How Dishonest Websites Use Fake Backlinks

A common way for a company to gain an edge over competitors in terms of its website's placement on Google's search results pages is to research the kinds of external websites that are maintaining valuable backlinks to the competitors' own websites. Backlinks are one of the most important factors that Google and other search engines take into account when they assign placement ranks to whatever websites their crawlers happen to come across and index. Since there is value in studying competitors' backlinks for information about what would compel an industry's demographics to discuss, promote, and ultimately link to a particular website, websites' owners routinely use crawlers of their own to gather this data from their competitors' domains. This is not commonly regarded as a "black hat" SEO tactic. What is widely derided as a black hat tactic, however, is when a website's owner creates various other websites that exist primarily to host "quality" backlinks pointing to it. These external websites are collectively referred to as a private blog network. Search engines that catch wind of this scheme are inclined to punish the offending website because backlinks are supposed to represent the active interest a website is organically eliciting on account of its presumed relevant content. However, it is often difficult for search engines to detect when a website is employing a private blog network because its owner usually takes measures to hide this. If the owner of the network hosts the other websites on expired domains and makes the right adjustments to their robots.txt files, backlink-crawling utilities can end up reporting to users that the website seemingly has no backlinks whatsoever. This primarily works to deceive search engines' algorithms, but human SEO workers can apply more flexible reasoning to estimate whether a website is actually hiding a set of fabricated backlinks. Some SEO experts create their own utilities that can allegedly assemble data about a website that would indicate whether a PBN is at work behind the scenes, but there is debate about whether an adequately thorough picture can be formed purely through blocked links. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/au740r/feedbackonmyhiddenpbnfindingtool_please/.