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SEO - PBN question

by GGpaul
16 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Folks,

Do you think there will be a point where Google will look at our PBN's and say "This site has a backlink to X (our money site), but yet he's not getting any referring traffic. That's alarming. Let's not value this as a strong backlink." Or nah? I'm wondering if Google is now identifying whether or not a PBN actually receives traffic etc and if they use that as a metric to rank a site or not.

What are your thoughts?
#pbn #question #seo
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    How would they really know if it gets traffic or not?
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    • Profile picture of the author yukon
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      Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

      How would they really know if it gets traffic or not?
      • Google Fonts
      • Embedded Youtube

      I know, don't use Google products but I bet my last nickel the average webmaster doesn't have a clue Wordpress is using Google Fonts as a default.

      I'm not saying Google cares as far as SEO goes today but Google is tracking anything & everything they can get their hands on. IMO Google Fonts alone is a scheme that only exist for tracking data on websites. The web existed long before Google Fonts, kind of redundant.
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by yukon View Post

        • Google Fonts
        • Embedded Youtube

        I know, don't use Google products but I bet my last nickel the average webmaster doesn't have a clue Wordpress is using Google Fonts as a default.

        I'm not saying Google cares as far as SEO goes today but Google is tracking anything & everything they can get their hands on. IMO Google Fonts alone is a scheme that only exist for tracking data on websites. The web existed long before Google Fonts, kind of redundant.
        I agree, there are a lot of ways they can track things, but they still cannot be 100% sure of traffic in most cases.

        And in the Wordpress example, that is on the admin login page, so not tracking traffic.

        There is one other thing though in this conversation, just because a site gets little to no traffic, does that really mean it is less valuable? Would it really make sense to devalue the links?
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        • Profile picture of the author GGpaul
          Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post


          There is one other thing though in this conversation, just because a site gets little to no traffic, does that really mean it is less valuable? Would it really make sense to devalue the links?
          Yup let's talk about this topic.

          We probably should get this thread deleted soon too though IF you know what I mean .
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        • Profile picture of the author yukon
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          Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

          And in the Wordpress example, that is on the admin login page, so not tracking traffic.
          True but the majority of premium Wordpress themes do use site wide Google Fonts.

          Example:

          The Avada theme alone has 163,548 sales & all most likely running Google Fonts on thousands of live webpages. That's only a single theme out of thousands of similar themes.






          Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

          There is one other thing though in this conversation, just because a site gets little to no traffic, does that really mean it is less valuable? Would it really make sense to devalue the links?
          True & I imagine that's why links are still the number one ranking factor. A person could own the best site in the world & never care about SEO, they could have a boat load of traffic from sources besides the SERPs or just as easily have no traffic at all.

          My point with the Google Font comments is Google is without a doubt peeking behind the curtain, even on some password protected webpages (ex: Wordpress by default).
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          • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
            Originally Posted by yukon View Post

            True but the majority of premium Wordpress themes do use site wide Google Fonts.

            Example:

            The Avada theme alone has 163,548 sales & all most likely running Google Fonts on thousands of live webpages. That's only a single theme out of thousands of similar themes.








            True & I imagine that's why links are still the number one ranking factor. A person could own the best site in the world & never care about SEO, they could have a boat load of traffic from sources besides the SERPs or just as easily have no traffic at all.

            My point with the Google Font comments is Google is without a doubt peeking behind the curtain, even on some password protected webpages (ex: Wordpress by default).
            I completely agree with you. Totally staying off of Google's radar is nearly impossible these days. It's why I believe if you are going to build a network, build useful sites. Google does not really care about a decent network site. What they really have been targeting is the obvious shitty Wordpress blogs that people throw out on domains like fukshtpissxyzae3a8.com.

            That being said, don't go out of your way to make it easy for them either, but if you build sites that are valuable on their own, you're likely going to be fine, even if they uncover your "network".
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            • Profile picture of the author babywhawha
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              • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
                Originally Posted by babywhawha View Post

                Interesting but those sites in turn would need links as well to attract traffic, like pushing the problem further away (in tiers)
                I'm not sure what you mean.
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        • Profile picture of the author hipeopo02
          Does traffic influence rankings? I believe it does from my own expirements.


          Can Google track traffic? if you are trying to reach a site through Google then yes, absolutely.


          To me, If a site is popular it's an excuse to look it up in Google. Type in traffic (you know the URL bar) at the top is being used less and less and the reason is obvious: Spell checking. Mistyping a site gets you zero in the address bar but G can still bring the site up if you type it in wrong in the search box. Now the link is being clicked through Google and this is a way they can track visits (as well as typing the site into the search bar)


          The other thing I like about typing in a site in Google is the site links. I can see links of a site that I may be interested in before even visiting the site.


          A trick to index a site into Google fast is to send a lot of traffic to it. Why is this? hmmmmmm...
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  • Profile picture of the author GGpaul
    Good question. All speculation - nothing more lol.
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    On that topic, how many links do you think Amazon has from sites that get zero traffic? Probably a few hundred thousand from failed IM'ers alone.
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    • Profile picture of the author GGpaul
      Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

      On that topic, how many links do you think Amazon has from sites that get zero traffic? Probably a few hundred thousand from failed IM'ers alone.
      But, how many links do you think Amazon has from sites that also gets A TON of traffic?

      Same case for a big ecommerce site who might have a bunch of spammy negative links but yet they have so much authority just from a couple of sites. So in which case, they won't be taken down by any means.

      From us though, if we were building just links from PBN with no traffic, then wouldn't that be alarming? Vs having links where we actually obtained referral traffic, etc. ?
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    There are a ton of valuable sites out there that have links from sites with little to no traffic. I think if Google tries to start evaluating links based on traffic, that would be asking for trouble.

    I understand what you are getting at though, so build your network out of sites that get traffic then. Networks don't have to be the same worthless shitty sites everyone else is tossing together.
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  • Profile picture of the author bluejeans
    Having been online for many years now, trying to do something sketchy and staying off the radar of those policing natural search is a fool's errand. It might work short term but long term there's just little viability.

    So, unless you're into having to reinvent yourself and your business every couple of years, build a network of value, don't try to hide it, don't interlink it, earn some natural links and monetize it through a system that doesn't rely (ironically) entirely on natural search.

    Look at building e-mail lists from them, for example.
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  • Profile picture of the author anthony1617
    1. they may or may not already be looking at traffic
    2. if they disregard or devalue links that don't have traffic, that's bad - think about it. lots of sites whose votes count might not have a lot of traffic. .edu and .gov sites, for example. also extremely niche sites - how does google handle niche rankings for low traffic niches and terms, if they devalue links without traffic? then they're just ranking the site with the most visitors - of course that's a horrible method and would take them out of business.

    3. additionally, we could just find a way to sort PBNs by the amount of traffic they used to get, and rebuild them into semi-real sites, and then they'd still be even more powerful because they'd make money on their own.
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  • Profile picture of the author thesadshow
    I don't know about PBN's specifically, but I think it's much simpler to follow the same rules with everything you do for your seo, especially off-site. Today it's all about doing things that would/could naturally occur if your site was popular enough to be growing a backlink profile all on its own with you having to buy or fabricate them.

    In my opinion, all of the future Google updates are going to be based on signals or patterns that they believe wouldn't happen "organically". I like to take my biggest competitor and take a good look at their backlink profile because these big guys are the ones who are legitimately gaining lots of organic links. Keep looking for things they gained organically that you can fabricate while looking just as legit in every way.
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  • Profile picture of the author dronehawk
    I wonder if Google considers traffic count for a site in considering what and what not to rank.
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