How Google Tracked Down BMR

I just gotten an email regarding this, hope this is not another PR job of blog networks operators to counter the negative press they're having right now., ALN probably suffered more than BMR... half of their blog-dom gets deindexed, and half of it are being seriously considered to be pulled out by its respective owners...

I just think it was really unusual of Google to send out a warning message to webmasters for unnatural/paid links. Paid links have been going on for over a decade, why would they wait until now to warn webmasters?

they are changing to keep up with intensified competition from social media and bing

....Or they're making it harder for everyone to go organic and just consider paid results.

Ray with all due respect you do not know what you are talking about. I have used seo spyglass and tracked down tons of domains existing on a network within minutes.

This stuff about Google using webmaster tools false warnings to find them is an urban myth being created on this forum. Sure Google used webmasters to find out more but they sent the notices to people who already had the links. Whats that a vast sweeping coincidence?

Now that BMR is gone I can tell you exactly how I could check on BMR if I wanted to - ton loads of people right here in this forum used to post their experiences using them who also had their own links they were using BMR with - RIGHT THERE IN THEIR SIG

For google to find them and cross check their links was like taking candy from a baby.

It's very easy to find blog networks - I wrote a post detailing 6 ways they could do it just off the top of my head.

Google Finds And Destroys Big Blog Networks!

If they can identify a single site that is part of a blog network they can identify a ton more.

How?

Just look at either all the outgoing links for a particular domain (where they are linking to) and then for each of the sites that are being linked to, find the blogs that are linking to them.

That will give you a large number of blogs that are part of the network. Of course it could give some false positives as well, but you could cross reference to eliminate these mostly.

It would have to be a lot easier when you can query the search engine data the way Google can in ways we cannot.

Another way is to just log common IP addresses that are class C providers - And then assume most of these are part of blog networks.

Certainly it would give you a lot of sites to work with and then to be sure just confirm it with some of the other methods I detailed in the article and you would be able to reverse engineer virtually any blog network.

This method works pretty well for any blog network but the percentage of the blog network it can detect will be based on the initial sample they have and then how the blog network has been setup.

Bottom line, pretty easy to do!

Cheers


Tim

Thats because blog networks

Like Mike said, it is not hard to find a network at all. Honestly, if Google employed 2-3 people to do it, they could probably find 90-95% of the domains in a day or 2.

Most, but not all, backlink profiles do not have a ton of homepage backlinks. When you pull them up in SpyGlass or Ahrefs, they stick out like a sore thumb. From there it is just a matter of visiting the site and confirming your suspicion that it belongs to a network. Which for these networks, it is really a matter of confirming it is on Wordpress, there are posts filling up the entire homepage all posted in a day or so, each post has at least one contexual link, and usually 20+ different categories.

Then all you have to do is visit all the sites being linked to, pull their backlink profile, and do the same.

Rinse and repeat...

And Google can pull far more backlinks than any of us can.



Yeah, it is really evil of them to fight back against people manipulating their services for their own gain.

It is not hard to track down blog network sites. All you need is to become a member, submit specially tagged content and then see where it comes up.

Google has the largest index of sites of any other search engine and any other company. As such, they are privy to a larger linkscape than any other service/person/organization in the world like some weird, omniscient Internet-deity.

I can't imagine that finding the networks was even remotely difficult - I mean, I could personally do it using Google's own search engine - it was probably more about deliberating the best way to keep control of the SEO community going forward, and doing everything possible to prevent 'Negative SEO' from becoming a reality.