so are PBNs dead?

[praetserge]

it's about how you present your pbn... make it look like a real website with valuable content and you're safe.
it's my opinion as I'm not a big fan of pbn... I do have micro websites which link to my main sites but I still treat my micro websites as they are of value to me and they have interesting and valuable information.

 

[infoasian]

When PBNs create outbounds links they reveal a lot. Outbound link patterns are the biggest foot prints. In my experience you should never use more than 20% of your existing network to link to the same target. I.e. when you run a 100 site network, you may not link to the same customer/ target with more than 20 items.

 

[intruder2600]

I don't think that IP's from cheap hostings are green light to ban domain, without manual review by moderation. There are lots of usefull websites hosted on cheap hostings.

Bad PBN has such footprints:
- same number of posts
- same number of outbound links
- outbound links to same websites
- domains registered on the same time

So you have:
- 50 websites
- each one has 20 articles
- each one has same 10 outbound links pointing to the same 10 domains

You don't need to analyze content (google can't do it) to get all the informations you need to detect PBN. In my opion based on my experience:
- IP doesn't matter (cheap IP might be a clue, but it's not a factor)
- content quality doesn't matter when nobody reads it (PBN subpages are not ranked)

 

[BacklinksCop]

Only your PBNs will get indexed not your money site

 

[jethro]

some guides about PBNs suggest this schema:

Money Site <= PBNs <= garbage backlinks (usually automated for this, ex. GSA/Senuke)

Obviously if you use this schema your PBNs become churn 'n' burn sites...so..if your PBNs were deindexed, the first thing to look (as my opinion) is...have you built garbage backlinks pointing to your PBN?

 

[jollyman]

2 questions:
If my PBN gets found out, would just the PBN get deindexed, or would my money site also get deindexed or penalized?
is it time to stop wasting time/money on PBNs?

If your PBN is not maintained well. Then, it has more possibility of penalty come to your money site. But, no worries it doesn't do any serious damage as soon as you removed links from de indexed domains.

 

[fc-dh]

People seem to forget the biggest footprint of them all........ Wordpress!

You're network should not have more then 20/25% wordpress sites, just think about it how many sites of all sites on the web are created with wordpress, it is a dead giveaway imho, i know HTML/CSS sites suck to maintain but they will stay up, and if you have Dreamweaver updating a PBN with HTML sites site isn't really that much work to maintain, and can easily be outsourced for a view bucks.

 

[Aty]

so are PBNs dead?

They just resurrected.

 

[somedevil]

Damn Some great tips in this thread. Bookmarked! Also i think those who are keen to run PBN's for short term gains are the ones suffering from this. They are perhaps still using it like a linkwheel. Garbages links to 2.0 (or even worse, to PBN blog) and from there to money site.

 

[FutureProofSeo]

Google is definitely NOT penalizing PBNs in general, there is just no way to ethically do such a thing. They would never just scan GoDaddy auctions or sites hosted on a shared server and deindex everything, it's just not possible. With that said, many people fail to do at least one or more very important steps in setting up a PBN. The following mistakes are often made:

1) All sites are hosted on the same shared server with the same IP.

2) Sites use spammy spun content. Contrary to popular opinion, Spun content is still okay, as long as it's 60-70% unique and is not the ONLY content on your website. On my micro niche sites I auto-blog one post a day and drip the first 10-20 articles in which are all real, 100% original, written by me personally. If you are ever penalized for crap content, it wont slam your whole PBN either, it will only impact the website with crap content.

3) Too many links with unnatural anchors. Again this would only hurt one site, not the whole network.

4) Keyword stuffing, etc... Once again, it will only impact the site that's being stuffed, not the entire network.

With that said, if you are making the same mistakes on all your sites, it's only a matter of time before they run into issues. Just be smart about it and you'll never have any issues. I have just over 50 sites in my PBN. All of my domains I found through FreshDrop, pr2-. I have a few different hosting accounts and I don't have more than 3-4 sites on an IP. If you have 100 sites, you don't need 100 IPs, 25 will do just fine. Just remember to maintain content quality and anchor naturalization, you aren't going to have any problems.

This.

It's all about the niche auto post!

And if you want a really nice tip, create a nice little niche directory on your site. Make it deep enough so not much PR juice flows through it, but make it an authority link bank, with plenty of related wiki/news/etc links.

People seem to forget the biggest footprint of them all........ Wordpress!

You're network should not have more then 20/25% wordpress sites, just think about it how many sites of all sites on the web are created with wordpress, it is a dead giveaway imho, i know HTML/CSS sites suck to maintain but they will stay up, and if you have Dreamweaver updating a PBN with HTML sites site isn't really that much work to maintain, and can easily be outsourced for a view bucks.

This isn't a footprint, do you know what percentage of the entire web is run on Wordpress?

 

[fc-dh]

This isn't a footprint, do you know what percentage of the entire web is run on Wordpress?

Around 19% according to the founder Matt Mullenweg (click), so if your PBN of lets say 100 sites exist only out of wordpress sites you will raise a red flag for manual review, and after that it is really easy for Google to find your whole PBN and deindex it and penalize your site.

 

[asiansamurai]

Listen.

I'm tired of all of these stupid bloggers talking about how PBN's are dead.

Your PBN's should look and be like real sites.

No linking to 100's of sites from the homepage.

Keep it looking natural and niche focused.

Each site should look like an authority blog.

Buy content for every new blog post.

Don't add links to every new blog posts.

Add some authority links.

Add some youtube videos.

Don't add any links to some posts.

Let those posts roll of to the internal page.

 

[worsemares]

PBNs arent dead, older ways of using them are.

 

[gordi555]

The one way you can only REALLY find a PBN is monitor the movers and shakers. Google knows who they are. That's why churn and burn happened. If it knows of a site making big moves it will simply look at the inbound links and make a call to see the sites linking to it.

All they all high quality links? Are they quite new sites? Are the dates on the domains have a newish modified date? Easy to compute if you're Google. Google will probably then put these inbound links into a possible 'spam bin' and see what kind of domains are in there. They would then do more analysis and give them a score. If everything ticks a box you'll get deindexed and the process will learn patterns like this.

Everything can be detected. They probably have humans pushing the final button.

 

[SEOLair]

PBNs are not dead....BUT Google is getting better at detecting the shitty ones. Just limit your footprints as much as possible. People have already made good recommendations above on how to do it. In case no one has mentioned it yet - Link out to relevant, authoritative websites.

Also - if you are using some bullshit wordpress plugin that duplicates everything to manage your PBN it will increase the chances of it getting popped. This is because those tools are just creating a footprint over and over again.

 

[ZimbabweDollars]

If you automate them then pretty much yes, but if you know what you are doing, then nothing will ever be dead so long as the internet attracts people.

 

[TacticalTechZone]

Does anyone find it ironic that the PBN's that are being deindexed are owned and operated by popular bloggers and SEO companies (niche pursuits, no hat, etc.)

Don't you think this was carefully orchestrated to cause the stir that it is now causing and get these figure heads of the industry to spread the google propaganda?

Or maybe not and it's all random.

If you know what works then all of this balogne doesn't matter.

 

[prophecyprojekt]

It's better to have 10 really good websites than 100 crappy ones.

 

[FutureProofSeo]

Around 19% according to the founder Matt Mullenweg (click), so if your PBN of lets say 100 sites exist only out of wordpress sites you will raise a red flag for manual review, and after that it is really easy for Google to find your whole PBN and deindex it and penalize your site.

Yeah just over 20 percent.

I'm not saying your entire link profile should be wordpress links and you will be fine, but using other links for brand and generic, and keeping your PBN for quality /anchor means that Wordpress would work out just over 15% of a sites link profile which is perfectly ordinary.

 

[mic88]

http://searchengineland.com/google-...tworks-manual-action-ranking-penalties-204000

The main problem with footprints at PBN is fact that most set of links is exactly the same. In other words we are using the same target urls on all the blogs. The different is in anchors not in urls. And it is th ebiggest problem in my opinion.