Should we imitate our competitor's blog network?

[CMC-SD]

One of our competitors has built a little blog network, and I'm wondering if it's worth it for us to imitate it. Here's how they have it set up: They have domain.com, their e-commerce site, and blog.domain.com. They also have a half-dozen EMD blogs set up that all link to each other and to the e-commerce site, each one supplying content related to one niche of their busines (e.g. kitchenwidgets.com, widgetsforkids.com, etc.). It seems they've been doing this since December 2011.

In my opinion, the content on these EMD blogs is pretty low value. Sure enough, they have basically no inbound links from outside the blog network, and it's not getting shared socially. I'm having a hard time imagining a lot of long-tail searches that would bring in qualified shoppers, since they basically just write up 300-word long descriptions of photos.

Based on SEMrush data, it doesn't look like this approach is hurting them -- they didn't take a Penguin dive in April, for example. But how likely is it that this approach is helping them enough to justify the time they must spend writing (probably ~30-60m a day)? It would be trivial for the algo to determine that these are not natural links and completely devalue them. Would it not be better to consolidate that time into 2.5-5hrs a week spent researching and writing a valuable, link-worthy, long-tail-rich post for the main blog and then promoting it in hopes of attracting natural links?

[CMC-SD]

I should clarify that the EMD blogs are not attracting actual inbound links; their e-commerce site is doing fine.

[igor.pinchevskiy]

Hello,

I think you should definitively start a blog just like your competitor however copying their tactic is not a good idea, as search engine spiders are very intelligent these days and can figure out linkspam. I assume that your competitor has all of his sites and blogs hosted probably under the same hosting account which would provide no value in regards to link value.

Your strategy of " to consolidate that time into 2.5-5hrs a week spent researching and writing a valuable, link-worthy, long-tail-rich post for the main blog and then promoting it in hopes of attracting natural links?"

Is much better and will pay off in the long run.

[CMC-SD]

That's my suspicion, Igor. Now to convince the higher-ups, who saw our competitor's strategy and decided that must be what we need to do in order to vault over them in the rankings.

[igor.pinchevskiy]

Yes, that is always the toughest thing to accomplish. What you need to explain to them is focusing on amazing content that will be beneficial to your customers is far more important than concentrating on getting links that are of no value and can get you in trouble with Google...

Getting a link to your site from a self made EWD domain with a blog that doesn't have any PR, PA, & DA is absolutely a waste of time and most likely will get you penalized...

There are numerous posts, whiteboard fridays on SEOMoz that talk about this. Here is some reference:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

http://www.slideshare.net/paddy_moogan/35-ways-to-get-links-in-35-minutes-paddy-moogan-at-mozcon-2012

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-for-ecommerce-sites-targeting-the-right-anchor-text

and there are many more, just search for link building on seomoz.

[igor.pinchevskiy]

Here is a recent post from today, about shady linking:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-shady-backlinks-actually-damage-ranking

Your competitor decided to this themselves, instead of going out and buying links, they're doing it on a much smaller scale then if they were to purchase 1000s of links, so Google might not catch them right away, but its a matter of time until their rankings go down...

[CMC-SD]

Hmm, I didn't mean to mark this "Answered." Is there a way to undo that?

[igor.pinchevskiy]

Not sure to be honest with you. By clicking on a Good Answer it will automatically mark the question as Answered... But people other members still can and often do reply after its marked as answered.

[KyleChamp]

Agreed, plus the answer that you marked as good really is the best answer for this question