Is my competitor using PBN? A mysterious SEO strategy

Hi guys, I found out the other day that my competitor is using a strange SEO strategy, which is getting him great results. Did he use a PBN or some other strategy?

Two days ago, when I analyzed my competitors' external links, I suddenly found that my competitors had gained hundreds of links from the front page of an educational institution's website overnight. These links linked to many different pages of his website and the anchor text was also niche related.
I followed the clues to search for this educational institution website and checked the source code of the page. It turned out that there was no code in the source code about my competitor's website.
I googled the keywords related to this educational institution, and I found that the snippet on his homepage had changed to my competitor's website information. When I clicked in, it was still the homepage of this educational institution.
What's even stranger is that I couldn't find any information about my competitor's website in the source code of the home page of this educational institution three days ago. But SEO tool shows that these links are still active as of yesterday.
Additional information: The DA and PA of this educational institution's website are both in the 30s. It has tens of thousands of natural search traffic.

There are several wonders in this case:
1, is this educational institution website a PBN of my competitor? I feel that it should not be. Because this site has very good natural search traffic.
2, why can't I find my competitor's information in the source code of the home page of this educational institution website but these links are still active?
3, the snippet of this educational institution's website is changed. Is it hijacked?

What is your insight, please?

Is there anybody have idea?

A single website linking out to your competitor multiple times is not going to have a drastic change. He probably has better links or better content, or both.

DeadJoe said:

A single website linking out to your competitor multiple times is not going to have a drastic change. He probably has better links or better content, or both.

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Thank you for your reply. I have read your other posts before. they have helped me a lot!
I am 80% sure that these links brought him the results. Because the ridiculous thing is that the educational institution site ranked #1 for the anchor text keyword a few days after giving him the links.

You can check if he is using PBN or not and which site he is using, using SEMRush. Sort Active, D0follow and export them to .csv, import them to your text editor like Sublime and use regular expression to check which links are coming from homepages(root domains).

A few Pb networks blocked crawlers. It is better to 10x the seo efforts to rank faster than your competition since you somewhat had an idea on your comps.

lonang said:

You can check if he is using PBN or not and which site he is using, using SEMRush. Sort Active, D0follow and export them to .csv, import them to your text editor like Sublime and use regular expression to check which links are coming from homepages(root domains).

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Thank you body! Very impressive method!
This educational institution did link to my competitor from the front page. He made over 200 links overnight which is crazy. This doesn't look like an effective SEO strategy in the perception I learned from all of you at BHW. But my competitor did receive good results.
Also the front page snippet of the educational institution's website so far shows all the information of my competitor's website. This makes me think it's not just a PBN.

Privil said:

A few Pb networks blocked crawlers. It is better to 10x the seo efforts to rank faster than your competition since you somewhat had an idea on your comps.

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Yes, I know people who do that. What I'm wondering is won't this even block Google crawlers together? If the Google crawlers are blocked, the links may be less effective.

Lookatdk said:

Yes, I know people who do that. What I'm wondering is won't this even block Google crawlers together? If the Google crawlers are blocked, the links may be less effective.

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Not really. You can opt to block stated crawlers and let the rest crawl. It’s more on the link strategy to rank and not Pb networks.

Privil said:

Not really. You can opt to block stated crawlers and let the rest crawl. It’s more on the link strategy to rank and not Pb networks.

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I see. Thank you mate!

Lookatdk said:

Thank you for your reply. I have read your other posts before. they have helped me a lot!
I am 80% sure that these links brought him the results. Because the ridiculous thing is that the educational institution site ranked #1 for the anchor text keyword a few days after giving him the links.

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Multiple links from one site doesn't change much, it would not be enough to rank him. Unless the keyword is super easy and everyone else isn't doing much.

Also, you can't say you're 80% sure when you barely have any sufficient data to back that up.

HenryObi said:

Multiple links from one site doesn't change much, it would not be enough to rank him. Unless the keyword is super easy and everyone else isn't doing much.

Also, you can't say you're 80% sure when you barely have any sufficient data to back that up.

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I agree with you, I should have done more research. Thank you.

A hidden backlink checker would answer your question. Let me know if you need help.

Sincerely,
The Data Scientist

Privil said:

A few Pb networks blocked crawlers. It is better to 10x the seo efforts to rank faster than your competition since you somewhat had an idea on your comps.

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Blocked crawler is good for pbn sorry I'm a bit noobie
Thank for suggest

You want the same hire an PAK guy they have this type of skills