A PBN is cheap because nobody is reading it. The page went live last month, the domain was dropped twice, and the only visitor is the crawler you hoped would care. It photographs well. It does not last.
An insertion sits on a page that already ranks. The editor already had a reason to keep the URL up. You are adding a sentence, not inventing a site.
What “aged” actually means
We brief pages with history and traffic — not a site that launched last quarter. The URL has to earn a place in the report on its own. If the only story is “we got a link,” the brief is wrong.
The page has history. The link is not a one-week experiment.
How we keep it honest
- Candidate pages with age, traffic, and relevance notes
- Insertion copy that belongs in the paragraph, not the footer
- Your sign-off before the edit goes live
- Index check in the pack you forward as your own
If a client ever asks “is this a network?”, the answer has to be no — and you have to be able to prove it without rewriting a line.
