In the last post here at Blog Subway, we started looking at ways to keep things clean and tidy when it comes to running a blog host. We already looked at keeping out spammers, which is easily the number one problem for blog hosts. Now we’ll look at the content of blogs already created on the system and see what can be done to ensure there is nothing that will raise flags at the search engines and cause them to penalize the host domain.

One of the real bugbears of search engines such as Google is people who try to game the system and cheat their way to the top of their index. The common method of doing this is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. While most methods of SEO are above board and accepted, such as optimizing the blog or website itself to be as SEbot friendly as possible, making sure there are no broken links, that the content is original and relevant and not keyword stuffed, that sort of thing.

Other methods of SEO such as getting other sites to link to you is a grey area. While some link building is encouraged by the search engines as a way of building authority for your site, not all link building is equal.

By writing informative articles that include a link back to your blog or website and submitting them to article directories and guest posting in other people’s blogs by invitation, you legitimately build your links and this is accepted as is commenting in relevant forums, getting listed in web directories and similar pursuits.

What the search engines don’t like you doing is getting involved in paid link farms where you send crappy spun articles that rarely make sense and are full of links to sites managed by the owner of the link farm and obtain links that way. This is cheating and not only that, when you allow the link farm members to start posting their own crappy spun articles full of links to who knows where on your blogs, then you are asking for a whole load of trouble. You’ll get found out and penalized by the search engines and it often leads to de-indexing.

Worse for blog host owners is that the hosting domain can also get caught up in this mess and get de-indexed as well. This is a terrible loss for all the legit blogs hosted on the domain, because they all get de-indexed by default, even though their owners have done nothing wrong.

So if you own a blog on a blog host that is not one of the big high authority sites like blogger, wordpress, blogetery, blinkweb etc, then you are risking the host domain by using your blog in this fashion.

Host administrators should keep a watchful eye out for this practice and immediately deactivate any blogs they find that are accepting crappy spun articles that are full of links to what is probably a paid link farm. That way, the hosting domain is protected and the perpetrators will then have to come begging, cap in hand, to get their blogs back (after they have been cleaned up).

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