Private blog networks (PBNs) have been growing in popularity all year, although they have been widely used for over a decade. The general enthusiasm for using PBNs to build links came out of the usual source but once again Google engineers have trumped the Web marketing community in a psychological game of reverse-thinking. Google’s advantage is not in the strength of its Ph.D.-wielding employees; it’s in the continual naivete of the aggressive Web marketing community. These people just do a very poor job of dissecting their perpetual mistakes and learning from them.

Let Us Begin with Some Quick Definitions

Churn and Burn SEO This is the business model where you expect to lose your Websites on a frequent, regular basis. Maybe you’ll get some sites to last a few months but that is a very optimistic outlook for anyone intentionally practicing churn-and-burn SEO. If you think you’re churning and burning but your Websites last for 6 months to a year, you’re either doing it wrong or you’re doing it wrong.

Blackhat SEO Although I’m not the most enthusiastic supporter of this appellation, “blackhat SEO” is essentially “intentionally doing something that violates search engine guidelines for the sake of manipulating search results”. A lot of people who call themselves “gray hats” are probably just mixing up their practices. They do some things within the search engine guidelines and some other things against the guidelines.

Web spam is any Website, link, or content that was created for the purpose of exploiting vulnerabilities in search engine algorithms to produce an unfair advantage for the spammer. The spammer may not believe his advantage is unfair. The vast majority of “white hat” marketers create Web spam on a daily basis. Probably all of us create Web spam without even thinking about it.

It’s not Web spam if you write an article where you share your opinion; it’s not Web spam if you list a product in your inventory.

It IS Web spam if you got a list of keywords with estimated search referral traffic and started writing articles for those keywords. That is ALWAYS Web spam and it has never been anything BUT Web spam because you were chasing keywords rather than creating content people would honestly want to search for before they knew it existed.

Not all Web spam is forbidden by the search engines. It’s not Web spam because it violates search engine guidelines; it is Web spam because it is was only created to siphon off traffic from natural listings in search results. Most people who create Web spam will never accept and acknowledge that is what they do. Nonetheless, most Website publishers do NOT create Web spam. Most of them never do any keyword research.

News organizations that chase keywords create huge volumes of Web spam; yes, the search engines know this. Yes, the search engines take aggressive action against Web spam coming out of the news organizations. You just don’t see those aggressive actions because ultimately something has to be included in the search results.

If you disagree with these definitions you’re wrong but you won’t accept that because you are habitually wrong anyway. Your opinions and mine don’t really matter because the Searchable Web Ecosystem doesn’t run on opinions, so let’s not waste electrons arguing over whatever exceptions you imagine qualify you and what you do. There are no exceptions. Get over it you arrogant spammers.

Private Blog Networks Fall Into Many Categories

Private Blog Networks are not always evil in the eyes of search engineers. For example, you can operate a private blog network that search engines don’t index. Think of Facebook. They only allow SOME of their user accounts (blogs) to be indexed. Or, we can say that some of their users don’t allow their blogs to be indexed. But Facebook is a huge collection of private blogs, of which many are not indexed.

Search engines don’t index a lot of social media content simply because of all the nofollow attributes those services add to their links. Marketers don’t believe in linking to content that is using nofollow, so they don’t get all their social media stuff indexed.

Some people write blogs “just for friends and family” and they block the search engines.

Some people develop test blogs, use staging servers, and otherwise create experimental content that is not intended for search engine consumption. And then there are the private-access (often subscriber-supported) blogs. Some companies operate multiple private-access blogs, and they are networked. I know because I have seen some of these networks.

Another type of private blog network that is acceptable to search engineers is the brand-based PBN. Your company does business under 40-100 brand names and each has its own blog. Your company links those blogs together in some way, even if it’s roundabout and convoluted because some conference-attending SEO is afraid Matt Cutts will blow you out of the SERPs if you dare interlink all your Websites. Some companies interlink all their brand Websites and it doesn’t matter.

Having a network and linking the sites together does not necessarily violate search engine guidelines. It depends on why you’re linking the sites together and if you’re using the links to influence search results. Search engines don’t care about stuff that doesn’t influence search results.

And you could have a private blog network that you built “just for links”. That is what got some people into trouble this month, isn’t it? But not all those “just for link” PBNs have been taken down. Only some PBNs have been taken. I have some ideas about who was shot down, why and how they were shot down, and I’ll be sharing those ideas in my next SEO Theory Premium Newsletter. Meanwhile, let’s take a step back and look at the larger picture because, frankly, what happened with PBNs this month is symptomatic of a long-running problem in the world of Web marketing.

What Is Google’s Advantage Over You?

It cannot be said enough that the fastest, surest way to get your spammy marketing tactics blown out of the water is to discuss them out in the open on blogs and forums. You would think that after 10 years of Google hammering every publicly-discussed marketing strategy that people would get the memo. But the aggressive affiliate marketers who all lost thousands of dollars in monthly revenues obviously paid no attention to what has been clear and obvious to all the SEO theorists (and some other folks) on the planet. Let me ‘splain.

First, Google has more than one advantage over you. You need to take assessment of all these advantages and disarm them. That doesn’t mean you will ever be able to outsmart Google. It doesn’t mean your sites will never be penalized again. What it means is that you’ll be better prepared to participate in this psychological game of outguessing the other guy. Think of two people (you and Google) standing face to face with your hands held out. The object of the game is to see who can slap the other guy’s hand most often. The only rule is that you MUST keep your hands in front of you except when the other guy tries to slap them.

Google Remembers Everything I know I have said this before. You occasionally see people ramble on about nonsense like “link echoes” (a concept I have not tried to debunk because such debunkery would be wasted). The point is that Google does not forget. I have been pointing this out to people at least since 2005, when for several months (from about February to May) Google was showing only cache images and meta descriptions that were TWO YEARS OLD (from 2003) for thousands of Websites. That was when I confirmed that Google Remembers Everything. Okay? Got that? Google does not like to throw information away, and they will only do so under great duress.

How is this an advantage? We have been shown a number of examples. Matt Cutts has said a few times that if “you have been caught spamming with 200 Websites we’ll probably take an extra look at your 201st Website”. That is an old, old, OLD Cuttism that people today seem to forget. Once you have a spam rap sheet you are in the system. They obviously (or maybe “possibly”) have tools that surface heavy repeat offenders above occasional offenders.

Another way Google remembers everything (to their advantage) is in the backlink reports you see in Google Webmaster Tools. Many a marketer has reported great frustration with using these reports because they include links that no longer exist. Why won’t Google remove those links from their reports? Why do they include links that use “rel=’nofollow'”? Frankly, I think they are doing you a favor, especially if you are an SEO diagnosing a client’s past link profile. But it is tedious, time-consuming work to have to go through all those links and figure out which ones are still active and possibly hurting or helping. Google’s advantage is in the fact that it already knows. Your backlink history speaks volumes about what your marketing practices are.

Google is always watching.

When Google adds an anti-spam filter or algorithm to the mix, that essentially kills a lot of hopeful spammy practices forever. The encoded anti-spam measures are part of “Google remembers everything (and that is an advantage over you)”. Just because a spammy practice hasn’t been used for 10 years doesn’t mean it can be used again. But feel free to create a link farm. Maybe I am wrong.

My point with “Google remembers everything” is that you and I do not remember everything (well, you don’t). I can lay good money down today that within a week some major SEO bloggers will be talking about something new and terrifying in the Googleverse that happened years ago, has happened more than once, and will happen again.

Your defense against “Google remembers everything”: Use your search skills to find out what has already been documented in the past.

Unlike Google, You Discuss What You Do in the Open I laugh every time I see frustrated spammers complain about Google employees signing up for subscription-only forums and spam networks to unravel their nefarious schemes. Maybe Googlers do that but I have never seen any need for them to do that. Why? Because sooner or later you have to put your spam where the SERPs are. Once your Websites and links are indexed they are subject to every statistical methodology Google can bring to the game.

So while you are standing there thinking, “Should I slap Google now or is Google about to slap me?” they have thousands of computers running in the background which calculate the odds of their getting to you first versus the odds of you getting to them. You’ll get some slaps in, don’t worry about that. But Google remembers everything and therefore all your successes are fed to the hypernetwork of analytical machines that are working hard to second-guess you.

So even if you believe you don’t “discuss what you do in the open”, YOU DO. I remember Matt Cutts mocking a link spam service that claimed its links were undetectable by Google (or something like that). Frankly, if I were trying to manipulate Google’s search results, the only links I would want WOULD be links that were detectable by Google. Obviously the intent of the claim was that Google would not figure out there was a pattern to the links (but there was, as always, and Google figured it out).

You pays your money and you picks your horse, but in this race Google is always going to reach the finish line, even if it comes in last. And what that means is that your horse may not run in the next race because Google remembers everything. Did I mention that before?

Serious affiliate marketers for some inexplicable reason like to discuss what they do on their blogs. I guess they feel they should “give something back to the community”. And sometimes they are just shilling for the latest marketing tools and services (they always embed affiliate links to those tools and services in their reviews). So there you are, telling 100, 500, maybe 10,000 regular visitors about how you’re making money this month so that they, too, can go out and make money.

But this is how we get newsletter signups, so that means we MUST shill for the tools and services, right? Well, as one shill to another let me say this: the more you tell the world about how you make money, the smaller your piece of the pie will become. Let’s take a closer look at this issue.

Google Knows About Training Programs So you have invested 3 months, 6 months, or a year in developing the latest, greatest Web promotional tools and concepts. You’re making TONS OF MONEY with these new resources and strategies. What’s your next step? Are you taking the family to Disney World?

NO. You get greedy and set up a training program. You can sell your ideas to thousands of earnest “Web marketers” who want to live the dream just like you. You teach them how to create more Websites like the sites that are making money for you. You show them how to find the links you use to build up your authority and make you strong in the SERPs.

And if you can offer a training program, then why not the next dumb schmuck who comes along with these great ideas? Heck, maybe some of your disciples (interns? trainees? students? whatever-you-want-to-call-them) set up their own training courses. You do conference workshops, set up a YouTube or Vimeo channel, provide LOTS of screen captures, and even share analytics reports.

There’s no way Google can reverse engineer what you and thousands of other people are doing, right? After all, you blur out the Website names and you crop identifying information from the analytics reports. … Have I ever told you about Website Spectography? It’s a fascinating topic that only a theorist (or maybe a search engineer) might care about. Here are a couple of examples of Website spectographs:



Do you know what is unique about the above two images? It is that they are unique, or at least relatively unique. If you expand the timeframe for any dataset to a large enough period of time then any Website’s spectograph becomes a unique fingerprint. These are two examples of graphs that training programs share, but they share other kinds of spectral data.

Google may not be matching your spectral data site-for-site, graph-for-graph, but if you think they are not using spectral analysis you’re crazy. They have been using it for years. It’s all part of the machine learning process. You explore the data in every way possible to find helpful signals. You might not recognize some of their spectographic analysis as such but they are finger-printing Websites, publishers, and promotional techniques. They have been doing that for years.

Google Reads Your Forum Discussions Every now and then some wiseguy gets out on a popular forum and starts talking about his service and tools. If you’re selling stuff to people you do need to promote what you sell, and highly skeptical marketers who have been burned before want to know lists of features and details about how you’re not getting caught, not going to get them caught, etc.

The really clever marketers only address specific details in vague language. “We take measures to hide our IP footprint”. Hm. Let me think. How many ways are there to hide an IP footprint? “We moderate all the guest posts”. Hm. How well written is that grammatical-error-laden pitch post?

Put out enough promotional posts, answer enough questions, and yes you do give the search engineers something to search for. How do I know? Because over the years I have tracked down many of these services. If I can do it without all the super-duper futuristic tools at Google then you should be able to imagine how much more the Googlers can do it.

One phrase is all I need to track down 100 Websites. One phrase.

And if you are not out there shooting yourself in the foot, your customers are. You may not be sharing URLs, text examples, screen captures, and other identifying information but someone else is. People cannot keep their mouths shut. They will not keep their mouths shut even if you tell them to.

And woe betide you if you or one of your followers gets on the bad side of some experienced SEO who, like me, knows how to track down and decipher these clues. Maybe your resources are used for negative SEO. Maybe you humiliate and disgrace someone publicly. It doesn’t matter. Once you’re on the “I don’t care what happens to this guy and his customers” list you are toast. Your cleverly hidden resources are handed over to search engineers without a second thought all because you or someone you do business with was a jerk. It happens more than you know or believe.

Google Is Attacking the MENTALITY Of the Spammer

They have even admitted it publicly that they are messing with aggressive Web marketers. You just don’t get it.

The mentality of the spammer is pretty easy to diagnose:

Every Website is about one of two things: links or money (sometimes both)

Every marketing technique is to be exploited to the maximum potential benefit

Every useful tool or resource is to be sold, referred, or otherwise used for financial gain

In other words, there is no restraint, no moderation, no thought or consideration for the consequences of sharing. In the metaphor where Google is the cop listening to the criminals discussing their plans in the diner, the less said the better — and yet these guys can’t stop themselves from gushing over how they have pulled one over the heads of the coppers again.

It’s like Dick Tracy has bugged BigBoy’s headquarters all over again. So enjoy your walnuts now because they won’t last.

Remember, YOU are the spammer. You are a Web marketer, a content marketer, an affiliate marketer. You don’t think of yourself as a “blackhat SEO” (or you do). You just think you’re entitled to make money through any loophole you can find.

The ethics of your choices don’t matter. The point is that you put yourselves in this position by Tweeting about every blog post and marketing resource you like. You created this atmosphere of cat-and-mouse with the search engine because instead of keeping your clever ideas to yourself you jumped onto the “let’s sell this to everyone!” bandwagon and accelerated the pace at which Google collected knowledge about what you are doing.

You have excuses for what you do to yourself. For example, “I’m not the only guy who figured this out. If I don’t sell it now, someone else will.” Sure, but you should NEVER be the first guy to sell the idea. NEVER. The first person to sell a new marketing strategy or resource is a complete moron. Everyone else who jumps in after him is an opportunist.

Just remember that the opportunity will be shorter-lived thanks to whatever moron let the cat out of the bag first.

Meanwhile, private blog networks will never really die. Mostly just the ones that people talk about in public.