-No
-Yes
-Yes
-No
-If you mean unique themes and such, Yes

You're missing internal redirects, and trimming of OBLs. A lot of themes have a lot of juice leakage.

^ Love the "no's" with no explanation of why. So he shouldn't be buying relevant domains with PR? Can you explain that? I would definitely add content (unique content) before linking out to your sites as well. Looks like you've got the basics understood.

There is no reason to restrict yourself to relevant sites to buy. It's great if you can find them, but you can change the content of any site.

No idea why you would wait a few weeks to post links to your site. That seems kind of dumb to me. Why not build a 8-10 page site with all the links there on day 1?

Also, you can overlap your linking some. If I have 10 network sites, I might link out to 2-3 different money sites. I just would not link out to the same 2-3 money sites on each network site. Make sure the OBL profile is fairly different.

Agreed with the others in that you can pretty much ignore relevancy for now but I tend to maintain just one niche per site rather than nik0's approach of cramming multiple niches onto one site.

But then I am maybe a bit more paranoid than the average person and want my efforts to work in the long term no matter what Google try to do.

Also, try to use different platforms other than WordPress for building your blogs. If you have a lot of WP sites linking back to you, it might look a little suspicious. At least learn how to create websites on 1 additional platform for variation.

I heard that putting some monetization on your blog network is also good to create variety but never ever use Adsense.

Hey Seamy,

I know you got a good amount of suggestions here, and I'm going to be honest I didn't read them all. Here’s why, we (Head Start SEO) have been running a private blog network for a few years now. We have some big clients (shoutout to all the "whitehat" SEO providers we provide links for), and we have been running our own for clients and personal uses.

We have really high standards for our network, and tend to out rank other networks. Now, I'm not tooting my own horn here, I'm just trying to give you some groundwork here to the things I'm about to explain.

Let’s break this down by groups. I'm going to skip over the relative niche aspects, since that's common sense, and a few other basic things as well. If this gets better maybe we should do a thread of this by itself.

Domains, sites themselves, and how to link to them:

1) Domains

Ok, let’s break this down even more (Metrics, link check, SEO check, and brandability)

- Metrics

First, let’s kick off this debate right. I know you hear PR this, PR that.... Forget about PR because it doesn't matter. PR is the worst thing you can look at when looking at a domain in general. So what do you do?

Grab yourself a Moz account and run it through Then, open Site Explore check Mozrank and MozTrust. However, when you're in the "Compare Link Metrics" tab don't look at the first one, go to the "Root Domain Metrics" section to get the domain trust level.

Now, there some debate among people of Moz and MajesticSEO. MajesticSEO is clearly going to have more links in their database. However, some believe that Moz shows all the links that matter, and tends not to look at more spammy parts of the web. I don't know how true this is, however there are people that stand by Moz for looking at Trust rankings.

All our domains have at least Moz Trust and Moz Rank of 3.

We also run them through MajesticSEO to check for their Citation Flow and Trust Flow. Sometimes you have to use your brain and see what your getting from both these tools (We don't use Ahrefs besides a lot of good things we hear about them, in our testing we don't think it matches up to Majestic SEO).

To cut this short, make sure Moz Trust is somewhere around 3+ and Majestic Citation Flow and Trust Flow is around 10+.

Finally, see if the domain is brandable. You might be thinking... who cares. Most likely if it is not brandable, like an EMD, it might have been used by a marketer before. We're looking for natural links here, like something that looks like great-cool-things-online.com. These aren't natural, but something like steelnews.com looks more natural.


2) Backlinks

Here is the most important part, if you get this wrong your f***ed. For our cases, we want domains that weren't SEO'ed. Here why, we want it to look super natural. We're looking for old, local, small businesses with expired business for whatever reason.

If you see the domain was SEO'ed then this could cause a few problems
1) You don't know if the domain has a penalty
2) Might have crappy links

Links from SEO a few years ago are crappy. If you see article marketing, or directories, just throw the domain away.

Now look at the anchor text, make sure they are relevant for your money site. If they fall within the range you're fine. Let’s say your niche is small brown dogs, you don't have to find something about small brown dogs. Anything dog-related will be ok.

Finally, look at some of the backlinks. Are the sites legitimate or are they crappy. If most of the links are crappy then get rid of them. Make sure these are links that won't be removed either, so you want to make sure there are a few good links that won't hurt the domain if you lose a few. Most likely, you will lose a few here and now, so if the domain has like 10 links don't bother with it (maybe buy it and resell it) hint hint).

Also, look for other pages that have link power. Don’t redirect them to the home page, just make new pages and redirect to there. Redirect to the home page Google has said they look at those differently, and plus foot print hello!

3) The site

This is another key for a network: each site has to be better than the last one. Get a logo on fiverr, get a new theme for each site. Buy Themedy.com, and maybe even Genesis themes (they have a lot there). Just don’t do all free themes, it looks cheap and is a give away.

Set up a social media presents like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Through some fans at it via fiverr.

Get the basics (ie) contact us page, about is page, and terms (make sure to use different terms on each site).

Make the site look real, even put up some fake affiliate banners on there with no clear links to the affiliate, since you don’t want them to track your affiliate id.

Just make the site look really really really real! If someone finds it, they shouldn’t be able to see it’s a link network.

(Pro Tip, use the robot.txt to block moz, Majestic SEO, and the other link databases to hide your links for others. I know some people say this is dumb, but really it's the best thing to do. You can't report on what you can't find. However, don't use these on all the sites.)


This was a lot, I could go on for hours, but I'm going to leave it at that. Let me know if you have any questions.

There a lot of gaps here, but you can shot. I'll answer

Dead serious! I've been doing SEO for more than a decade and have never come across someone more open and honest about strategies that truly work, and actually last.

Really? The stuff I have seen from him would never work for anything the least bit competitive. All I have seen though is him trying 'wow' newbies by ranking nearly blank pages for stuff nobody is trying to rank for using high PR links. Nothing really amazing there.

Maybe I missed the good stuff. I don't know.

He's good at marketing himself though. I'll give him that.

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I take it your shouldn't have all your money sites on one hosting provider?

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