I will forever support the growing trend of AAA publishers letting indie studios take a stab at dormant IP, and Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is maybe the most exciting example yet. But the whole thing is pretty unexpected for developer Evil Empire – the studio was pretty sure Castlevania owner Konami wasn’t even going to get on board with its original idea for Dead Cells DLC.
Dead Cells developer Motion Twin spun off a separate company, Evil Empire, to help build DLC for the action roguelike. Given the obvious inspirations Dead Cells takes from Metroidvania titles like Symphony of the Night, the 2023 Return to Castlevania DLC seemed like a natural fit – at least, from an outside perspective. The devs themselves were a lot more nervous about the pitch, though.
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PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
