As every PBN links at Saket Wahi’s site are a key ranking factor. When a website links to yours, it signals to Google that people like and trust your content enough to recommend it to their readers. PBNs, however, manufacture these votes of confidence in order to manipulate search rankings artificially. They’re a risky business, and Google is constantly working to improve its algorithms in an effort to catch them.

The problem is, most people don’t even realize that they’re using PBNs. That goes for independent link builders all the way up to the largest guest posting service companies we see advertised in our industry. This is because, at this point, creating new links through PBNs is a quick and cost-efficient option for most of these marketers.

Demystifying PBN Links: How They Impact Your SEO Strategy

A common PBN strategy involves buying old domains and then putting up content that loosely relates to the original website in order to build high-quality anchor text for your money site. This type of setup may have worked in the past, but Google is now wise to these types of tactics. It’s not uncommon to see SEO professionals receive manual penalties for this type of manipulation.

Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to identify PBN links using the right tools. There are a number of SEO link auditing services that will flag websites that use PBN links, and some will even let you know whether those links are toxic. You can also use the disavow tool in Google Search console to remove any backlinks that you think are causing you problems.