When you’re building (ahem, buying) links for your sites, one thing you should consider are site networks. Site networks are simply a group of sites that are owned by the same individual/group/company. They’re not necessarily linked together, and it may actually be beneficial if they’re not linked together.

Why a site network? It’s basically about bang for your buck. You can often find link prices lower on a site network than buying links individually on separately owned sites. The buyer wins because they get a cheaper price and the seller wins because they effectively get more business than individual site link sales. They may be able to solidify buyer loyalty (longer terms sales) and simplify their link sales, too.

One type of network becoming popular is blog networks. With the ease of setting up a blog (even I did it), webmasters can set up multiple blogs fairly quickly, build some backlinks to get page rank and/or traffic, and then start selling blog posts across the whole network. Webmasters are even automating the posting process across the entire network to reduce their time involvement.

There’s a few things to watch out for when buying links on site networks, and Aaron Nimocks actually has a pretty good buying guide for blog networks. Most of Aaron’s points apply for any site network, too. Basically, do your homework - caveat emptor - and avoid duplicate content issues.

Coming up later, I’ll point out a specific site network you can take advantage of…