make things looks more natural.
Your new blogging pages can be used as a sort of filter between your SEO efforts and your main site.
If you want to experiment with a new backlinking strategy or maybe do something more on the Black Hat side of link building, then you can do that with one of your blogging sites instead of risking your businesses main site.
The strategy is often referring to as "tiered link building" or "pyramid link building." Your main site sits on the top of the "pyramid." Then the next level is comprised of blogging sites you have created. Since they are on gigantic domains with millions of backlinks, building lots of low-quality links to them isn’t going to trip any spam alerts with Google.
If something goes awry and an algorithm flips your link building on its head, you simply kill the blogging site or change the links coming to your page.
Now that you’re sold on blogging sites, you want to run out and create a million of them to dominate your niche, right?
Hold your horses: There are dangers associated with using these types of sites in your SEO campaigns. Here’s what you need to watch out for:
The more of these sites you create, the more content you need to create.
You’ll get dinged if you try to use the same content from your site and end up shooting your SEO efforts in the foot. So, not only do you have to create original and engaging content for your site, but you now also have to create it for all of your blogging sites.
That can lead to a heavy workload or some serious outsourcing costs.
When you create a webpage on your own hosting, you own it and control it completely. But when you sign up for one of these blogging services, that isn’t necessarily true.
The paid sites may have better protections, but the bigger free sites like Blogger and WordPress can yank your blog whenever they feel like it. If you violate their terms of service or do something else they don’t like, your content (and the time, effort and resources it took to make it) is gone as well.
If you’re using one of these sites as the cornerstone of your business, would you really sleep well at night knowing it can all go bye-bye at the flip of someone else’s switch?
Just like you can’t advertise certain products on AdWords or make pages about certain topics on Facebook, these blogging sites have a list of prohibited content.
If your business sells or has cause to even discuss topics or products that are labeled as taboo by these blogging sites, you can find yourself banned quicker than you think.
Many of the big blogging and web 2.0 sites like Squidoo have made all of their outgoing links "No-Follow." This will vary between platforms, so make sure to take a look for yourself.
No-Follow links aren’t the worse things in the world. While the attribution was originally put in place to allow sites to link to others without passing on link juice, there is some value in creating these links still.
That being said, if you’re only looking for "Do-Follow" links (there technically is no such thing—a link is normal or "No-Follow" only—but it’s become a common term), then you might run into some problems with blogging sites.
Like any other SEO tool or strategy, if you use blogging sites correctly, create original and engaging content and don’t put all of your eggs in one basket, then blogging sites will serve you well.
If you decide to go all in on blogging sites and use them as your only form of link building, then you could run into problems. When you start using low-quality, spun content in an effort to just churn out links, then you’re eventually going to reap what you sow.
Using these established and powerful sites can help you get a jump on your competitors and move your main site up the search engine rankings. Just remember, slow and steady wins the race!