I'm a newbie SEO and recently looked at the backlinks of competitors' websites. Found that most of them are this kind of domains that have nothing when you click on them, but use png as the referencing domain, curious how it's done? Is it bought?
It sounds like you stumbled upon some potentially sketchy backlink practices! Those empty domains might be part of a backlink strategy where sites buy or create low-quality links to boost their SEO.
Are they visible images or transparent 1x1 images? It sounds like the kind of thing we used to do 20 years ago and that Google has long been penalising.
Thank you all so much! I may have gotten it. I don't see these images displayed on the site, but the image link opens at 768*768. If Google would be penalizing, why does his site still have a high DA score and a lot of Organic Traffic. Really can't understand the mechanism of Google SEO
Those are usually not “PNG backlinks” in the way you’re thinking. What most tools show as a PNG referring domain is often just an image file hosted somewhere that’s being hotlinked or cached by a CDN, image proxy, scraper, or spam site. When you click it and see nothing useful, that’s normal. They’re rarely bought as a strategy anymore, Google mostly ignores this kind of noise. High DA and traffic usually come from other links and signals, not these images. Also DA is a third party metric, it doesn’t reflect how Google actually evaluates the site, so don’t use it to judge penalties or risk.