Google's John Mueller said that finding link schemes from PBNs (public blog networks) is easy and "nobody has to leak a PBN" to Google for Google to know about it. He said "they're pretty obvious to the appropriate tools & basic scripts."
John said this on Twitter and then added later that there is "nothing unique about PBNs, they're just link schemes like others have been for many years." He said that Google will "respond to link schemes in a variety of algorithmic and manual ways." "We have a lot of practice, and much of it is fully automated," John added.
Here are those tweets:
Hi [@JohnMu ] If Pbn is leaked, will Google penalize that site or eliminate the effect of links? ¯\_(❛︣ ͜ʖ ❛᷅)_/¯
— Shahram Rahbari 🍏 (@ShahramOriginal) May 13, 2021
Usually nobody has to leak a PBN, they're pretty obvious to the appropriate tools & basic scripts.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 14, 2021
There's nothing unique about PBNs, they're just link schemes like others have been for many years. We respond to link schemes in a variety of algorithmic and manual ways. We have a lot of practice, and much of it is fully automated.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 14, 2021
Google has penalized tons of PBNs manually over the years but now it seems mostly automated and Google likely does not count links via PBNs.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
This post was pre-written and scheduled to be automatically posted today, I am offline for a holiday and unable to respond to comments or questions until late Tuesday night.
