Backlink Assassin

Product Development Projects | 2016+ | Links:

Advanced Negative SEO

This project was an experiment to see how much one can detect and prove that certain domains are cheating Google PageRank by running Private Blog Networks (PBNs). It turned out quite successful, and over the course of about 6 months Google took down 100,000’s of backlinks to domains after they were exposed to be coming from PBNs with a 100% accuracy.

The premise was simple: “If a domain is useless, all of its outbound links to other domains are useless”. If you identify a domain with large numbers of backlinks to be a domain that no human would ever visit or find remotely interesting to spend time on, you likely found a PBN site.

I traced inbound backlinks to powerful websites, and checked from what other domains their links were coming. Many of them were using dozens of domains with high Domain Authority that offered no useful information to a human, but insane amounts of backlinks for Google’s crawlers.

This gave me an incredible insight into what powers the “link juice” for domains, and allowed me to see who is cheating (using backlinks from PBNs) and who isn’t (having organic backlinks).

It also allowed me to report to Google, with high precision, what domains could be easily verified to be part of a PBN, and what backlinks should therefor be considered to solely exist for the purpose of “manipulating pagerank”. Once a domain is known to be part of a PBN, all of its outbound links are part as well.