The future of PBNs

Unreliable Witness said:

All the chatter of yet another update targeting PBNs got me thinking about how easy it would be for G to identify them if it wanted to do so, and therefore what the future for them might be.

Lots of sales threads here talk about low footprints. There are some huge ones in the networks I have seen. It isn't individual things necessarily, but rather combinations that create a footprint.

If I was G, I'd start by looking for sites that block all crawlers. I haven't come across any good reasons to block every crawler (you could argue that you might to prevent server overload by persistent Chinese robots - but how many sites really do this for every crawler?).

I'd then further narrow down those sites to those that also have general niches - ones that talk about protein supplements on one page and accountants in Idaho the next. There are plenty of legitimate general sites, but I bet you could correlate the topics that PBNs target vs those that non-PBNs do.

It would be even more obvious to look for the above where the domain had changed ownership before lots of content being added.

I'd then look for each post on a site having 300 to 500 words of content that use non-brand or URL anchor text. Every post would have one link (or maybe two - one would point to Wikipedia). There are few sellers on the marketplace who offer 800 to 1200 words of content.

Of course there would be false positives, but if you then looked at the link profiles of the sites to which a suspicious site pointed, and saw other similar sites, you could probably deduce that a PBN network was being used.

The point is, it wouldn't be hard for Google to identify PBNs if it really wanted to do so. I think that the executives at G probably have no will to wipe out all PBNs at the moment because use of them is so prolific - particularly by brands that claim to be squeaky clean. It can, however, reduce the use of them.

So what is the future? I think PBNs will become ever more like real sites where you can guest post now. The cost will have to increase to pay for the creation of longer and additional content. Instead of $15 a post, the highest quality ones might cost $60 or more per post.

That means sites that exist on low income - Amazon affiliate commission and advertising income - won't be able to afford to use them. That plays to G's strategy of making sure brands rank higher without needing to kill use of PBNs entirely.

There will always be sites that don't try to pretend that they aren't PBNs, but all G has to do is to increase indexing time so that these can be identified before a page is indexed. That is partly what I reckon is happening now with indexing - a longer time allows a more thorough check of quality.

A longer indexing time also changes the value of keeping posts on a home page for a short number of weeks - if the page is only indexed after 6 weeks, then a promise by a seller to keep it on the home page for 4 is worthless. A PBN seller who is successful at selling (i.e. who has many clients) will have difficulty indexing the posts before they move from the home page and lose a lot of power.

What are your thoughts?

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bartosimpsonio said:

Google doesn't need to do any of this sophisticated stuff when PBN sellers are using Gmail and Google Docs.... People have no idea about privacy whatsoever....

It's a matter of ONE query : find words link report, pbn report, link sales, and so on FROM gmail,docs, etc....

From Google's panel it's just one query and they have all the reports, names, paypal receipts, everything in Gmail and Google Docs.

I checked out a interesting service here just the other day. The proposal came from Google fucking Docs!! If I reply to it I'm basically telling Google "hey Matt look here I'm buying black ass hat motherfucking links will you ban all the sites I have on GWT please".

Months later you have Google reporting that they caught a MAJOR network entirely. How? Easy, they were selling their packages on BHW using Gmail. All the paypal receipts, REAL NAMES and URLs right there.....

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I know SEO said:

This x1000

I bang my head against my desk regularly with the whole Google docs used to send reports thing.

Microsoft have excel online, it's free. Please use it.

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starki said:

I think being paranoid about Google services like mail/docs etc. isn't necessary. Like Nerevar said, imagine the possible reputation/trust damage plus the waste of resources and manpower to scan though all those mails and docs and verify suspicious ones. PBNs are causing Google some headaches, but certainly not enough to justify suicidal countermeasures. There are some EU regulators only waiting for one wrong step to tear Google apart in court and while the EU isn't the world, it's the most important market after the US.

Not necessary anyway, the way many PBNs are build and/or used them easily detectable. Outgoing links for example, it's one of the biggest and most neglected footprints, no matter how legitimate a site look, no matter how good the content is.

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I know SEO said:

This x1000

I bang my head against my desk regularly with the whole Google docs used to send reports thing when doing marketplace reviews.

Microsoft have excel online, it's free. Please use it.

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Nargil said:

Thank you for the mentions guys, I really appreciate it.

I will chime here too if you don't mind.

The first footprint that 90% of the PBNs do is full articles on homepage. I swear that 95% of the websites that have full articles on homepage are either PBNs or mommy blogs. By using this primarily filter you have majority of the PBNs already covered. And there are many more. As you said, sites blocking crawlers for example. Sites redirecting dead inner pages to homepage etc. Sites that have been dropped for a longer time period. If they can work with niche relevancy, then multiniche sites.

I mean, honestly, if Google really wanted to, most PBN users would be fucked hard already.

So apparently, they don't want to. Why? I honestly think that there is some "beyond-reasonable-doubt" policy. They can't manual-action-rape the site unless it's an absolutely blatant PBN. OR they have counted the ROI they would have if they dedicated more manpower for manual reviews or to adjusting the algorithms for finding PBNs and they decided to fuck that, it's not worth it. Either one or the other. Let's just hope it stays this way.

And about amazon sites not being profitable, I will have to disagree here. Even if you spend $5K to rank a site that makes $500, which, unless you are utterly retarded shouldn't happen even in the next few years, the ROI will be there in 10 months. If you are building long term stuff there is. And even then you can, relatively effortlessly, sell the website for 20x the monthly profit from the last 3 months, so for $10K give or take. I mean, yeh, throwing 5K to something that will make around 15K in its entire lifetime isn't amazing, but this is the borderline worst case scenario.

Still, the focus is being shifted to more of a authority site approach and content marketing lately.

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Reibl said:

What about new marketplace rules?

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Reibl said:

Some sellers register all the web 2.0/accounts for « diversity link building » using the same gmail address…

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I know SEO said:

I'm mostly talking about the services that don't pass the test, I'd estimate that I reject 70% of the packages users submit.



Google can't find what email you signed up to tumblr with.

Diversity link pages usually means links from lots of platforms rather than PBN packages (for example) where 95% of the links provided are from wordpress.

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Nargil said:

You honestly reject 70% of the services? Wtf? So those that are in the marketplace are amongst 30% best ones? Jesus... I don't want to see those rejected ones.

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I know SEO said:

Google can't find what email you signed up to tumblr with.

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Nargil said:

Thank you for the mentions guys, I really appreciate it.

I will chime here too if you don't mind.

The first footprint that 90% of the PBNs do is full articles on homepage. I swear that 95% of the websites that have full articles on homepage are either PBNs or mommy blogs. By using this primarily filter you have majority of the PBNs already covered. And there are many more. As you said, sites blocking crawlers for example. Sites redirecting dead inner pages to homepage etc. Sites that have been dropped for a longer time period. If they can work with niche relevancy, then multiniche sites.

I mean, honestly, if Google really wanted to, most PBN users would be fucked hard already.

So apparently, they don't want to. Why? I honestly think that there is some "beyond-reasonable-doubt" policy. They can't manual-action-rape the site unless it's an absolutely blatant PBN. OR they have counted the ROI they would have if they dedicated more manpower for manual reviews or to adjusting the algorithms for finding PBNs and they decided to fuck that, it's not worth it. Either one or the other. Let's just hope it stays this way.

And about amazon sites not being profitable, I will have to disagree here. Even if you spend $5K to rank a site that makes $500, which, unless you are utterly retarded shouldn't happen even in the next few years, the ROI will be there in 10 months. If you are building long term stuff there is. And even then you can, relatively effortlessly, sell the website for 20x the monthly profit from the last 3 months, so for $10K give or take. I mean, yeh, throwing 5K to something that will make around 15K in its entire lifetime isn't amazing, but this is the borderline worst case scenario.

Still, the focus is being shifted to more of a authority site approach and content marketing lately.

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satya nadella said:

is that red part is from your experience or you just heard from others ?

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ThopHayt said:

Google knows that the best way to discourage SEO is by making it more expensive to implement. They have no interest in wasting resources KILLING all SEO, they just want to prevent it from cutting into their bottom line. And the best way for them to do this is by inflating the cost of doing SEO.

And the easiest way for Google to inflate the cost of SEO? Require better and better content. Content is expensive and Google knows it. They know that most people don't want to spend $7 posting a hand written article on their PBN without a backlink. So Google looks for A) Shit content and B) Sites that have too many OBL/page. This is what probably kills 90% of public PBNs built. They either have terrible content on the non-linked pages, or they have 90 pages with 80 backlinks outbound. Real Easy footprint to see.

-ThopHayt

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Unreliable Witness said:

On another point, its amazing that sellers would use Google Docs to give reports. It would be very hard to prove in a honey trap that Google was using that information to remove PBNs, and I'm sure Google would argue that it was allowed to remove any sites from it's index (or just demote them in the SERPs) that try to game it.

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