How to Find PBN Links: Identify a PBN by the Footprints That Matter

At a glance

• To find PBN links, pull a site’s referring domains in Ahrefs, Majestic or Semrush, then look for something unique that several linking sites share.
• Shared analytics or ad IDs, the same WHOIS owner or SOA email, unique shared nameservers and the same IPs are the footprints that tie sites to one owner.
• Low authority, low traffic, WHOIS privacy and a cheap theme are true of countless legitimate small sites, so they prove nothing on their own.
• “Hidden backlinks” means two things: links hidden on the page, and links hidden from backlink tools by blocking their crawlers.
• A well-built PBN has no definitive tell, so treat what you find as evidence, not proof.

That shared, unique thing is a footprint. Our PBN guide sorts footprints into three kinds: harmful ones that are unique to one owner’s blogs, neutral ones that look unnatural but tie nothing together, and common ones shared with thousands of other sites. Detection means finding the first kind.

One honest caveat before you start. If a PBN is built well, there is no reliable way to tell its blogs from any other site. Everything below catches networks that were built carelessly, which is still a lot of them.

(If you need the basics first, see what a PBN is.)

Why look for PBN links at all

Three kinds of people run this check:

• An SEO doing competitor research. If a competitor with similar pages outranks you, their backlinks usually explain why.
• An agency client who wants to know what their SEO vendor built.
• A PBN owner auditing their own network the way someone hunting for it would.

It is also worth checking your own backlinks. Your site may be linked from someone’s network without your knowledge.

Step 1: Pull the backlink profile

Start with the referring domains of the site you’re checking. Use Ahrefs, Majestic or Semrush. Each crawls the web on its own, so their lists differ, and using two catches more. For the mechanics, see how to check the backlinks of a website.

Then build a shortlist:

1. Sort referring domains by authority (DR, Trust Flow or Authority Score).
2. Keep the ones with strong metrics but thin, generic content, especially blogs on domains with a history under a different subject.
3. Note which of them link with exact-match commercial anchors.
4. Check whether the same small group of domains also links to the site’s competitors or to other unrelated commercial sites.

A shortlist of 10 to 30 domains is enough. You’re now looking for what they have in common.

Step 2: Check the footprints that matter

Run each check across the whole shortlist. A single site with any of these means nothing. The same unique value on several linking sites is the finding.

Footprint	How to check	Conclusive?
Same Google Analytics, AdSense or Search Console ID	View the page source and search for the tracking or publisher ID. Compare across sites.	Yes. One ID means one account.
Outbound links only to the same few sites	Read several posts on each blog. List where they link.	Strong, when the blogs link to nothing else.
Same WHOIS owner	Look up each domain with ICANN Lookup.	Yes, when the owner is shown.
Same SOA “hostmaster” email	Query the DNS SOA record of each domain. cPanel often puts the account email there.	Yes.
Unique shared nameservers	Query the NS records. Compare against what the hosting provider normally uses.	Yes, when the nameservers belong to one small SEO host.
Same IP, or IPs in one block	Resolve each domain to its IP.	Strong when several thin sites share one IP. Weaker for large providers.
Real IP leaking behind Cloudflare	Look for subdomains or mail records that resolve to the origin server.	Yes, when the leaked IPs match.
Same server headers or default server pages	Request each site’s headers and an unused hostname on its IP.	Supporting evidence.
Domains registered on the same day	Check registration dates in WHOIS.	Supporting evidence.

A few notes on reading the results.

Analytics and ad IDs are the cleanest evidence. They sit in the page source, they are unique to an account, and anyone can search for them. That is why our guide tells PBN owners never to use them.

Shared IPs give away poorly built networks: a group of low-quality sites linking to the same money site from one IP is the classic tell. A shared IP on a big cloud provider says much less, because that provider hosts a huge number of unrelated sites. The same reasoning applies to the network that owns the IP, which we cover in ASN footprints.

Nameservers are a common giveaway for networks on old-style SEO hosting, where every blog uses the host’s own custom nameservers. More in nameserver footprints.

Cloudflare doesn’t hide as much as owners think. When we researched it, misconfigured setups often leaked the real server IP through records left in the zone file. The details are in real IPs leaking behind Cloudflare. Server responses can also match across sites, as covered in server header footprints.

Signals that prove nothing on their own

These show up in every detection checklist. On their own, each describes a large share of the small sites on the internet.

• Low Domain Authority or Domain Rating. Most small sites have low scores. Many PBN blogs are bought for their high scores.
• Low traffic. Most blogs get little search traffic. A PBN blog doesn’t need any to pass a link.
• WHOIS privacy. Our guide notes that since GDPR, most registrars offer privacy for free. A hidden record is the default, not a sign of hiding.
• A cheap or common theme. Popular themes are on thousands of sites.
• WordPress. It is the most popular CMS. Its presence tells you nothing.
• An expired domain with a new subject. Suspicious, but plenty of legitimate sites are built on bought domains.

These are fine for deciding which sites to look at first. They don’t connect one site to another, and connection is what makes a network.

Hidden backlinks: two different things

“Hidden backlinks” gets used for two unrelated problems.

Links hidden on the page

These are links a visitor can’t see but a crawler can. Google’s spam policies define hidden text or link abuse as “placing content on a page in a way solely to manipulate search engines and not to be easily viewable by human visitors,” with examples such as “Using CSS to position text off-screen,” “Setting the font size or opacity to 0” and “Hiding a link by only linking one small character (for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph)” (Google Search Central, fetched 2026-10-28).

To find them, open the page source of a suspicious linking page and search for your domain or the target domain. Compare what’s in the HTML with what’s visible. A link that sits in the HTML but not on screen is hidden. This is a spam tactic, not a PBN technique, and a well-run PBN has no reason to hide its links from visitors.

Links hidden from backlink tools

Some PBN owners block the crawlers of backlink tools so the tools never see the links. Ahrefs, for example, says its crawler AhrefsBot “strictly respect[s] robots.txt” and can be blocked with a User-agent: AhrefsBot and Disallow rule (Ahrefs, fetched 2026-10-28). Do that on every blog in a network, and the links to the money site don’t appear in that tool.

What you can still do:

• Compare tools. A link that shows up in Majestic but not Ahrefs, or the reverse, may come from a site that blocks one crawler.
• Read the linking site’s own robots.txt (domain.com/robots.txt). A small blog that blocks backlink-tool crawlers by name is unusual.
• Check the pages directly. A blocked crawler doesn’t stop you from opening the blog and reading where its posts link.
• Use what Google shows you. If it’s your own site, the Links report in Google Search Console shows a sample of the links Google has found, whatever third-party tools see. Google’s help page says it “isn’t a comprehensive list” (fetched 2026-10-28).

Blocking crawlers can also become a footprint of its own, if every blog in a network uses the same unusual robots.txt.

Checking links your SEO vendor built

How can you tell if your SEO company is using a PBN? Run the same checklist on the links they built.

1. Ask for the list of links they placed, with the linking URLs. A vendor who won’t share it is the first red flag.
2. Pull your own backlinks and filter to the period they worked on. Compare against their list.
3. Shortlist the linking domains and run the Step 2 table across them.
4. Check who else those domains link to. If the same blogs link to many unrelated commercial sites, it is a link-selling network, and your site is one of its clients.

Red flags to watch for:

• Blogs with strong metrics and thin, generic posts.
• Posts that link to unrelated businesses.
• Matching IDs, nameservers or IPs across sites.
• Links that appear in bulk over a few days.

The same check applies when you buy a site. A seller may not mention that its rankings depend on a network it plans to keep.

What to do with what you find

Use it to understand the competition. If a competitor ranks on PBN links, you know what you’re up against, and that content alone may not close the gap.

Don’t copy a public network. If you found it, others can, and buying links on it puts your site on the same client list. Our view is that you build your own network and never sell links on it.

Don’t disavow by reflex. If your site hasn’t been hit by a penalty or a clear drop, links from a network you didn’t build usually don’t need action. We cover when backlinks can hurt you in can backlinks hurt your site.

Your own network has to pass this checklist

Turn the table around: this is the audit anyone can run on your blogs. PBN footprints explains which ones matter and why.

Easy Blog Networks handles the hosting side of it. Each blog gets a unique IP, and the IP and nameservers come from the hosting provider itself, shared with that provider’s other customers. Each blog is installed with a random theme, different plugins and a randomized admin username. The parts only you control, such as tracking codes, outbound links and WHOIS, are still yours to get right.

FAQ

How do I know if a site has a PBN?

Pull its referring domains, shortlist the strong but thin ones, and look for a unique value they share: an analytics ID, a WHOIS owner, an SOA email, nameservers or IPs. Several sites sharing one is a network.

How do you find PBN links for free?

Free tiers of backlink tools show a sample of a site’s links. Page source, DNS lookups and ICANN Lookup are free, and they cover most of the Step 2 table.

Can Google find a PBN that I can’t?

Google sees far more of the web than any backlink tool, and its crawler isn’t blocked the way backlink-tool crawlers can be. Assume it finds anything in the table above.

Is a link from a PBN always bad for my site?

No. A link you didn’t ask for, from a network you don’t control, usually does nothing either way.