When will Google finally crack down and do something about PBN?

[JimFranco]

Looking at a lot of high ranking sites in different industries. I see they are filled with PBN backlinks and paid backlinks. Its very obvious. Where people would never get a backlink from sites or blogs other than it had to be from paid services.

The spam from this and ranking benefit is worse now than it has ever been because of it. Worse than before penguin.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Re: When will Google finally cracked down and do something about PBN ?

Hey Jim,

Have you ever had any luck reporting link spam to Google?

How to effectively report competitor spam - Search Engine Land

 

[profiledefenders]

Re: When will Google finally cracked down and do something about PBN ?

I have a contact at the spam team. If you want to send me the details in privacy I am glad to try to run it up the ladder.

 

[adammaxum]

Re: When will Google finally cracked down and do something about PBN ?

they will never be able to stop it because in order to truly stop it you would need a huge team manually reviewing everything for every website...just not feasible.

this is where the algo updates come in, but again, if there is nothing "fishy" in the layout, content, domain itself, the automatic detection and algo's will always have a very hard time weeding them out.

If you have a truly good PBN network, you mimic real looking websites so much so that at the end of the day, there is really not a big difference between a PBN and a real blog or website.

A lot of the bigger marketing companies who actually do good SEO have created directories and blogs that are real and relevant (ie:niche blogs/sites) They contain real, valuable information and so at what point does a PBN become an actual legit site? The lines become very blurry.

 

[rclark]

Re: When will Google finally cracked down and do something about PBN ?

Definitely best to just ignore and do what you can to start being better than them.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Re: When will Google finally cracked down and do something about PBN ?

The way most PBN's are created today, you can easily tell them apart. Content with exact match anchor text in them. There's always a pattern. The rule of thumb is if you can detect it as a human, the algorithm probably isn't that for from being able to detect it either.

However, that is is an interesting point about "where is the line on when a PBN becomes a real, functional site with valuable information"? I think that's an excellent point.

On topic though, I don't worry about PBN's. As the poster above me says, just work on your own backlinks. It's all you can do. And PBN's can't mimic local flavor for backlinks.