Chances are your SEO White Label Partner is using a PBN(private blog network). Using a PBN costs Small Businesses potentially tens of millions of dollars in wasted money.
What is a PBN and how do I know if my SEO provider is using one?
A PBN is a collection of websites used for Link building. Typically they are low value and low quality websites. SEO companies will sacrifice quality for quantity and use a PBN(private blog network) to make more money. Unfortunately, Google is always on the lookout for these sites. Often penalizing the websites that use them.
It's pretty easy to see if you are using one. Pick one of your clients. They should be spending at least $1,000 a month or a Company like Boostability may just do other low value work like social bookmarking and directory submissions. Here is a business I found on a PBN site.
Customer: carpentercrane.com
Use moz or any backlink analysis tool to get a list of all their backlinks.
Sort by DA(Domain authority) if using moz. Start at the lowest DA. The domain authority is a quality ranking number from 1 to 100. On average, a local business would have a DA of at least 15 or higher. For this URL, the lowest linking domain has a DA of 1. Let's look at the site.
PBN Site: ttjeddie.com (obvious PBN site) DA Value = 1
Red flags for Google.
- All the sites use one of about 10 templates, but look the same.
- The weird cartoon image on the home page.
- Low-value non-informative content.
- Look at the source code and see that it is a static page. Not built on any platform like Wordpress.
- No analytic code
- 100% linking on Keyword focus
- No inbound linking value or no links at all.
Why would you Potentially lose tens of millions of dollars?
Google indexes over 30 Trillion web pages. That is a lot of content that they sift through. They are constantly looking through the data looking for sites like these. Most of the Google updates improve their spam search for these sites. Eventually, they all get caught in Google's Spam algorithm.
In the past, Google would pull the domain out of their index. I have seen PBNs lose on average about 10% of their Private Blog websites every month. I have seen a few times; Companies lost their whole network completely. More recently, I saw one company had 20k sites deindexed, and then they took down the sites entirely. How many sites do they own? My estimate is it could be over 100k, which would make their PBN the largest in the world.
Do Other Companies use a PBN(Private Blog Network)?
It seems to be a pretty widespread issue. That is why Google is actively looking for these sites. However, a PBN can be of value if you treat it like a real site. That means quality control. Making sure you only accept or post high-value content. Also, marketing the website will increase its Domain Authority with Google.
What do I do after finding out I have been using an SEO white label partners PBN(private blog network)?
There is no reason to panic, but the
First thing is to stop using that SEO provider. Even if they say they won't use their PBN anymore, the fact that they used it in the first place will tell you they don't care about your clients.
Second, is to let a reputable
white label SEO company audit the backlinks. They can tell which backlinks are hurting your site and potentially will hurt your site. Once you identify those Websites, we can work with the providers to remove the links. If they don't want to remove links, there is a disavow tool within the Google Search console. The disavow tool will tell Google that you don't trust the link to your site. Google will then not penalize you for having that backlink.
Third, begin to rebuild quality backlinks the correct way. By providing valuable content that contributes to the Internet, instead of spamming it. Then look for websites that value the content on their site and welcome high quality content. As well as market their own site driving
Red Canyon Media
Let us help you avoid Google penalizing your customers. Give your customers the value and quality that you can be proud of. Let us audit your white label SEO provider and you will be shocked at what we find.