THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
Reece Howden earned his second straight second-place finish at the FIS Ski Cross World Cup in Gällivare, Sweden, the final stop of the 2025-26 campaign.
Simone Deromedis and Edoardo Zorzi, both from Italy, finished first and third, respectively.
Howden had seen Deromedis take the lead at the start of the big final. After managing to catch up in the final turns of the course, a photo finish was needed to separate the two skiers, with the Italian narrowly edging out Howden.
Among the other Canadians in contention, Jared Schmidt won the small final to finish in fifth while Kristofor Mahler finished 21st.
Howden thus finishes the 2025-26 season with the Crystal Globe, securing first place in the overall standings with a 311-point lead over runner-up Deromedis.
In the women’s competition, Hannah Schmidt finished sixth after placing second in the small final. Marielle Thompson finished in 14th place.
The day before, Howden had also finished second, this time behind David Mobaerg of Sweden, achieving back-to-back podiums.
For her part, Hannah Schmidt also made it onto the podium, taking third place.
It was a brilliant season for Howden, who scored six wins in addition to adding four other podium finishes in the 16 World Cup races of the season.
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.