You hear a lot of different talk about PBNs being an effective form of link building. The standard responses are: “Yes, they work.”, “No, they don’t.”, “Google will catch you.” and “They work but not as well as they used to.” So, we put this to the test to know once and for all.
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Transcription Below
Testing PBNs
This was an excellent test to show how these things work. We wanted to see if we can test to see if PBNs pass juice – as an indicator to see if this is a good PBNs or not a good one. All of these PBNs came from SIA member Mads Nordskov. Mads is a linkbuilder out on Denmark. He is one of the linkbuilders that I know. He actually runs his business as a linkbuilding service but one of the things that he does is that he builds PBNs.
In addition to guest posts, outreach, those kind of regular links that you think of that are a little more whitehat, he also dabbles in PBNs as well. To my knowledge, since he started building PBNs, I do not think he even lost one. All of the PBNs that he ever built are still indexed.
Has anybody really taken the time to look at a group of PBNs to see how they all worked or if they all work and they are effective and can pass juice? The best environment to do this is in a test environment where nothing else is going on so you can see if the PBN is a positive factor, negative factor, or no factor.
If you have been in SEO for more than 4 minutes, you have heard of PBNs and you probably heard of a large mix of what people thing about PBNs – some will say that they are super effective and you definitely want to build them, some say they are not effective, some say Google has been sniffing them out since 2012 and you are going to get your self penalized.
It is one of the things that goes across the board. Interestingly, most large sites actually build versions of PBNs. They build small satellite sites they own and control and they end up linking back to themselves. Just as kind of an aside to the idea of PBNs, big sites do them. They do not call them PBNs, they call them their satellite sites or sister sites but they are essentially building PBNs.
That is something to keep in the back of your mind when thinking should I build PBNs, is Google going to penalize me, my thought process is no. If you are doing something gross where you are selling mass quantity of links to all kinds of different sites, that is a different kind of thing from what we are talking about. We are talking about controlled sites that have real content of them, you are never going to get into trouble with that. That is my opinion.
What we are doing here is we are looking at can we measure these things as passing juice. Mads very kindly donated 19 PBNs to be tested. From each of these PBNs, there was 1 link sent to a test page and then we chronicled what would happen. I initially thought that this would take 3-4 days or 5 days at the most, we will see the juice pass and we are good to go. Quite the opposite happened.
On the table – yellow indicates a change in rank either up or down, green means a positive movement up, red means a negative movement down, white indicates no movement at all. You can see that initially, once the link was fired, nearly every test page dropped which stopped my heart. We let this test go and you can see that eventually, we are talking after two months, all but two are not positive. One is negative and the other one is in the no change. This is why I think people has such varied opinions on PBNs.
Just in a test environment, these things took forever – two months to figure out what was going on. You can fire a link, you can pay for a link, you could build your own PBN and you send that link and nothing happens for two weeks then you get a drop and it stays down and down and the decline continues and you are freaking out. You take that link away and tell your friends that PBNs are being penalized and Google found me out. I let it sit for a month and all I did was negatively impact my target page.
Conversely, you could be like the first row where I fired a link and the second day it stayed at number one the whole time. This is where in my mind, those polar opposite opinions come from, from the same basic technique. It takes a long time and you can see transitional rank. That transitional rank can be negative for a long time – in this situation, more than half were negative for quite some time before positive movement came out of those links. Moral of the story, PBNs pass positive juice majority of the time.
Here is what I would do if you are interested in doing PBNs, you should test them. You should send them to a test page and see if that page moves up in a test environment then you can see if it passes good juice. There are other things that you could do as well.
You could submit them to Search Console. I do not have any tin foil hat issues showing Google my links. The idea is Google can see them anyway, that is the whole point of them. It would be weird if you have a whole bunch of sites that did not have Search Console and Google Analytics on them, in my opinion.
That might be more of a footprint than having them on. You can submit them on Search Console when you buy and expired domain or a domain in auction, I would put it in Search Console because it would immediately tell you if there was a penalty on the site or not. You will see if there is some manual action. I will put it in there and see what is going on.
The next thing that you could do is to see if this will rank for long tail keywords. You should know what niche that particular site was in if you are buying an expired domain. Put some long tail terms. It should be able to rank for them. Third thing would be this test – fired to a test page and see if it passed juice and goes up.
Once you got those three things, then you know that you got a real site that will pass juice and Google will love it and I think you can safely use it. Mads has done this with these sites and you can see that the results of what he has done is most of his are excellent. If you are purchasing PBNs or PBN links, it might be something that you would want to get into.
This is another reason why it is difficult in my mind to get a link from somebody that you do not control. If you have no control over the particular link, you can’t do these things and you are opening yourself up to more risks. I would do these things to my PBNs.
It is also helpful even in just linkbuilding in general – it could take months before your links have any positive value.