If you wanna sneak by page 2/3 because you are stuck you have to be a little more creative then rely on PBNs to work these days.
Plenty of people will still argue that PBN are working like Crazy, but the reality is they dont work like they use to this is why I sold my 400 site PBN network because I was getting shitty results>
There is a reason for this... and I will try to make this quick af
I moved completely over to expired Web 2s, which is neither here or there and you could say I am biased because I offer web 2 service as an extension to my SEO agency business which I rank clients websites. But All I can say the proof is in the pudding.
Expired Web 2s are essentially used very similar to PBNs, however Web2s have an
overall advantage in Google based on the TLD authority, reputation, trust, age, social and user engagment which is loved by google.
If you a comparing those traits of a expired Web 2 with a traditional PBN which is a
reregistered domain, crappy content, 0 user engagement, no social signals in addition to that no age, trust or history its fair to say google is devaluing traditional PBNs = Google hates, and is getting you stuck on page 2/3
I was going through the same BS a few years ago with my client sites and stopped with traditional PBNs all together because PBNs were stunning the growth of my clients and affiliate sites and this was effecting my business. At the time I was experimenting with many concepts, one of those was with web 2's which worked every time.
I have attached some juicy ranking increases