Any Suggestions On Identifying a Private Blog Network?

Hello

I'm posting this to ask you guys if anyone has any suggestion on how I can find a whole PBN. There are many sites in my niche which I know are using PBN's as they are ranking on competitive keywords, but when you look at there back link profile all you see is low quality comment links. I know it's not possible to get a site on the first page with comment links in my niche. And some 8 month old sites don't even show any backlinks at all in Ahrefs, but still they are ranking first.

Seems like my competitors are smart enough to block Ahrefs, OSE etc bots through the robots.txt or whatever way.

I just wanted to ask you guys if you have any creative ways of figuring out a PBN that can't be traced by backlinks profile.

If they are smart enough to block it then leave them. Google will catch them. We are all against Google here, not each other, out rank them but don't be a snitch, no one is going to help you ruin other peoples hard work.

Do some research into 301 redirect first. Spotting a PBN network depends on how much effort the owner has put in making it. Few clues would be to analyze the hosting of the domains. Maybe you can see a pattern there (1$ hosting). Some people don't promote only 1 site on their PBN, usually I see some promoting 2-3 links...this can be another pattern.

Rookie mistake I love for finding those networks - google the domain they are linking to "domain.com".

Sometimes, people want to diversify and link with a naked URL only to find me poking around later.