In September 2014, Google targeted private blog networks (PBNs) with manual action ranking penalties.

This served to dissuade search engine optimization and online marketers from using PBNs to increase their online rankings. The "thin content" warnings are closely tied to Panda which focuses on thin content and on-page quality. PBNs have a history of being targeted by Google and therefore may not be the safest option. Since Google is on the search for blog networks, they are not always linked together. Interlinking your blogs could help Google, and a single exposed blog could reveal the whole blog network by looking at the outbound links.

A blog network may also refer to a central website, such as WordPress, where a user creates an account and is then able to use their blog. The created blog forms part of a network because it uses either a subdomain or a subfolder of the main domain, although, in all other ways, it can be entirely autonomous. This is also known as a hosted blog platform and usually uses the free WordPress Multisite software.

Hosted blog networks are also known as Web 2.0 networks since they became more popular with the rise of the second phase of web development.