Matthew Woodward gave an interesting talk at the recent SEORockstars event.
He stated that many unwitting people were purchasing links from orphan categories and therefore, gaining no juice.
Also, the general assumption is that the PBN homepage is the best place to get a link from because the juice generally ends up flowing back there, and many links in their profile will be homepage links.
James decided to test it.
Test Downloads
Transcription below:
Dori: There's no way an orphan page is going to be a homepage link, no way. On anything?
Clint: Yeah, I think we're getting there and if you don't know orphan page, no links from the website anywhere else all by itself.
Typically, as Matt Woodward's pointed out, Dori is pointing out several times, you buy a guest blog.
And more importantly, this happens a lot more when you actually buy them versus you get a guest posting opportunity on on a legit site.
But when you buy them, nine times out of 10, probably 9.5 times out of 10 is going to be an orphan page.
No other pages of that website will link to that and it'll just sit there.
You got your thing on there, they're not going to promote it, they're not going to share it with their audience. It just got to be there. And they're going to take your 125 bucks or whatever.
And then the inner page link, in the course of this is there's another link coming from the page to this. And then the homepage.
Alright, so here we go. Here's the numbers. Page has been selected and you can see here. And then as everything starts bouncing around inner page, home page, orphan, inner page, home page, orphan inner page, home page, orphan, I think there's one more. think this should be it.
Dori: Wait a second. Is this on the same site?
And is there a link from the homepage to the inner page as there would be from a recent blog post?
Clint: Here's the different sites where the links come.
Dori: James just told me to wait.
Clint: He can see the backlink info, center page. Yeah, here's the innerr page link.,let's look at the metrics.
There's a homepage and 24 and 35, inner page 27 and 35.
To me, just case, you wonder, I would consider this a better link, because the ratios a little bit closer and then the orphan page 22 to 31.
Dori: Well, if the orphan page should not have any metrics, since there would be no incoming links to it.
See, if you look at the external links, they're both zero, tut majestic doesn't report on interlinking.
Both of those are getting links from inner pages.
Clint: Or is begging a number based off of the implied metrics from the domain?
Dori: That would be the root domain when they take the average and they'll take the homepage and all the URLs and average them together and that's how you get our root domain metric.
Now, these metrics should be URL metrics.
Clint: Should be zero, but but they're not.
Dori: Well, they don't report internal links so that an internal page can have any type of could be linked from all the internal pages but majestics not going to show the links but they are reporting the score.
That's why you see a 35 and with zero links going into it.
Clint: You're saying that there's links here?
Dori: Yep, he says orphan, no interlinks but it wouldn't have a trust flow unless it was a root. Yeah, it wouldn't have any tust flow if it was a real orphan page, because they don't report interlinking, which is, I think, a travesty, but they don't. So you'd have to scrape those sites and see what kind of links going into those sites.
Clint: So your argument is that because of metric on that orphan page says that there's numbers on it, you're saying that there's inner linking done to it. And then the test is saying, and this is the same domain.
Dori: Inner page, yes there's links, there's inner links, but he says the orphan page doesn't have any inner links.
But how is it having the same met almost the same metrics as the inner page?
And to the homepage too., in the root domain, with the PBNs, 301 404 444 to 301 redirecting all that juice to the homepage, the homepage is getting all the juice on a PBN?
Clint: Why didn't that homepage move it off? The homepage PBN link was the most surprising to me, trying to tell the story.
Dori: Here's Tim, James, is this one of my PBNs? No, I don't know. It's one of his. Is this a blog? or HTML? Expired? Okay, I got that. What did you build on it? It was a way back rebuild? Did you rebuild the orphan? Or did you build the orphan page? And it is a blog. Did you build the orphan page? How did you know? or why did you think it was an orphan page? Yes, he built the orphan page.
But since it is a blog, and it's probably a post, it's getting some juice from the way WordPress links around?
Because it was probably the post is probably being linked to from the homepage. When you have you know, your recent posts
Clint: In the archives, perhaps or if the homepage is set up as archive perhaps.
Those mattered that page should it be the homepage and it should be up there right with the interlinking.
Dori: It says no archives, but it's possible that it has recent posts on it.
Those are two different widgets that you can have up.
The archives, and then recent posts on a WordPress blog. He says only main menu. No recent posts. Strange right? Yes, it is strange.
Well, it depends on where all their linkings coming from. I mean going to on that expired domain, it could be going, you know, so there could be a lot of links going into that inner page more so than the homepage. So that would certainly qualify it to why the inner page ranked, but I don't. But what's strange is that the orphan pages showing such a high trust flow. But the inner page has links coming into it from other inner pages. He says he thinks that there's a negative signal on the homepage.
Well, then, you know, we can ask Bill Hartzer, or send this question into majestic, but it shouldn't, if it was just a page never linked to. It shouldn't be showing. And this is a URL and not the path, coz a path will show you the highest trust flow in that path. So if you have domain slash category slash orphan page, if the category has a high trust flow, then that page will have a high trust flow flow if you search for it.
Under path slash URL, okay, he'll send me the URL. He doesn't want to disclose it. I don't blame you. Not to disclose your PBNs. But certainly something is a miss. And I mean, obviously, the orphan page should be at the bottom, but why is it showing trust flow? That's it. I mean, that's a really, I'll spider it, and then I'll be able to tell you.
Clint: Majestic users unite. So really the purpose of this test now, I guess the next question would be if the 404 is of all the backlinks that were the backlinks that go to 404 pages from the rebuild, are all pointing to the homepage and as a general rule, the homepage typically has more backlinks than internal pages just because the way human beings backlink things right. .
So, why would the inner page be the homepage? The orphan pages right where we expected it to be wise the homepage, it didn't have any effect whatsoever. Are you gonna look for the movement?
Dori: Since it's an expired domain? I would imagine that there are more links going into that inner page, plus maybe you know, the all the link juice coming from inside the site as well.
Clint: Is there any backlinks to the inner page?
Dori: It's internal? Yes, he already said yes.
Clint: He said there's external backlinks going into?
Dori: No, he said internal.
Clint: Yeah, so there's no external backlinks and the homepage has all the external backlinks, I'm assuming, is that correct?
Dori: That's what it looks like, yeah.
Clint: Then that goes right back to? If the homepage has all the external backlinks. Why didn't it provide more power? Because ultimately, all the authority if you're into the domain authority thing is be at the homepage? Why did the inner page to get more?
Dori: James, is it only being linked to from the homepage? Or is it being linked to from other internal pages as well? You just said totally not what I have elected, I believe so. You believe it has other links going into it from other pages? No, just through the menu.
avigational links are uber strong. But this is interesting. If I crawled the site and looked around and poked around, I might be able to figure out, figure it out what's really going on? Because it does seem suspicious. And I don't know, maybe we found something that we need to investigate a little bit further.
Clint: Let's say you have all those the PBNs, let's run this test again.
Dori: Yeah, and I can crawl it, and I can look at the site.
Clint: I give it to you James, she's gonna look for excuse.
Dori: No, I actually want to know the truth, you know about anything, more than anything else. So if we found that linking to internal pages from the navigational menu would give sites a better boost, then you know I'm going to be doing that instead of homepage links.
Clint: James did point out that he's got this 301 redirect. I've seen those on expired builds, where that's all the 404 is a redirect to the home page. To me, that sounds like something that Google could set and find easily. And I always had an issue with doing it, so I always manually redirect it.
But because all the people were who were doing domains and teaching PBNs, we're talking about using that tool, I tested it out. And around that time, that's when Google launch the old soft 404 messages. And so that, to me, was an indicator that Google's like, Hey, we're on to you clown.
Stop redirecting all your links to your homepage. Stop, be lazy, do this, right? Because again, 404s are totally acceptable. They're expected in website land. And if you have them, and you delete a page and a 404s, and it was in the index, and Google eventually will drop it out of the index for you. It's not necessarily Oh, your site's bad quality, hey, you deleted the page.
404 or 410 is totally accepted and could this be used as a bad signal? In my opinion, I think what you need to do is put the PBN into search console. And if you see a lot of 404 errors, then they're probably onto you clown. Take those off and redirect them individually to the internal pages that you want to use, for further use, versus running one of these universal 404 redirects type.