PBN ranks going down with time? (Case Study)

Hi,

I tried to do a small case study with 2 of my PBN domains. I tracked the SERPS of some keywords on those PBN domains for a long time approx. 1.5 years.

Look at the ranking of some of those tracked keywords:

PBN Site 1 (2 keywords) (no new content for the whole time):



PBN Site 2 (2 keywords) - here I added one new article on July 2016:



This is happening to all of my PBN domains with time. This wouldnt bother me so much, but it has an effect on the money site itself. Its loosing ranks slowly too. In fact, after a certain amount of PBNs and time, the new PBNs will just replace the losses of the old ones. So at best you will just hold your SERPS.

What could be the cause? I came up with those ones:

1) PBN looses backlinks
-yes, some links are lost (deleted, expired domains etc.). But the loss of the backlinks isnt so big and after a certain time i barely can see any change

2) Lack of fresh content
I didnt add any fresh content to the domains. For over 15 months. Could this be the main problem? Should I add new content regularly to stop this loss of seo juice?

Does somebody have any experience with this? Some guys around here tell us, that we should add content at least once a month to every PBN site. But this gets really costly.
Example: 120 domains x 10 € per article x 12 months = 14 400 €... Thats why I am asking for some real experience with this kind of problem. Because it would be really costly just to try it out without any data.

When you add content to a site that already gets traffic, your rankings acorss keywords go up no question about it,
You just have to try and keep things more up to date, even just a single article a month would be the minimum.
Just buy 2-3 articles a day, and roll it out over your sites.

Panther28 said:

When you add content to a site that already gets traffic, your rankings acorss keywords go up no question about it,
You just have to try and keep things more up to date, even just a single article a month would be the minimum.

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Hmm, so the consensus is 1 article per month per PBN domain?

This is a huge pain in the ass if its really like this. Especially for us with larger PBNs. So if you have 500 PBNs, then you need to buy and publish 500 articles each month. Just the time to publish them is really demanding lol.

Any other experience? I was thinking perhaps once every quarter? That would cut the costs by a lot.

asker1 said:

Any other experience? I was thinking perhaps once every quarter?

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Whatever you can then, just make sure you regularly do it, and remember you can refresh articles, and boost them up a little, which can count for a lot too.

And do you think that the fresh content can have such a large impact on the rankings? Do your PBNs retain their seo juice or are they loosing it continuously over time as mine?

Would be great to do a case study on this. I will do this for sure, but this wont help me at the moment. I will track the rankings as I will add fresh content.

link rot.

same thing is happening to me from that bullshit PBN crap I bought in 2016 to some sites.
links behind their PBNs are rotting, and the PBNs are rotting themself and that is rotting the # of the moneysites.
luckily, for that, in most cases I just used pet projects.

asker1 said:

Hmm, so the consensus is 1 article per month per PBN domain?

This is a huge pain in the ass if its really like this. Especially for us with larger PBNs. So if you have 500 PBNs, then you need to buy and publish 500 articles each month. Just the time to publish them is really demanding lol.

Any other experience? I was thinking perhaps once every quarter? That would cut the costs by a lot.

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there has never been prove of this. nor makes this "fresh content" shit any logical sense except the 7$WSO Industry.

Still dont believe it? Check our your bad neighborhood on some PBN hosting. 9,9/10 dont update their PBNs. and 9/10 will be in tougher niches than yours (PBN Post sellers excluded)..

Wait, I'll recheck myself too, been some time when I was sniffing round.

and only if, you will get that "freshcontentbullshitdisneyland" from popular seo bloggers, claiming boombastig new rankings after putting "updated in 2017" into their articles or updating it with "fresh content"..

I myself have like 2 sporting sites, where no fresh content was done for years and they bank and rank.

pop some links. done.

so, I have to move on to my usual 1 sentence bullshit now.

I find blasting them with social signals seem to bring some life back into em

This will happen with PBNs over time and IMHO it does not effect the Money Site rankings much. There is a reason for that, once your money site gets in top 3 rankings, it start to get natural links and if you keep the content on money site fresh then its ranking will not dwindle except in case the competition is upping its game.

I have had money sites where I lost PBN domains altogether (domain expiring etc.) and still it maintained its rankings. The trick is to get money site in top 3 for 3-4 good keywords.

Also, its much cheaper to add a few new PBN domains than adding content to PBN domains.

darulez said:

link rot.

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There is always some link decay to expect from a PBN that cannot be avoided, so they lose some power over time. But I have some PBN for over 5 years that are doing fine.

Crawl rate.

New content invites crawlers.
Social signals invite crawlers.
New back links invite crawlers.

If you have no new content to crawl, no signals no back links that lead Google to visit your page, your page will be slowly "forgotten" by Google.

You may not notice this if you are just tracking a bunch of keywords.
But look at your GWT you will see that month after month you are ranking for lesser and lesser terms becos of the lack in activity.

Why would Google continue to rank you if you don't actively invite her to your place?

primeCS said:

Crawl rate.

New content invites crawlers.
Social signals invite crawlers.
New back links invite crawlers.

If you have no new content to crawl, no signals no back links that lead Google to visit your page, your page will be slowly "forgotten" by Google.

You may not notice this if you are just tracking a bunch of keywords.
But look at your GWT you will see that month after month you are ranking for lesser and lesser terms becos of the lack in activity.

Why would Google continue to rank you if you don't actively invite her to your place?

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^^ This.

The content is not really expensive. Check for example @littlewebdragon where you can get an article for $1. I always schedule 10-40 articles over the year when I build my PBN and it's pretty much set and forget. It's not exactly expensive and it makes the job done.

Also, regarding link loss, what RD do those domains have?

Hmm, it looks like the issue is not so straightforward judging from the various opinions.

I just added 1 article to each of those tracked PBNs and interlinked them with some older articles. Lets see if it will have any effect. I am a fan of doing things that we can measure and see in data, not just because some authority tells us to do and spend big money without questioning it . I will let you know for sure, if I will get any results.

Nargil - PBN 1 has RD 636, PBN 2 has RD 123.

asker1 said:

Nargil - PBN 1 has RD 636, PBN 2 has RD 123.

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I doubt that the link loss is so massive to cause this kind of drops.

Nargil said:

I doubt that the link loss is so massive to cause this kind of drops.

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Yeah, thats what i thought too. Those are really some of my best PBNs I have, the first one having in fact a lot more RD than my money sites lol. But at the same time - this doesnt automatically imply that the loss of seo link juice from those PBNs can be attributed to the lack of fresh content. But its quite possible. I will watch any changes closely over the next 1-3 weeks. Maybe add one more article. If there is a bump in rankings, then its clear that the PBNs need fresh content.