How would they really know if it gets traffic or not?

Good question. All speculation - nothing more lol.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wonder if Google considers traffic count for a site in considering what and what not to rank.