Wow, apparently my article from earlier this week really rocked the boat!  I made the firm stance that I will no longer be building private blog networks (PBNs), and it garnered A LOT of attention.

In fact, my article was mentioned on SERoundtable.com, SearchEngineLand.com, tweeted by Rand Fishkin, and even Matt Cutts tweeted about the news articles (that I was in).  Then of course there have been plenty of other blog posts, online discussions, and overall a major buzz around the topic of PBNs getting deindexed and whether or not to use them going forward. 

The day of that blog post was the highest traffic day this site has ever had, and there are already over 400 comments on that blog post!  To say the least, I've hit a nerve that lots of people care about.

As a result, Perrin and I only felt like it was appropriate that we record a follow up podcast to dive a bit deeper into the risks vs. rewards of private blog networks.

As you can see from the podcast title, I still think you should NOT build a PBN.

Listen to the podcast for all my reasons why.

A few days ago I shared the monthly income report for a few sites that I purchased this year.  The site buying case study is one that I've learned quite a bit from and has helped expand my business.

In total, I've now bought 4 sites this year, and as you can see from the what I've learned from spending $37,100 on buying sites, I've been able to do pretty well!

Today, I'm sharing a podcast that Perrin and I recorded to review our monthly earnings from just a couple of sites along with a discussion of what else we have going on in our business.

Perrin and I had the chance to interview Neil Patel of QuickSprout.com.

Neil is very well known for the products he's built (Kissmetrics, CrazyEgg, and others) and for the traffic strategies he's implemented on large websites such as TechCrunch.com and Amazon.com.  When it comes to content marketing and traffic experts, Neil is right there near the top of the list.

So, I hope you enjoy the interview as we discuss his entrepreneurial background, traffic strategies, infographic strategies (that still work), and much more.

Last week, I finally broke the silence about what happened to my survival knife site, from niche site project 1.

As revealed in that post, the site appeared to have been hit with negative SEO.  And then when Penguin 2.1 came out in October 2013, the site finally tanked in the rankings (the spammy links obviously being the reason that it was affected by Penguin).

I tried several tactics for over 9 months trying to bring the site back from the dead without much success.  However, last week some interesting things started to happen: the site started to rank for keywords and the traffic was increasing rapidly.  Perrin and I discuss what's going on.