How to Reverse Engineer PBN Links - Any Ideas?

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone could give me a hint for how to reverse engineer a sites PBN backlinks.

Site XY is ranking before me but I cannot detect any relevant backlinks that point to the site with any of the standard tools, such as ahrefs, semrush, majestic etc. Yet I am pretty sure that they use a PBN. The content is very thin, no authority, not mobile optimized, young domain etc. In order to overtake them in the SERPs I would like to estimate the number and quality of links I would need to build.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

I never tried to stalk others before but you may try these things (so no idea if these help or)

1) google their naked url, for example, www.xxxx.com (hope find naked links in PBN content)
2) try not that popular backlink tools like SERPstats, seoprofiler, similar web, etc (not all PBN will block all crawlers)
3) try link: domain / search operator
4) try some services that can find same domain ownships of either, from same person, contact info, phone....(they may register PBN in one belt)
5) ???

Thanks for your ideas. Mind to expand on option 3?

I was also considering to use Domain Hunter Gatherer for the analysis. They have an option called "Reverse Hunt Domains" where you basically check for expired domains on all pages that link to a specific site. Question is if it would be possible to get these linking pages...

Also, maybe one could use ScreamingFrog by scraping content - will look into how to set this up.

As I said I have no experience too, these are just what I learned from reading.

No.3 I have no idea if Google still use this operator, but if so, u could try it on Google, this will show backlinks to a specific domain (in an random order and number), that's why may pose out some hidden PBN links. (hope I am right on this)

I guess your DHG and Frog things may not go well...

I suggest you, either build more links for your website, or leave the niche. Even you can find their PBNs, whats the point? Better keep move on! Good luck.

Have you tried to search for "domain-to-investigate.com" directly? It should show you at least something, imo.

Try to use "not standard tools", those are less likely to be blocked.

Matheus Moreira said:

Have you tried to search for "domain-to-investigate.com" directly? It should show you at least something, imo.

Click to expand...

Yes, thanks for the tip. This in combination with the link:domain.com method of @terrycody revealed some of the links that didn't show up with the standard tools.

Google query I used:
"domain.com -site:domain.com"

Even though it is not at all a complete list of links, it confirms my initial hypothesis that the site in question was using a PBN to rank.