One of the great benefits for those working behind the scenes at Human Proof Designs is we have access to a lot of data due to the many sites we work on and services we offer. Two of those services are our one-time and monthly PBN links.
For as long as the concept of a PBN came to existence, they have always been a polarizing topic. One of the most highly debated issues has been whether they even work or not.
While theorizing is fun, the best way to really get some kind of answer on this is to look at a few sites using them and see whether or not there have been any results.
So, without further ado, here are three sites and their rankings results from using PBN links.
(Note: URLs have been removed to protect the site owners).
Site #1
The first site we’re looking at was built by us here at HPD. It’s everything you would expect a starter affiliate site to be.
When the owner decided to give HPD Links a try the site had little very minimal off-page work done. Here is what it looked like as far as ranking keywords are concerned.
As you can see, the on-page alone did get some keywords popping without any off-page help. But, it wasn’t getting any real organic traffic at this point.
The owner opted to subscribe to a monthly HPD Links program of five links per month. They did almost no other link building aside from that.
Six months later and we see a very different picture.
While on-page improvements and adding more content of course can help, the links really kicked this into a site that was a hobby to a site that can actually make some real earnings.
Site 2
This next site is also an HPD built site. It was nicely designed and had some really nice content within a niche that is not the easiest.
From the start, it showed a little promise with a handful of keywords popping up in the top 100, though none of them were high enough to pull in much traffic.
As far as link building, before joining the HPD monthly links program, it only had a few nofollow blog comment links. That’s when the owner decided to give the PBN links a try (five links a month).
As they progressed month over month, they saw slow but steady gains. The owner also focused their efforts only on new content and on-site changes while leaving the link building to us.
Six months later, and here’s what they have to show for it.
Their total number of keywords in the top 100 jumped tenfold, and their traffic went from almost nothing to over 1000 unique organic hits a month and growing.
This site has so much potential it’s not even funny.
Site 3
This final site is a little different than the first two. It usually takes a solid four or five months for traffic to really start to ramp up from the five links per month service. But, as anyone that’s worked in SEO for a while knows, no one site is the same.
Here’s another affiliate site. It had very minor off-page work done before joining the monthly service. You can see it really wasn’t gaining much traction.
There were hardly any keywords showing in the top 100 and there was absolutely no organic traffic coming in. But, that quickly changed.
This site reacted very well to the PBN links and after only three short months, the rankings and traffic were very different.
What’s great about this is that the site owner started to see a very fast ROI on their link building efforts, which in SEO usually takes a lot longer.
Then, their traffic more than doubled from month three to month four.
That’s some seriously nice return on investment right there.
In Summary
All three of the sites above have two main things in common – they all were receiving the same amount of links per month (5), and they all stayed with the program for several months. That sustained approach to link building really paid off.
They also didn’t have much link building done before joining and they did little to no link building while using the HPD monthly links program. That helped keep the data fairly clean.
So, do PBN links still work? What do you think?
Lastly, the main idea behind this case study was to use some of the massive amounts of data we have available to us at Human Proof Designs and see if there’s anything we can learn to help both our business and our much-appreciated customers. We only grow by helping you grow.
