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Can we talk about PBNs?
Posted by on September 1, 2025 at 4:23 pmI find that the PBN links from the many different “blogger outreach” services are sooo obvious. These sites are clearly not real sites and have just been put up to sell links and the content is all written by AI.
I agree that they seem to work fine enough for moving the needle a little bit, but their impact seems to plateau after you get about a dozen of these.
I don’t think Google is penalizing for these, but it certainly seems that they are able to identify them and devalue them. I mean, they are so easy to identify. It feels like throwing money into the garbage.
Do you agree? Are there any blogger outreach services that get real links from actual real websites?
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1 Reply
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There’s nothing better than prospecting your own links or creating content good enough to get natural backlinks.
But that doesn’t mean PBN is a bad thing, as long as it’s mine and I have full control, including over the quality.
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Public networks are painfully obvious. Google will often deindex them or just discount all the links on them when they discover them.
They work… right up until they don’t.
Now a truly private network, you would never recognize.
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Yeah, I’m with you. A lot of these “blogger outreach” services are basically just PBNs pretending to be legit. The sites usually have no real audience, recycled content (often AI-written), and it’s obvious they’re built just to sell links. Sure, they can give you a bit of movement early on, but it doesn’t last Google seems to pick up on them pretty quickly and stop giving them much weight. The real value comes from links on actual sites that have traffic and relevance, but those take more effort (and usually more money). In the long run, it’s smarter to aim for genuine editorial links otherwise, it does kind of feel like tossing money into a void.
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Thats why the Creator created backlink exchanges.
They are networked.
They are natural.
They are merited.The way Larry Page intended.
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Most of these PBN links are super obvious and don’t really do much after a handful. Google probably just ignores them after a while. Real value still comes from getting links on actual websites with real audiences—everything else feels like throwing money away.
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Google’s gotten scary good at pattern recognition. Same hosting, similar templates, unnatural anchor text distribution. They might not penalty you immediately, but the link juice is basically zero
Real blogger outreach means finding sites that actually have audiences, engaged comments, social shares. Takes way more work but the links actually move metrics long-term
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that is a good percentage of the internet. bs sites with the sole purpose of links.
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PBNs are outdated, Navboost signals are so much more dominant right now.
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Yeah PBNs are mostly junk now. For real links try manual outreach HARO or platforms like Babylovegrowth for quality backlinks.
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Mmmm you gotta just build your own. Its what all the cool kids do, but they never talk about it because… Ya know… You aren’t supposed to talk about it 😉
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