Page 32 - SEO Mad Scientist 2020 Report

PBN Tests

There are many types of PBNs but the most important thing to know is this - there are PBNs you
own and PBNs you don't own. With that said, here is our DISCLAIMER: Never send PBN links to a
clients website, unless you OWN the PBN site. Ownership means you control all the content on
the website. Your backlinks will never leave the homepage, you can limit the number of outbound
links, and most importantly you have the authority to decide what links are placed on the website.
Another bonus is that you can keep the site niche-targeted as well. If you don't control the link
AND the website, don’t risk a client's business by pointing these links directly to their website.

Are PBNs Effective & Safe?

Test Setup: April 3, 2020

This PBN test is looking at the effectiveness of PBN links, as well as their safety when linking to a
website. To test this, we built ONLY PBN links to our clean test site we had previously built from
over 30,000 words of repurposed content from archive.org. We used this site in a previous test,
but we had not built a single link to the website before this new PBN test.

We used 50 Budget Links, both standard PBNs and your average $15-$20 links, with only "brand"
and "brand in location" anchors. We sent 40% of the links to the homepage (20 links) and 60% of
the links to inner pages (30), with only 2 or 3 to each inner page. The site had 19 service pages so
we divided them up this way: 2 links to 11 pages + 1 link to 8 pages = 30 links total.

The range of anchor text and PBN types vary drastically so for this test we used only one type of
PBN and a very specific anchor text - homepage links only used anchors with a brand name,
brand, and geo location and URL. Inner pages only use the brand name, brand name and service,
h1 or URL for anchors. Anchors weren’t repeated for any links except brand links on homepage.

On April 10, 2020 the tests were in the beginning stages. All of these links were placed between
April 19th and April 25th.

We did not use PBNs we own. The PBNs being tested are general PBNs with tons of content
published frequently and the links will eventually leave the homepage.

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