A viral SEO podcast says private blog networks still work. The guest's own caveats and Google's link spam policy show who that's true for and who it isn't.
"Sheer PBN, lot of numbers, no traffic, which absolutely works, especially in churn and burn iGaming."
That line comes from an 86-minute episode of Edward Sturm's show, Black Hat SEO in 2026: Why PBNs Still Work (With the Guy Who Owns 200,000 Domains), published September 26, 2026, with close to 10,000 views in its first week. The guest is Kalin Karakehayov, introduced as owning more than 200,000 domains and running about 30,000 websites, joined by Charles Floate and David Quaid.
The headline is the part that gets shared. The qualifier at the end of that quote gets dropped, and it's the bit that decides whether any of this applies to your site.
What the episode claims
We went through the transcript. Stripped of the tangents, the case for PBNs rests on four claims:
Links don't need traffic to pass value. Kalin's view is that PageRank-style value flows through links whether or not anyone visits the linking page. A link with traffic "could maybe help more," he says, but it "may cost 20 times more" than one without, so it becomes a cost-benefit call.
Distance from trusted "seed" sites is what counts. The panel talks about picking domains "very close to the nearest seed" so authority passes through without traffic, and Kalin says his team ran all 200,000 of his domains through harmonic centrality, which he describes as "about proximity to seeds."
Private networks are harder to detect than public link farms. The description lists "why private networks are harder for Google to identify" as a topic. Another panelist adds that the work is still a pain because of anti-footprint setup: many registrars, many hosts, CDNs.
AI made networks cheaper to run. Content, hosting and setup cost less than ever, so building and maintaining a network takes less labor than it did a decade ago.
One disclosure the episode makes itself: Kalin says his company is "by far the largest provider" of SEO domains. The person explaining why aged domains are valuable also sells them. That doesn't make him wrong. It does mean the claim deserves a second source.
The seed idea has a real basis
Proximity to trusted sites is a real concept. Google holds a patent, US9165040B1, "Producing a ranking for pages using distances in a web-link graph", filed in 2006 and granted in 2015. Its abstract describes a system that receives "a set of seed pages," assigns lengths to links, then "computes shortest distances from the set of seed pages to each page" and ranks pages using those distances.
So when someone says proximity to trusted sites matters, they're describing something Google has at least patented. A patent proves an idea was filed, not that it runs in production today, but the logic holds up: a link from a page a few hops from a trusted seed can carry weight even if nobody ever clicks it.
The catch is what that logic implies for a network. If value comes from proximity, then the network domains themselves have to stay close to trusted parts of the web. That's exactly why aged, expired domains with old editorial links are the raw material, and why they keep getting more expensive, a point the episode makes too.
What Google says it does about it
Google's spam policies (last updated August 28, 2026) define link spam as "creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings." A network built to pass PageRank to money sites fits that sentence without needing to be named in the examples list.
The same page defines expired domain abuse as an expired domain "purchased and repurposed primarily to manipulate search rankings by hosting content that provides little to no value to users." That's a fair description of a network site whose only job is to hold a link.
The more useful document is the December 2022 link spam update announcement. Google said SpamBrain "can now detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links," and described the aim as neutralizing unnatural links so the credit they pass is lost.
Put that next to the episode and the two sides are closer than the title suggests. Google's claim is mostly that it detects and zeroes out a lot of network links, not that it penalizes every network. Kalin's claim, as we read it, is that enough of his links pass value for long enough to pay off at volume, not that they're undetectable.
Why "churn and burn" is the whole argument
In churn and burn, the ranking site is disposable. You rank it, take the revenue while it lasts, and when it gets hit you move on to the next one. iGaming affiliate work fits because the payout per ranking is large and the site carries no brand.
Under those conditions, Google's own wording works in the operator's favor. The spam updates documentation says that when systems remove the effect of spammy links, "any ranking benefit the links may have previously generated for your site is lost," and "cannot be regained." If you planned to abandon the site anyway, losing the benefit later is a cost you already priced in.
Now swap in a real business. Your domain is your brand, your customer reviews, your email deliverability, years of earned links. The same sentence becomes the worst case: you pay for network links, they work for a while, SpamBrain neutralizes them, and the rankings they propped up go with them. Google's manual actions report also lists "Unnatural links to your site" as an action for "a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links," which hits a domain you can't replace.
It's the same tactic with the opposite math. To be fair to the episode, the panel says as much if you sit through all 86 minutes; the short clips going around don't.
The cost the episode understates
The panel's own description of the work is the best argument against doing it casually: "100 different registrars, 100 different hosts," CDNs, anti-footprint management, ongoing content. AI lowered the content cost. It didn't lower the cost of keeping a network invisible, and that's the part that fails if you cut corners.
If you're buying PBN links from a vendor instead of running a network, you get none of that control. You don't know how many other buyers share the network, whether its hosting has a footprint, or whether a domain has already been neutralized. We covered how to check placements before paying in our guide to vetting a backlink before you buy it. Most network placements fail the first test in that list: would the page exist if no one paid for the link?
Where this differs from what's already on this blog
We've written about GEO agencies reselling PBN placements as "AI visibility", which is a disclosure problem: buyers not knowing what they bought. This post is about the underlying question, whether the tactic works, and the answer is that it depends almost entirely on whether your site is disposable. For the related expired domain redirect tactic, see our breakdown of dead domains and redirect link building.
What to take from the episode
The seed-distance idea is the most useful thing in the episode, and you don't need a network to act on it. Links from sites that sit close to trusted parts of the web (industry associations, universities, established trade publications, curated niche directories with real editorial review) carry that proximity naturally, and they don't evaporate when SpamBrain gets better.
So before you buy anything labeled "private network," ask one question: if this site lost every ranking it has next month, could you walk away? If yes, you're in the episode's target audience. If no, build the links that don't need to stay hidden. A vetted list of niche-relevant directories, like the ones SerpCrest tracks, is a low-risk place to start building that kind of proximity.
