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Noob question about PBNs

by Ross02
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi,
This probably sounds dumb to the people who know but I'm going to ask anyway. If its good practice to hide PBN sites from search crawlers, how do they still benefit overall ranking?

I thought only sites indexed by google boost ranking (in google serps)?

Thanks in advance
#noob #pbns #question
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Originally Posted by Ross02 View Post

    Hi,
    This probably sounds dumb to the people who know but I'm going to ask anyway. If its good practice to hide PBN sites from search crawlers, how do they still benefit overall ranking?

    I thought only sites indexed by google boost ranking (in google serps)?

    Thanks in advance

    If you hide them from search engines, they won't do you any good.
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    • Profile picture of the author Ross02
      But when talking about PBNs people say they should be hidden from things like OSE and Ahrefs etc?
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by Ross02 View Post

        But when talking about PBNs people say they should be hidden from things like OSE and Ahrefs etc?
        Those are not search engines.

        They do not need to be hidden from OSE and Ahrefs. You can hide network sites from them if you want to. The only reason to do that is to hide them from competitors, but if you build really good network sites, there is no reason to hide.
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      • Profile picture of the author irawr
        Banned
        Originally Posted by Ross02 View Post

        But when talking about PBNs people say they should be hidden from things like OSE and Ahrefs etc?
        All that does is prevent your competition from seeing them. So depending on how realistic the sites are, that might matter. If you have some fishy looking sites, your competition might make a stink about it and the site might get penalized.

        The sites I have linked to my other sites are real sites, I'm not even slightly concerned about hiding anything. I'm not hiding the fact that I own those sites, they are well developed high quality sites, and the links between them makes sense. The intent of them is not to manipulate Google but rather to help the users.

        If that's not what you're doing it's advisable to hide the sites from those tools since they would provide a nice little report of your activities. Also if you have a bunch of template sites linking into your site that will look fishy whether you hide them or not. It's statistically abnormal for a site with 20 high quality citation type links to be getting 15 of them from sites with 10 pages of content. If you do this, sooner or later a manual reviewer will come by, use a tool on your backlink profile, verify the link profile is "weird," and then figure out some lame excuse to manually penalize the site.

        If you read the quality guidelines, most sites can be penalized for something.
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  • Profile picture of the author niksto82
    If I were you, I would completely erase PBN from my vocabulary. They have become SEO plague.
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
      Originally Posted by niksto82 View Post

      If I were you, I would completely erase PBN from my vocabulary. They have become SEO plague.
      If by PBN you mean public blog networks, then yes.

      Private networks, however, are fantastic.
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
        Banned
        Originally Posted by niksto82 View Post

        If I were you, I would completely erase PBN from my vocabulary. They have become SEO plague.
        Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

        If by PBN you mean public blog networks, then yes.

        Private networks, however, are fantastic.


        That's the thing, people associate PBNs with public link networks like BMR (RIP).

        When I recommend PBNs I'm making reference to Private Blog Networks & by Blog I mean any type of webpage format, doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a CMS like Wordpress (example).

        Anyone buying links from another person doesn't have a private link. Now If they're buying the entire domain, sure, they own the link (domain).

        BTW, a lot of the most popular domains own private link networks (ebay, amazon, facebook, etc...). You'd be hard pressed to find an authority site that doesn't own multiple same/similar niche domains. My point is owning private link networks is normal.
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