Another One Bites the Dust? When Will they learn the P in PBN stands for PRIVATE not public????

11 years ago

No. PBN is Phat ca$h in my pocket you suckers Blog Network.

Or maybe...

Phuckit your site sucks anyways so put it on my Blog Network.

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jinx1221

11 years ago

Even with changing the acronyms, they will still advertise their Public Blog Networks as a Private Blog Network :rolleyes:

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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

They probably did the same type of things as BMR/ALN and such did, in short leaving huge footprints all over the network.

Another killer is popularity, you can better stay small.

Funny point about the domains in backup, probably the same themes and same IP ranges of hostings.

Another funny thing from the sales thread: "50 Russian underground networks", crazy to see clients get penalized completely when only 1 out of 50 go's down.

But no worries, next week they are up and running again they say. They would only need 150 links per client * 500 monthly clients = 75.000 links and 10 OBL rule, hmm that's only 7500 high PR domains that they need to purchase and setup in a week time.

Peace of cake!

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MikeFriedman

11 years ago

When you sell to the masses, there doesn't even need to be any footprints to get the network deindexed. All an interested party needs to do is signup for the service. If there is even a slight, tiny bit of overlap between any of the sites being linked to, you can unravel the whole network in a few hours.

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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

When you sell to the masses, there doesn't even need to be any footprints to get the network deindexed. All an interested party needs to do is signup for the service. If there is even a slight, tiny bit of overlap between any of the sites being linked to, you can unravel the whole network in a few hours.

Just thought about it a little and it's indeed not that very hard but that would mean that almost every single SEO company out there that owns a network could get busted any day any time.

Wonder why Google ain't doing that when they are so anti paid links. Right now they only use scare tactics by targeting the big networks.

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Mike Anthony

11 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

Just thought about it a little and it's indeed not that very hard but that would mean that almost every single SEO company out there that owns a network could get busted any day any time.

SEO companies analyze the sites and businesses they work with. Google would have to fake a website and a business just to bring down one SEO. link services require any old wordpress blog to link to and a subscription fee. Totally different setup.

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MikeFriedman

11 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

Just thought about it a little and it's indeed not that very hard but that would mean that almost every single SEO company out there that owns a network could get busted any day any time.

Wonder why Google ain't doing that when they are so anti paid links. Right now they only use scare tactics by targeting the big networks.

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

SEO companies analyze the sites and businesses they work with. Google would have to fake a website and a business just to bring down one SEO. link services require any old wordpress blog to link to and a subscription fee. Totally different setup.

Like Mike said, it would take a massive amount of effort and money to take down truly private networks.

It's not something they can sign up for at $50-100/month and quickly obtain links throughout a decent chunk of the network to get started finding the rest. It might cost thousands of dollars just to take down a small handful of sites on a truly private network. They aren't going to do that.

I'm sure there are plenty of other ways they can do it, but it is far simpler to target the networks being sold to the masses for a few bucks. They can tear those down by the bucket full whenever they want.

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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

Like Mike said, it would take a massive amount of effort and money to take down truly private networks.

It's not something they can sign up for at $50-100/month and quickly obtain links throughout a decent chunk of the network to get started finding the rest. It might cost thousands of dollars just to take down a small handful of sites on a truly private network. They aren't going to do that.

I'm sure there are plenty of other ways they can do it, but it is far simpler to target the networks being sold to the masses for a few bucks. They can tear those down by the bucket full whenever they want.

Wait a second, you and Mike are assuming that most SEO companies only use a fix set of high PR domains to rank one specific client. While that is often not the case, I know at least a handful of SEO companies in Holland who use the same type of setup that I'm doing.

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Mike Anthony

11 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

Wait a second, you and Mike are assuming that most SEO companies only use a fix set of high PR domains to rank one specific client.

Nope....not one client but a handful. I can't speak to what "SEO companies" do because there is such a wide range of meaning to what a SEO company is nowadays but SEOs concentrating on businesses certainly are not loading up the hundreds. I would think I was over doing it if I see more than three or four customer links on a page but that just me. (and not every link on every domain like link services either)

Now truthfully at WF prices I feel for you. At those prices no matter what you call it its a link service and you have to do volume. Around $400 is my lowest per month and they are not the "I have to rank tomorrow crowd" either. It may take 90 days or more for things to really start humming so check it out.

Google is going to have to set up a website that convinces me they are a legit company, have an employee interface with me, pay me for some months under a fake name and wait before they get to see a significant part of my network and heres the kicker - they don't even know how much I am affecting serps to even be bothered - with a big service they know that it is by the size of it.

So as you can see the only thing a SEO company with a network doing SEO for companies really has to worry about is being reported when they rank in a serp. however with a higher price point theres no spun content gibberish on those sites and few links so it can be managed.

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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Nope....not one client but a handful. I can't speak to what "SEO companies" do because there is such a wide range of meaning to what a SEO company is nowadays but SEOs concentrating on businesses certainly are not loading up the hundreds. I would think I was over doing it if I see more than three or four customer links on a page but that just me. (and not every link on every domain like link services either)

Now truthfully at WF prices I feel for you. At those prices no matter what you call it its a link service and you have to do volume. Around $400 is my lowest per month and they are not the "I have to rank tomorrow crowd" either. It may take 90 days or more for things to really start humming so check it out.

Well actually did does make me think a bit as I don't feel much for losing a $50.000+ network.

What I could do is this:

- Buy a PR1-PR2 domain for the reg fee with some existing links
- Write 1000 words of content that links out to 4 clients
- Point 1 perm PR4 link at the domain so that it's guaranteed to have the strength of a PR2 domain

Total costs would be? $10+$10+$10 for the perm PR4 link (assuming it has 20 OBL and the purchase price is $200) / 5 = $6,- per client cost price for the link.

When you compare that to a PR5 blog post that costs $5 in content and $0,50 for placing it and that rolls off the homepage after several weeks that has 15 OBL, opposed to a PR2 homepage link with only 5 OBL.

What would you consider a better deal?

I could sticky the homepage and set the max posts featured on homepage to max 5 so that when they cancel the monthly service I could unsticky it and it rolls off, kind of necessary cause of domain renewals each year.

That in combination with my already themed sites where I use less content per link could work.

It would just require a ton of extra work from my side as I would have to reg and setup 200 domains per month

Guess I'll start to do some tests with my affiliate sites to see how it works out ranking wise.

Only thing is that most people want instant results so although this provides more stable & safe rankings it will take longer opposed to them getting like 15 PR3+ homepage links per month that roll off the next month but then there are 15 new ones placed and so on.

I do realize for quite some time already that less links = better these days, you can't keep repeating the same type of blog posts over and over as you will reach a max at some point where adding more links isn't really helping anymore. At least that's what I saw with some clients who stayed subscribed for 10+ months, could have other reasons, always a bit hard to isolate.

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Mike Anthony

11 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

When you compare that to a PR5 blog post that costs $5 in content and $0,50 for placing it and that rolls off the homepage after several weeks that has 15 OBL, opposed to a PR2 homepage link with only 5 OBL.

What would you consider a better deal?

I'd take the Pr5. 15 Obl is nothing to speak of for a PR5 and works out far more powerful than a PR2 with 5.

Anyway you are still thinking like a link seller. True enough you may be small enough to avoid Google directly going after your network but your point of huge exposure is your customers ranking and being reported for bought links. With the crappy affiliate, MFAs and the like its easy to spot them for bought links because they would not get links any other way. Networks get deindexed that way all the time. Doesn't make the news but its just as deadly to get a site reported.

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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

I'd take the Pr5. 15 Obl is nothing to speak of for a PR5 and works out far more powerful than a PR2 with 5.

I think you missed the part of roll off vs non roll off homepage. Uh wait, I forgot to mention that part myself.

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Anyway you are still thinking like a link seller. True enough you may be small enough to avoid Google directly going after your network but your point of huge exposure is your customers ranking and being reported for bought links. With the crappy affiliate, MFAs and the like its easy to spot them for bought links because they would not get links any other way. Networks get deindexed that way all the time. Doesn't make the news but its just as deadly to get a site reported.

That's why I don't serve affiliate/adsense site anymore, well at least not with my expensive main network.

If the side network (specifically for MFA/Amazon/etc) would get deindexed then that's of course very nasty for the customers but financially I wouldn't lye awake from it. It's maybe 100 sites large and a mix of PR3-PR4 with a good amount of dropped ones so I wouldn't go down more then $10k which is an acceptable risk when you look at the ROI.

I think it's plain impossible to build a bullet proof network for MFA/affiliate sites as those sites tend to get penalized easily, more often due to Panda things then by Penguin (or perhaps 50/50) and there are always some folks who do everything to recover their crappy 5 page site due to emotional attachment, it shouldn't get much worse should it. And before you know it your sites end up in a disavow list of links.

If it wasn't for one single customer that brings me a ton of business in the shape of mostly affiliate sites (also a link seller at some forum) I would've abandoned it completely. On the other hand I also need to rank my own affiliate sites and I won't measure with 2 sizes.

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Mike Anthony 11 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

I think you missed the part of roll off vs non roll off homepage. Uh wait, I forgot to mention that part myself.

Fair enough. Thats another diffrence by the way. Doesn't make as much sense to roll links off pages with full SEO clients.
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- nik0 Banned 11 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Mike Anthony
  
  Fair enough. Thats another diffrence by the way. Doesn't make as much sense to roll links off pages with full SEO clients.
  
  Got to row with the paddles that we have!
  
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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

SEO companies analyze the sites and businesses they work with. Google would have to fake a website and a business just to bring down one SEO. link services require any old wordpress blog to link to and a subscription fee. Totally different setup.

Yeah the step in price is higher when you look at it like that and might not be worth it, but there are different ways. The disavow tool would provide a lot of info and then there are competitors that report each other.

What I see as a common practice among the somewhat higher priced SEO companies:

- They buy a high PR domain
- Restore the old site but only a handful of pages
- Place link to client site in the sidebar

Yes it does require a bit more effort to take them all down.

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Bambu

11 years ago

Ghost Rank 2.0 did not use any privately owned networks, per se, but various Russian networks, such as Sape.

If these networks are setup anything like Sape, all Google had to do is register for an account with each of the Russian networks (easy to do), scrape all of the websites in the network, and take manual action against them + the sites utilizing the links.

These links were great for ranking churn and burn sites and if you knew what you were doing you could get a great ROI (especially if you bought the links directly, cutting out the giant markups from middlemen).

What's amazing about the Ghost Rank thread is that even after all of the bad reviews and feedback in the thread from the penalties, newbies are still buying the service! Simply amazing.

They are promising to move from Russian links to something else in the thread. It will be interesting to see in what direction they go now.

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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

The guys selling links to IMers will be the one's that take one for the team.

It's not complicated. IMers optimize with things like WMT, an offline donut shop owner (example) doesn't care about WMT or anything Google will ever do, they want ranked in the SERPs, nothing more.

It's the IMers that make bringing down public networks easy (Oh my gawd, I have a bad message in WMT, must disavow all links ASAP!!!).

Good luck with that.

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paulgl 11 years ago

ROTFLMAO! That email is a gem! Dumb and Dumber.

Anyone still giving SAPE a thumbs up?

Matt Cutts admitted a while back he did know about SAPE,
but he promised to "take action" if warranted.

Is not the biggest, baddest IM forums open to the public eyes?
A wise person has always realized that.

Paul
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Mike Anthony

11 years ago

Originally Posted by yukon

The guys selling links to IMers will be the one's that take one for the team.

It's not complicated. IMers optimize with things like WMT, an offline donut shop owner (example) doesn't care about WMT or anything Google will ever do, they want ranked in the SERPs, nothing more.

I get to look over the shoulder of a lot of networks and Imers don't even have to use WMT. The sites they link to are so bad not even a mother would love them. Biggest footprint in the world is when a site links to another site that no human being would link to without being paid. However since they are private and no one but me and them care they exist they survive and many do very well.

Google can't be bothered slapping one totally private network owner linking to a few pages out of Billions. Just the employee hours cost of doing so would run them into the ground. Ghost/sape? Sure. There are enough people using them to actually make a difference in many serps.

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markowe

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

.
Google can't be bothered slapping one totally private network owner linking to a few pages out of Billions. Just the employee hours cost of doing so would run them into the ground. Ghost/sape? Sure. There are enough people using them to actually make a difference in many serps.

And I think just as importantly they send a public message, "It's not worth using these services, we'll just take them down and you'll lose your money and your site". And I think it's probably working.

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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by markowe

And I think just as importantly they send a public message, "It's not worth using these services, we'll just take them down and you'll lose your money and your site". And I think it's probably working.

Although I'm a small fish on the grand scale of things like BMR/ALN/SAPE which all had like 10.000+ members, I do like that Google keeps forcing us to improve cause at the same time it kills a lot of competition.

Same like you see with affiliate sites now.

Internet marketing was never this lucrative, it's almost like going back in time.

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markowe

11 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

Although I'm a small fish on the grand scale of things like BMR/ALN/SAPE which all had like 10.000+ members, I do like that Google keeps forcing us to improve cause at the same time it kills a lot of competition.

Same like you see with affiliate sites now.

Internet marketing was never this lucrative, it's almost like going back in time.

Yeah, I'm kind of alright with that. They've raised the bar for entry. Now you have to spend a couple of hundred to get an affiliate site ranked, or whatever, suddenly it doesn't seem so attractive to newbies. Even though the returns are greater as you can dominate bigger niches etc. Probably the frontier days are slowly coming to an end, IM is becoming the business it should always have been, you actually have to invest and reinvest real money - in the business, not in the next fly-by-night MMO product, trick or fad.

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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by markowe

Yeah, I'm kind of alright with that. They've raised the bar for entry. Now you have to spend a couple of hundred to get an affiliate site ranked, or whatever, suddenly it doesn't seem so attractive to newbies. Even though the returns are greater as you can dominate bigger niches etc. Probably the frontier days are slowly coming to an end, IM is becoming the business it should always have been, you actually have to invest and reinvest real money - in the business, not in the next fly-by-night MMO product, trick or fad.

There will always be loopholes in anything/everything. Google is built by humans, humans aren't perfect & for every Google engineer there's thousands of people just as smart that will do whatever it takes to make money online.

With that being said, public link networks will always be a temporary business model.

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markowe

11 years ago

Originally Posted by yukon

There will always be loopholes in anything/everything. Google is built by humans, humans aren't perfect & for every Google engineer there's thousands of people just as smart that will do whatever it takes to make money online.

With that being said, public link networks will always be a temporary business model.

There will always be loopholes, but what I mean is the barrier to entry is that much greater. The days of throwing up a 3-page EMD (which everyone and his dog could do) are pretty much over. Our hypothetical newbie can leverage any temporary "methods" that come along (like "private/public" blog networks) but the loophole gets closed eventually and they are back to square one. It's getting so the only people who can viably exploit major loopholes are black-hatters doing hit-and-run churn-and-burn stuff, throwing up new sites all the time, knowing they will get whacked but where the ROI and economies of scale are worth it for them. Or people with bigger SEO budgets able to invest big moolah in private networks or quality linkbait or whatever, again, not exactly newbie-friendly models any of them.

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Mike Anthony

11 years ago

Originally Posted by markowe

Or people with bigger SEO budgets able to invest big moolah in private networks or quality linkbait or whatever, again, not exactly newbie-friendly models any of them.

Thats a good thing as you stated. Opportunity needs barriers to it in order to be a real opportunity. If a briefcase of cash lay open on the Floor of Grand Central Station it will cease being an opportunity in two seconds flat.

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kindsvater 11 years ago

This statement from the story may be more important than Google slapping a public link network:

many of the sites using them to rank well in Google are now penalized

Not sure if that is loose language, or means a drop in rankings due to lost network backlinks, or a real penalty. If the latter, the real play is obvious.

Search rankings are a zero sum game. The ranking is the same whether obtained by building yourself up or knocking the competitor down.

.
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markowe

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Thats a good thing as you stated. Opportunity needs barriers to it in order to be a real opportunity. If a briefcase of cash lay open on the Floor of Grand Central Station it will cease being an opportunity in two seconds flat.

Ha, EMDs were more-or-less like that. Maybe 2 years instead of 2 seconds but same sort of thing.

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kindsvater

11 years ago

Reviewing the Ghost sales page, and how one client went from #90 to #55, and another was bragging about zooming from #249 to #98 - people pay for this? Their traffic went from zero to zero.

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MikeFriedman

11 years ago

Originally Posted by kindsvater

Reviewing the Ghost sales page, and how one client went from #90 to #55, and another was bragging about zooming from #249 to #98 - people pay for this? Their traffic went from zero to zero.

Ummm... have you never perused through the WSO section? Newbs are amazed at the silliest things.

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Kevin Maguire

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Thats a good thing as you stated. Opportunity needs barriers to it in order to be a real opportunity. If a briefcase of cash lay open on the Floor of Grand Central Station it will cease being an opportunity in two seconds flat.

Yeah you'd probably hand it into the cops too. Mr Whitesocks Shannanagins.

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Mike Anthony 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Kevin Maguire

Yeah you'd probably hand it into the cops too. Mr Whitesocks Shannanagins.

Me? I'd swipe that cash so fast you would think DC's Flash was real. Don't confuse my opposing fraud with being whitesocks
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- Kevin Maguire 11 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Mike Anthony
  
  Me? I'd swipe that cash so fast you would think DC's Flash was real. Don't confuse my opposing fraud with being whitesocks
  
  More starch for your socks Sire?
  
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  Mike Anthony 11 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Kevin Maguire
  
  More starch for your socks Sire?
  
  Perhaps but make sure to steam press my clothes and polish the Bentley first. The socks can wait.
  
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Bambu

11 years ago

I just came across a Tweet from Matt Cutts hinting that Ghost Rank was on their radar about 3 weeks ago here: https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/373221842309234690

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GyuMan82

11 years ago

OMG a "private" network that everyone and their mom knows about got smacked? :rolleyes:

This is my shocked face!!!

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Another One Bites the Dust? When Will they learn the P in PBN stands for PRIVATE not public????

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