Oct 22, 2026, 10:23 PM@amy @mhoye *also the initial one is usually an admin, at which point they're one badly configured spf record (and/or missing dmarc) away from getting spoofed+phished, and both of those records are, again, public. you dont generally have to look very far to find a site with shoddy spf/dmarc either., though big mail providers recently *requiring* dmarc to be configured actually helped quite a lot there.
Oct 22, 2026, 10:38 PM@amy @mhoye also the venn diagram of PBN sites on expired+revived domains and badly configured wp sites is basically a circle.
*for everyone else: pbn sites are "personal blog network" sites which is an seo trick where you find an expired site like davestyreshop.com who were popular & well ranked but then dave retired/died/went bust & his domain expired but all the backlinks he accrued over his 20 years in business still exist. you use yandex & some other tools i forget the name of to find domains like that in the first place & also all the existing backlinks and then set up a new site with pages to match those old backlinks so they dont 404. you then scatter links thru that site to yourtyreshop.com (which you're actually trying to promote) & reap the benefit of Dave's 20 years of link building. repeat 3-5x for plenty of organic traffic (albeit relatively low quality, & imho it's better to just write good original content rather than resort to shitty tricks)
Oct 22, 2026, 11:03 PMOct 22, 2026, 11:07 PMOct 23, 2026, 12:32 AMOct 23, 2026, 12:36 AM