Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I think the one thing that people like to forget is that everything related to SEO is done to manipulate positioning.  Everyone is buying links one way or another.  If someone is paying for SEO services they have bought a link.  If someone is in a link directory, they have bought a link.  If you have taken the time to ask a customer to give you a positive review on Google maps then you have manipulated rankings and paid for it too.  There is still an opportunity cost with everything and if time is money, you have spent money on your efforts.  Is it any better than what BMR did?  In many ways no.

You think that's costly, try doing it the old fashion way.

It's fun but it makes it tough to pay the bills in a crowded and competitive market.

Hi Randy,

I thought Google was only talking about paid services.  Have they come out with anything suggesting that a small private blogging co-op would be either blackhat or a no-no? If so, I think a lot of SEO firms will soon find themselves out of business because they don't offer much more value than link building.

Exactly. I'm in a field that really caters to many other industries including Legal, Medical, Energy, Technology, Humanitarian and Academic.  If we put tight requirements on writing quality and evaluated potential members by what they have on their own blogs then maybe we could build a quality resource.  We might even have some sort of minimum fee for members that would entirely go to offsite link building and social optimization for each of the member blogs.

Is anyone interested in building a private blogging network of semi-related sites?

We are thinking about authoring a number of articles for several newspapers around the country and hope that they will be published in both print and online editions. The purpose would be to gain a Wikipedia page about our business with established references.  Has anyone seen any positive effects by implementing this type of strategy?

I guess those who didn't receive one can relax a little!

We had a large drop this week.

Same here

Every site in a competitive market buys links.  If you use an SEO firm, you are buying links.  If you donate to a charity in exchange for a link, you are still buying links. If you pay to be on a directory site, you are buying a link.

If you are in a highly competitive market then you can count on it.  Google wants everyone buying Adwords.

I think you are right.  Google is forcing everyone into buying Adwords.

I've experienced this effect with them too.

We've used it and I think it is ok for short term use.  The effects of each new post tend to become diminished over time.  My guess is that Linkvana now offers little to no juice.  I think everyone in competitive markets are now being pushed into buying Adwords.

So what now?

Looks like opportunities are quickly being drying up and sites are shutting down.  BMR just announced they are closing.  What opportunities are others looking at now?

It wasn't really all or nothing.  Most of these were near the top of the second page or somewhere near the middle of the second page.  They all sort of entered the first page one after the other.  I'm not really sure if anything was done off page to cause this sort of penalty.  We do try to build links but I don't know if some of these were looked at as bad links or if some lost a lot of value.  I know that at the time the drop took place we did have some technical problems with our site that took a while to fix.  I can't say for sure if those problems cause the penalty either. Aside from doing a lot of SEO in-house we also have a low cost provider and they assured us that all of their activities were legit.

I know we have some bad links that were mostly due to scrapers who stole some of our content, re-wrote it and left a portion of our URL on a page.  I think this sort of thing happens to all sites.  The vast majority of our links should be good though.  WMT tools shows that we have a little over 220,000 links to our pages.