Most people know that when they submit an order to me – I personally check each and every URL that we get sent.
Unlike other PBN vendors, I’m not a fly-by-night operation; I’ve been selling PBN links since 2015. Meaning I have no problems refunding people if I can’t work with them.
In 2023 I sent $20,500 in refunds simply due to not being able to work with sites; Most of that was due to a public case study I was involved with.
People also take me rejecting their sites as a personal attack – It’s not.
There are specific reasons as to why I reject sites and I wanted to have a document I could cite that could shed some light on why we do it and what I look for.
Back in 2018 almost every single person who sold PBN links had a good portion of their network deindexed – me included.
I had people in my DMs (other PBN providers) asking me if they saw X, Y, or Z as a footprint. At that point we hadn’t fully analyzed things and I’m also not one for sharing information because it doesn’t help Me in the long run.
(Even this article won’t share certain specifics – sorry!)
After waiting several weeks to assess the damage we looked at the blogs and then tried to determine the “things” they targeted.
We saw consistent patterns:
*I mean Christ, would it kill some PBN sellers to buy premium themes yearly OR are we still stuck in 2012 finding “free WordPress themes with full posts on the homepage.”
Whoops I leaked one.
**This one I have little control over. I do send out warnings but at the end of the day, it’s YOUR money and I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.
All of these “things” have resulted in the Hatred PBN having 6 sites* deindexed in 6 years – which is a really solid track record for a Public Blog Network.
*In that time we’ve also “retired” roughly 10-15 other sites due to failing certain checks we run but I’m also unwilling to share those checks too.
I’ve been telling people since 2017 to stop pounding exact match anchors.
Back when I sold on Konker.io it was so bad that I had to start posting that across the top of the sales page.
But, it did nothing – people aren’t fans of reading (few of you will even read this entire 2000 word article).
But just like Chat-gpt – you have to give people an alternative if you restrict them so I made an order document to tell people what to give me.
Said Document: https://www.hatred.io/anchor-text-and-order-details/
To take it a step further in 2024 I wrote this article to make it even easier:
https://hatred.io/how-to-write-better-anchors-for-your-pbn-orders/
In 2018 I started rejecting certain anchors like “best” “top” “review” “near me” because, as I pointed out above, we saw that as one of the things they targeted.
Fast forward to 2024, we now have clearer “spam documents” from Google.
Citing that documentation:
“Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit, or links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites.
For example:
- There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress.
Well hot dog, hot dog, hot diggity dog (Matt are you reading this?).
Would you look at that – we have hyper-aggressive anchors on tier 1 including things like “best” and “buy” – both of which I reject.
It’s almost like we called that one 6 years ago.
Again, I am begging – no, pleading with you – stop pounding your tier 1 with exact match anchors.
Side bar: I’m not suggesting exact match anchors don’t work – they do. But there’s a huge difference between 1 exact match anchor and using 10/20/30/40+.
Eventually it’s the same story every time: It’s bound to cause problems and non-exact match, natural anchors do the same thing. The movement is slower but it’s safer from all perspectives.
The biggest reason I reject certain link profiles on tier 1 is because the #1 culprit for deindexing blogs is negative link associations.
Any PBN seller who says otherwise is full of shit or hasn’t been doing this long enough to see the patterns – or they just don’t give a shit and will take your money to take your money.
(It’s probably the latter).
This is somewhat hypocritical as someone who sells PBN links because I’m not saying that my sites are “godly” and that they look like real sites – it’s because I don’t want to get my network deindexed OR filtered and I want YOU to still have what you paid for a year from now, not a month from now.
The stuff I typically reject associating with:
A site that has all of these types of things en-masse – it’s a footprint and creates a negative link association for me.
If I as the PBN seller link to several link profiles that all contain similar types of “spam” then guess what, I’m now part of that spam too.
This ain’t rocket science.
If you’re buying guest post links or niche edits – a good starting point is Shane Dutka’s blacklist.
I’d link to his G-sheet but that’d be mean to skip his email sign-up (unsub after if you want – I did).
I am NOT suggesting that these sites are bad in that they are incapable of passing pagerank or causing a serp transition.
I’m also not suggesting that Shane got it right – all his list is, is a list of sites that have accepted payment for links in some capacity (allegedly).
Let’s check some cherry picked examples:
(The 1st site actually fails my filter checks even though it’s indexed – techieworm passes filter checks but if you click the site via searching the domain on Google it goes to a spam redirect to adware extensions for chrome – leems segit).
These look like link farms designed to sell blog posts.
I mean these even have blatant footprints; They cover every category imaginable and then list that in the menu and have a basic theme with a shitty logo.
Also on the list:
Passes a sniff test to me initially, but…
(Update 7/5/2024: Homepage is now rented to betting/casino sites via ads)
Searching for any of my header terms:
Again, why the fuck is a Rugby site linking to a casino site?
I mean it makes them money, that’s the obvious answer but does it make sense objectively? No.
This also isn’t to say that niche relevancy matters – it still doesn’t in terms of passing page-rank and causing serp transitions BUT it looks like shit.
You get the gist.
Now, there’s also a sliding scale in my head.
Meaning, if your entire link profile looks like that, you get rejected, plain and simple.
But, if there’s like a singular odd link like that, and the rest of the link profile is great – you’d get approved (I also ignore scraper sites because we all have them – it’s just how it is).
(In terms of checks, your site is run through Majestic.com, Moz.com, and Semrush.com).
Sorry!
But you could use the service as intended – you know – tier 2, like it’s advertised.
By going tier 2, it avoids the potential for:
The people who have continued to do well with this service are doing the same stuff:
These are things that I’ve been echoing since 2018 when I wrote that initial anchor text/order document.
Yet we still have people who want to:
This stuff does not work long-term and hasn’t in forever.
BUT if you know and understand that fact, let’er rip tater chip.
One of the biggest reasons we’ve had to go back to using full-posts on the homepage is because indexing PBN posts has become Wicked. Fucking. Hard.
If you’re using another provider, there’s a super good chance that all of the posts they sell you won’t index.
However, the one thing that does have to update is the homepage and google is essentially left with no choice but to crawl it or deindex it or flag it (remember those tests I mentioned that I can’t share).
This is solely due to AI and it becoming rather expensive for Google to index everything.
Back in like late 2020 we started to notice it so we opted to allow orders to drip out like we always do and then start index checking the posts after 30 days.
Any posts that don’t index on their own are then forced to index via 3 indexing methods we use.
Again, I won’t share them because – well – why would I?
One of the methods got shared on Black Hat World – and guess what, they patched it in like a week.
The method involved scheduling a live stream on YT, using a link shortener on your link and then posting those in the description of the scheduled video. The video gets indexed and Robots visit the URL which 301s and then hits your article.
You now need a PVA YouTube account (Government ID verified) and to wait a long time to even consider posting a link in a description.
Which means you can’t mass-index links anymore with this method. Even with a PVA account, it’ll get banned for doing the above.
“The rest are empty, lacking links but the savvy nerd,
The best PBN with no rank ya ever heard”
-Dillon
