Five websites from a PBN have been deindexed, should they be deleted or kept live?
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Do Deindexed Sites Still Pass Link Juice?
This is the big test for the month. Dori worked on this several years ago showing it was a thing, and as a response to Google removing a bunch of sites. The idea is, does a deindexed site pass juice?
In my own practice, this was something that I saw through finding sites that were actually pinging Google alerts. Google alerts would bring back alerts and when I look at these sites, I realized that they were deindexed and they had links in them and, in my own practice, I thought it was interesting that Google alerts are finding these sites.
Clearly, Google knows they are there but they were deindexed and not showing in SERPs. So, what do these links do? I know Dori worked extensively on this and what was a ton of fun was working with deindexed sites. Dori has tons of networks and maybe could speak more about this than I can but from time to time these sites get deindexed for whatever reason. It’s the natural attrition of owning large networks. You are going to lose sites from time to time.
She gave us some sites to use that had recently gotten deindexed. The test was actually ran by Carin Handsun and I actually ran this test two more times because this is such a big thing. In the end, what we got is that the deindexed sites moved the needle. They were able to achieve a rank improvement with links from deindexed sites.
That is an amazing thing because if you are dealing with large networks, if you have PBNs of your own, this is something that you are going to run across and you’d ask what you would do with the sites that have gotten deindexed. The answer is you can still use it and practically speaking, I may not point that to my money site but these I think are excellent links for juicing up other PBN sites, other tier two or tier one kind of sites that you want to juice up.
Dori: One thing also is in the membership area, you have the ability to use link ratio campaigns and when you are using those with your PBNs, and you should be, if something gets deindexed and you don’t want it pointing at your money site any longer, you can change it right in that membership dashboard. That is how easy that is and how that works.
The other thing also is that I did a big study on this in 2012, 2013 and we were talking about this in SEORockstars. Everybody started getting deindexed and I got hit really bad because I just opened up SEOLinkmonster in the beginning of February and they started deindexing these sites right away. We went from 4000 sites.
Then, I have a back up of 4000 sites and they just kept getting deindexed. The thing was, nobody’s ranking changed. It wasn’t until February 27th, when Panda 3.3 came out and there was a little paragraph at the bottom of this long string of things that they said what Panda did that was changing the way they looked at links.
What happened then was they were looking at the exact match anchor text differently. Before, everybody was just using the same keywords and it worked really well. That was actually what happened, not the deindexing of the sites. So, I wrote an analysis on it and I proved it. People still came and saw them and they would still rank sites.
Now, I think what happens is the natural attrition to PBNs, especially public blog networks – you are getting content on to them, they are thin content but there is really no traffic. I have narrowed it down to it being traffic to keep your PBNs strong, of course you want to add content but it is traffic that sites stop getting. I think it is a natural loss of power that starts to happen after a year or two with the same network.
I had guys that would get mad when I take down some of the links in my network because they said their rankings would get down when I took the sites down. They would pay me to just keep the deindexed sites up.
What people do not understand is there is the index and there is the search results. Those are two different cans. They actually take those out of the search results. They are still in the index but we always call it deindexed because when you see yourself in the search results, then you must be indexed, you are in the index.
That is not actually true. They are two separate cans and Google published a document on it and I have the graphic somewhere where there is the index and there is the search results. What they do is they get those thin sites out of the search results so that they do not show up any longer but they are still in the index, they are still getting crawled, and they still pass juice.
I think of it as there is a forward facing index and there is a backward facing index within Google and the idea is there are filters. So, when a site is “deindexed”, it has been added to a filter so when the algorithm crunches how a search is done, I think what it would do is display kind of the middle area and then these sites pass through the filter and if it’s on a list of deindexed sites, it won’t pass through and show up in the front facing index.