Question about PBNs

Let's say you control a pbn made out of 50 sites, and you keep pumping your money site using this pbn network. Doesn't google notice this sort of practice? Isn't it strange that the same group of sites are all linking the exact same site, time and time again?

Whitehatdoe said:

Let's say you control a pbn made out of 50 sites, and you keep pumping your money site using this pbn network. Doesn't google notice this sort of practice? Isn't it strange that the same group of sites are all linking the exact same site, time and time again?

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It does. That's why people who manage good PBNs likely don't link to their money site way too many times.

And it's the "signal to noise ratio" problem all over again. Remember that a large enough site will also pick up links naturally. Some of the natural links will be from automated sites like page monitors/seo tools/archivers etc.

Then there are "online collaborators". People who reference other people frequently on their individual sites. Do it too frequently and it becomes "link sharing", just keep it low enough and those can be powerful editorial links.

Google can't differentiate a regularly linking PBN from those kind of sites very well, so it probably puts all those kind of links into a single bucket and gives them some PageRank accordingly. And It's definitely not zero given sites that accumulate these kind of links over time do rank on serps.

And if your pbn grows too large, to the point of having millions of pages and several thousand sites and people start talking about on the internet, you risk getting a manual penalty.

Tl;Dr - pbn owners bet on the fact that the number of times they link to their money site doesn't trigger google, and they try to keep a low profile as much as possible.

Ashk881 said:

It does. That's why people who manage good PBNs don't link to their money site way too many times.

And it's the "signal to noise ratio" problem all over again. Remember that a large enough site will also pick up links naturally. Some of the natural links will be from automated sites like page monitors/seo tools/archivers etc.

Google can't differentiate a regularly linking PBN from those sites very well, so it probably puts all those kind of links into a single bucket.

And if your pbn grows too large, to the point of having millions of pages and several thousand sites and people start talking about on the internet, you risk getting a manual penalty.

Tl;Dr - pbn owners bet on the fact that the number of times they link to their money site doesn't trigger google, and they try to keep a low profile as much as possible.

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fair enough, that's why I imagined. But pbns can be very costly to run, is there really a good ROI if they manage to build large PBNs but only link moneysites a few times? sounds like too much effort and money spent for too little rewards

Whitehatdoe said:

fair enough, that's why I imagined. But pbns can be very costly to run, is there really a good ROI if they manage to build large PBNs but only link moneysites a few times? sounds like too much effort and money spent for too little rewards

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Large pbn sites basically operate like complete whitehat sites. They won't just link to your money site. Like other whitehat sites, they will link to other sites to (which they charge money to get a link from). Some pbn owners make several web2.0s and link to the just for link diversity.

This is why good ones work so well. They can hide in plain sight. And really good ones, whose owners know what they are doing, can bring great roi to their clients.

It's true that for you, as a lone individual, mainitaing a pbn is too much effort for minimal gain. You would just as well create better content and do more outreach and see equal/if not better results than using PBNs.

But when there's entire companies maintaining pbns, with entire teams of SEOs, writers and VAs; you start getting the results of economics of scale.

A team like that can spit out consistent content and link to their client's sites for a fee. They are basically whitehat sites with the added benefit of being able to sell links very effectively.

There are multiple factors at play here, so it's not just a black and white answer. If you are using multiple personas, different hosting IPs, different themes, original content, have a good inbound to outbound link ratio, etc.. then PBN's still work like a charm. But most people don't want to take the time or invest the money to do it right which is why you hear of so many PBN horror stories.