Foreign SEOs be cautious - protect your PBNs correctly

I am in the PBN game for around 15 months now. It helped me to massively increase my rankings and income. No matter what they tell you: PBNs f***ing work like a charme.

Of course I protected my PBNs by blocking bots/spiders via htaccess - at least I thought so

Yesterday I made a horrible observation which literally stopped my heart beating for a second: I had forgotten to block a whole bunch of important backlink tools.

Why? I dont target google.com. I rank foreign / non-english sites.

The thing here is this: All these htaccess-templates on BHW and elsewhere which are designed to block the bots only block the bots of the well-known "international tools" such as majestic, moz, ahrefs etc.

But there are a lot of "local tools" which are not as powerful as those mentioned above but will still find a lot of your PBN sites if you forget to block them.

My PBNs show up in these "local banklinktools". My most stupid competitor can find them instantly.

what I did now: I searched for "backlink tool" in my own language and made a list of all local backlink tools I found. They were around 20 and the half of them were not in my old htaccess yet unfortunately and show my PBN links.

So that is my advice to you if you are in the foreign SEO game: Find the local backlink tools and block those spiders as well. Because your competitors will not only use majestic etc butt also these tools. They will find your PBNs if you are not careful enough.

have two questions

• after blocking how long will it take until the PBN links vanish from those tools? I heard for ahrefs that it is about a couple of months. Is that correct?
• lets assume now that I was reported meanwhile by a competitor. Is it likely that I get penalized? I heard that most of the time nothing happens when a site is reported to google. Can you confirm that? I know there is no guarantee but it would greatly calm me down

The links should be removed the next time the crawler comes to the site and sees its blocked.

The odds are you wont be penalized.

Blocking all bots is a huge footprint, regular websites don't do that.

Desire00 said:

Blocking all bots is a huge footprint, regular websites don't do that.

Click to expand...

a lot of regular sites do that.
Besides google cannot check if a certain bot is blocked unless they try to enter the site as that bot

but that is not the questions here

what concerns me most at the moment if it is likely that my site get penalized when they report my pbns

How long have you had the pbn before you noticed that local checkers were not blocked?

Venturi said:

How long have you had the pbn before you noticed that local checkers were not blocked?

Click to expand...

the oldest pbns around 1 year
the youngest just a couple of weeks

Well the way i look at it is, if your competitors didnt spot the older ones thats were there for all to see (locally) then chances are they wont see them between now and the next crawl that will remove them from the checkers results.

Rest easy and if something does happen then cross that bridge when you come to it

Venturi said:

Well the way i look at it is, if your competitors didnt spot the older ones thats were there for all to see (locally) then chances are they wont see them between now and the next crawl that will remove them from the checkers results.

Rest easy and if something does happen then cross that bridge when you come to it

Click to expand...

the thing is I have not been on their radar so long probably. I built my first PBN 12 or 15 months ago but it is only 3-6 months that I really got enough success to annoy some people. Well lets see

Any idea if a report to google really makes a difference? I think I read before that google does not follow up most of these reports anyway so in this case I would be on the safe side

aussiejack said:

Any idea if a report to google really makes a difference? I think I read before that google does not follow up most of these reports anyway so in this case I would be on the safe side

Click to expand...

No personal experience and like you just reports of google not taking action against reported sites.

Are you in a small niche were its clear your competitors are actively employing seo techniques or is it a niche were your competitors are ranking based on age,natural backlinks and "brand"?

Venturi said:

N
Are you in a small niche were its clear your competitors are actively employing seo techniques or is it a niche were your competitors are ranking based on age,natural backlinks and "brand"?

Click to expand...

The first one! They all do SEO and build backlinks. Everything looks very unnatural. This niche is quite weird in fact
Why would you ask this? Is that important?

Reason i ask is that some niche's are big but not hard to rank for based on competition.

Other niche's are small but hard to rank due to the competition.

If its a niche where your competition are are not actively involved in seo then chances of your pbn been found are slim to nil but since you say your competitors are active the there is a possibility they might see your pbn.

In saying that you have been on their radar for up to 3 months but not spotted it yet or done anything about it.

If they reported you to google and nothing has happened then they would probably (depending on your rank/ their desperation) try to dilute your tier 2s with spam btu if they tried this you would have noticed. This is just my opinion so i hope someone with more experience can comment on my thoughts.

Pull up your server logs once a week/month and just analyze the different user agents used. Modify the blocking scripts here to reflect those bots and scale across your network.

I've never thought of it that way - local tools, that's a nice idea for research.