Yep, there’s certainly no easy answer. And you only have one shot at experimenting before you “kill” your real identity 🙂

It’s standard practice and quite effective – I’m surprised they haven’t taken action before. However – a few days ago – they have and in a big way.

I think Google can tell who the author of something is by also using the metadata (rel publisher, author) mostly. However, in the case of a PBN – there’s no way to know who the author is. As for SEO – author is supposedly gaining weight but … how much? It’s not the kind of thing that has an easy answer.

One thing I’m wondering about is whether Google can also link content to their authoring entities. E.g. can Google discover whether:

1. An author has written this AND that content (e.g. blog, Stack Overflow, etc.)
2. An author belongs to this OR that bigger entity (e.g. employer)

Some information is obviously known to Google via OAuth (i.e. “login with Google”), but I’m sure there are other means to discover author identities.

Well, we’re not talking about Moz or Ahrefs – these may indeed be blocked. Google however has the whole picture – since the Google crawler is not blocked – and so they can perform the analysis with full accuracy. Cheers,
Eugen.

Hey Neale – yeah, I do think it’s not very difficult to analyze a site and figure out if it’s using a PBN or not once you start with the full link graph. That being said, it’s a very risky strategy for an authority site you’re aiming to grow into a real asset. If you’re growing a niche site that you don’t have big plans for, the risk is probably acceptable. Cheers,
Eugen.