It’s been extremely shocking to me that so many people have been saying that Private Blog Networks (PBN’s) were not specifically targeted by Google. Of course they always base it on their own experience which is a poor way to judge anything.

They think because their sites were not smacked and they have hundreds or even thousands of backlinks on PBN’s that the people who got spanked were doing something else that was “really wrong”.

I personally spent over 50 hours doing in-depth research on this and the only single factor I could find among sites that were penalized was PBN’s. Of course Google is never going to get anything 100% right. Some sites were hit that had never built a single link on a PBN, at least not themselves anyway.

But I knew sooner or later, some real proof would come out. Well it came directly from the horses mouth. Matt Cutts (head of Google’s web spam team) recently posted on his own twitter account that PBN’s specifically are on Google’s radar. Here is the post.

He even went so far as to link to a forum which pointed out that ALN lost over 5,297 domains in a single week! You can read the thread here.

So what does this mean? Is writing high quality articles and publishing them on article directories dead too? Continue reading »