Everyone's touching on the same points but missing the elephant in the room: entity stacking.
The sites that are surviving the last year's brutal core updates aren't just doing "tight footprint control" --> they're building topical authority clusters on their PBN sites before linking out. Single-purpose PBN domains with 5 throwaway posts are getting nuked within 60 days now (without the big G even letting you know... shadow ban baby).
What's actually moving the needle in competitive niches:
- Reverse engineering the link velocity of your top 3 competitors (not the #1 - they're usually grandfathered in)
- Building PBN sites that could legitimately exist without your money site
- Mixing branded + naked URL anchors at around 70/30 on tier 1
- Cloudflare Enterprise or BunnyCDN on everything - residential proxies for hosting are getting flagged
The aged domain advice is solid but incomplete. I'm seeing better results from 2-3 year old domains with moderate DR (15-30) over the "premium" DR50+ domains everyone's chasing. The latter have been picked over so many times their link profiles are swiss cheese.
Also, anyone still running Screaming Frog against their networks to check for common footprints is behind. Ahrefs batch analysis with randomized crawl intervals is the move now.
