Message from ALN Private Blog Network

The sky isn't falling and blog networks like ALN may be hit a little more in the future, but I highly doubt Google will de-value bloglinks, simply because they can't really detect spun content effectively as long as it isn't total crap that reads like markov generated.

When looking at my own sites in ALN, most of the domains killed by Google last week were from the first batch I added, they had accumulated 1500-3000 posts. They were all well customized, different free and paid themes, custom sidebars, no blogroll, different hosts and IPs.

But let's get real: It doesn't take rocket science or a really clever algorithm to detect a blog that has thousands of non-related posts with 1-3 external links each. The longer a site is in the network, the more posts it gets, the more obvious it becomes, no matter how good the spinning or content is.

That's why people who added sites to other networks as well suffered most: The faster the blog grows, the higher the number of posts, the higher the risk of getting the short end of the stick handed by Google quickly.

In my opinion, it is almost inevitable that this kind of site gets de-indexed, the lifetime is always more or less limited. That's not bad, expired domains are like $10-20 for a PR2. De-indexing is part of the game and the value you get from a network like ALN is still well worth those few bucks in exchange for great rankings.