Found a site using a PBN - have some questions about metrics

I've been researching some competitors recently, one I've found I think is almost certainly using a PBN: -



1) The fact they have so many backlinks from just 200 domains/ips - this is confirmation they are using a PBN right?

2) Second question I have is , does google not care how many links they get from one PBN site?

For instance, one domain in SEMRush has these metrics: -

- 154,208 backlinks into the competitor site
- Domain score: 26
- Trust score: 36

I've clicked on the site and it's some kind of software directory, and is in a unrelated sector to the site I'm investigating.

2.1 ) Does google not care about one site having 154k links into one site?
2.2 ) Does google not care that the two sites are in different industries?

3) Does the site with so many links from a PBN site keep benefiting indefinitely based on the number of links from the site? The site I'm investigating is doing pretty well and has over 100k organic traffic a month according to SEMRush.

4) What tool can I use to check out how good the PBN site is from a metrics point of view? What metrics should I be looking at?


Thanks

They might be using a PBN, but you can't tell from the fact that they have thousands of backlinks from few sites.

In fact, that probably has nothing to do with a PBN. When a person creates a PBN, they usually link back to their money site once or twice from each PBN site. Not tens or hundreds or thousands of times. No one does that.

If you see hundreds or thousands of backlinks from the same site, that's usually a sitewide link - a link in the footer of every page, or getting listed in "recent comments" in the sidebar of every page. That kind of thing. That happens either intentionally (someone paid for a footer/sidebar link) or unintentionally (you post a blog comment and it ends up in the sidebar of every page).

If someone owns a PBN and they use one site in it to generate hundreds of backlinks to their money site, they're doing something very wrong.

Normally you would only link once or twice from one pbn to a money site so IMO this is not evidence of using pbn's. Footer links are normally responsible for such a big difference between number of links and referring domains, so you see it all the time on web design agencies for example- where they put a link to themselves in the footer, which is then on every page of the site.

PBN linking is done quite differently, and I would argue that it is actually quite dangerous to link in the footer of a pbn. This type of link is all about quality not quantity.

Based on the fact that footer links are given low priority/weighting by Google I tend not to worry too much about competitors with this kind of ratio. What you need to be digging down and finding is the really good quality links - those on high authority sites that are in main content body of a site (ie not the footer, header or sidebar).

I agree, I have seen this exact thing on my end. One thing iv recently discovered is the guys that do well with pbns, hide them from a majority of sites like alexa,spyfu and majestic. I use a less common Link Index website so i can see a majority of links from pbns, The most common theme iv seen is that these websites will look super basic(plain white background), not always are they relevant to the industry but have somewhat related quality content. They use the main keyword there going for like "new york seo" in their anchor and they place it a pretty good spot in the article. Most of these sites will be aged and the good ones will have 20 TF/CF.

With the large amount links, google has a hard time telling if you or a competitor is building spammy backlinks on purpose to down rank, so most back links that are crap shouldn't affect too much(if i understand correctly). But its true about Quality backlinks over Quantity, iv seen 7 back links be enough to rank in a very nice industry niche.