A PBN (Private Blog Network) is a group of sites that any person or entity controls. The reason why each PBN is setup is so that the person who controls them, can drop backlinks on them at will that point to a money site in order to push the rankings of the money site.
The money site is your main site, that you want to rank higher in Google. All the private sites you control fully that push SEO juice to it are your PBNs. They can be wordpress based sites or even third party hosted Web2.0 sites - as long as they are private they're safe. Although they are called "blogs" they don't technically have to be "blogs".
A true Private Blog Network consists of a network of sites that are collectively known only to the owners / creators and not shared in any public forum, whatsoever. The moment the owner of a PBN starts selling links on his PBN sites to people and shares these with them, its really no more a Private Blog Network - because the network is "exposed". Also, many rampant links sellers on so called PBNs are leaving gaping holes for Google to discover their PBNs as they leave common OBL link patterns from multiple clients. BEWARE!
Are there any risks involved in building a PBN?
You've probably heard this a thousand times before, but I'll go ahead and say it again...
Google is against any form of deliberate link building that is done for the purposes of gaining rankings... the algorithm (and shareholders) want to see natural links only.
Doing SEO with PBNs is core BlackHat.
You wont know how and what happened. So, its in your best interest to understand the theory that goes behind building a secure and powerful PBN in totality. If you're gonna be doing any SEO that is based on PBNs you need to know the theory.
Are PBNs still effective for SEO?
PBNs are very effective because, if done right they can rank sites very effectively. The benefits of building a PBN in the correct way, far outweigh the risks involved - which is why they are so popular while doing SEO. However, most people go about building their PBNs in the wrong manner.
PBNs are still going very strong and Google can do little about it, because its algorithm still gives a lot of power to links as a ranking metric.
All you need to do is build links pointing to your money site from authority domains that look exactly like real sites and are in-fact no different than them.
The most critical thing to remember while setting up a PBN is to ensure that you do not leave any common footprint across all the sites in your PBN, so that Google can detect that they all belong to one entity.
If you leave a common footprint, you stand a high risk on having all your PBN sites de-indexed and therefore become worthless in the SEO link juice they can pass down the sites you link to from them.
Buying Domains for Your PBN
The core component of a PBN is acquiring a Domain that already has an ability to pass link juice to other sites, and that is not a spam domain (more on how you can do this later on).
The domain can be acquired from an Auction, or purchased as an Expired Domain or you can simply buy an authority website from marketplaces like Flippa. If you have a small collection of domains that are catching dust and have age and authority - you could even resurrect and use them.
However, you need to be careful not to leave certain footprints for Google to identify them as being all part of a PBN.
Any domain that you choose to setup as part of your PBN, needs to have certain signals and metrics as a whole that make it something worth going after.
Some of the metrics to look in a PBN Domain are…
Clean and strong backlink profile (my number one criteria)
Domain Age
Majestic Trust Flow
Citation Flow (with minimal TF/CF ratio that I will discuss later)
Clean content when seen historically in Archive.org (WayBackMachine)
Good Moz DA (although this can be games so be careful)
PageRank (I tend to not look at this)
The cheapest way to acquire these metrics is by identifying an Expired Domain, but this can be tedious and get tricky at times.
When you setup your Domain on your PBN, then all you need to do is channel the incoming link juice to its pages forward to your money site page(s). You may do this using multiple ways including simple links, image links, or using 301 redirects (internal and external).
I’ll talk more about this later on in the guide.
Once you build your own Private Blog Network that you control, you will have all sorts of SEO super-powers!
You will be able to use the power of your PBNs to rank and bank at will.You can use it for your own sites, clients sites or even setup a Public Blog network on sites like Blackhatworld and sell services and packs of PBN links (although I don’t recommend this as it may leave obvious footprints for Google to discover your PBN as more and more orders come in).
Planning Your PBN Ahead of Time
When you build out your PBN you will first need to decide if each PBN site will be niche specific or a more general site that can have links going out to multiple niche money sites. Its always best to keep these PBNs separate. They each have their power.
Its always best to split up your network into parallel networks that are independent of one another. That way it doesn’t hurt you if one networks gets detected.
A niche specific site network will have a lot of relevancy in the link juice that is passes down to your money, but these are probably harder to find. They will have a lot of "topical trust flow" and can help your money site gain a lot of link juice.
A larger general purpose PBN site network may not pass down relevancy but if it has high authority metrics overall - it will pass down a lot of domain authority and trust to the money site. Its best to mix and match both types of links, and this is what Google also sees as natural, as that is exactly what happens naturally in the web of the Internet.
The number of PBN sites you need and the power from each site, depends on your niche and the competition. You will need to study the top ranking sites in the SERPs and see their backlinks. Although they could be hiding their PBN links, you can use some clever Google queries to unearth their real PBN. Once you have a better picture of the power of their PBN links, you can build out a similar powered PBN or one that is more powerful.
Make sure you follow step by step and the most important tip I can give you is to not do anything foolish in a hurry that could get your PBN detected by Google.
For instance, if you’re seeing ranking gains, DO NOT ... ever ever ever ... speed up things and blast a ton of PBN links to your site in a quick quest to get to the top overnight!
SEO is now a slow and steady game, and Google takes time to give each backlink its due link juice.
The link velocity that you get exclusively from your PBNs again depends on what other link building activity you are doing... and moreso, what historical link velocity your site has. Getting a couple of links every week, may be fine in some niches - but not good in others.
What does is cost to build your own PBN?
There are various factors that go into setting up each site in your PBN and manage your entire PBN. I will cover each in depth in this guide, but very briefly, here are the associated costs for each.
Domain Acquisition
You can acquire domains via different methods and therefore their are different associated costs. If you buy domains via an auction it could set you back by $50 to $300 or more. If you purchase a domain / site on Flippa you could spend a lot more. Again, what domain you need depends on your niche, current SEO, the competition and you overall SEO strategy.
The cheapest option is to buy expired domains. These are domains that the original owner did not renew and is up for grabs. This will set you back only around $10 (the cost of registering a new domain).
But, to find domains that have authority and the ability to pass down raking power to your money site is a task that requires a good eye and fair amount of experience in evaluating SEO potential.
Web Hosting
Always get premium CPanel Shared Hosting or Cloud Hosting. If you get CPanel shared hosting be prepared to pay around $3 to $5 per site per month at a decent web hosting company. It gets cheaper if you put more sites onto the same account on the same IP (but be careful not to link out from 2 different PBN sites on the same IP to the same money site - as that's a deadly footprint for Google to net your PBN).
Also, do not buy $1 cheap hosts, because all their IPs have bad websites hosted on them and your PBN site will get a "bad neighborhood" reputation. This can lead to de-indexation by Google.
Site Setup (design, installation, backend)
The cost of this varies. You can do this in-house or hire a team of VAs to get it done for you. You may need to spend money on acquiring premium themes and plugins, should you want to give your PBN sites an extra oomph. On an average expect to pay around $50 to $70 per site setup.
Content
Many PBN builders skim this part thinking its not too very important. However, with all the recent algorithm updates content plays a major role.
Make sure you hire good writers and expect to pay them $4 to $5 per 500 words of on-site content, and never use spun content on your PBNs because that's what will get them de-indexed real fast.
PBN Management
When you build out a large network of PBNs you need to make sure that you setup a system to manage them efficiently without opening any holes for Google to spy into your PBN sites list.
I use dropbox and excel to store my list of PBNs and I never use Chrome when I visit the sites directly.
How many PBN sites do you need?
This is a very common question. The answer depends obviously on what you are trying to rank, and how much damage you are planning to do.
If your money site is in a small niche a small network of 8 to 10 PBN sites with basic ranking power (TF15+ and clean domains) should be good enough to push you high up in the SERPs.
If you find one domain with TF 35+ then that one single site can be as powerful as 5 smaller sites. But, then you pay more for it and you will need to really build it up with a lot more content.
Also, you get one link with one single anchor variation from it.Its best to diversify and get links from multiple PBN sites that have starter metrics that are decent and that will give you a more variety in your anchor link profile.
Isolating Your PBNs Safely
While building out links to your client niche sites or your affiliate sites make sure you never link out to the same site from the same IP.
So, if you have 5 sites hosted on one IP shared hosting service, never link to the same single money site from 2 different PBN sites on this hosting account / shared IP.
To minimize the money you spend on hosting your PBN sites, you can simply put different niche specific sites on each shared hosting IP account.
Finding Quality Domains with good SEO Ranking Power
Finding a good domain to be part of your PBN is the very foundation of building a solid PBN. There is no point in building a PBN with weak domains that cannot pass on any ranking power to your money site!You can acquire domains through a variety of methods.
You may buy a domain at an auction, you may buy a domain on a site like Flippa or you can grab an expired domain. You will need to make sure that the domain you acquire has good SEO metrics and is clean (that is - no spam content in the past or spammy links pointing to it). You will also need to check a multitude of domain metrics for each domain ensuring that it meets your minimum set standards based on the price you are going to be paying for the domain.
Here are important metrics you need to check
While examining the metrics of a potential domain that you want to buy for your PBN, you need to ensure that the domain does not smell of "spam". This means that it should not have been abused leaving some obvious footprints.
Amongst other things the domains historical content should not contain spam or junk in it and the backlinks to the Domain should resemble real natural backlinks.
Here are some of the core items you will need to scan each potential domain for...
What are the metrics for the best / topmost links… PageRank, TF, DA?
How real and genuine are these top pages with good metrics that are linking to the domain?
What kind of backlinks does the domain have?
Are they mostly spam backlinks or do they look like genuine high quality / decent links?
Are they mostly blog comments?
Are they ******** or Nofollow?
How many are still alive or are most of them deleted?
How fast were the links built?
Tools To Help You With Domain Checks and Audits
Here are some of the tools and metrics in detail that you can use to do your domain audits. Make sure you don't rule out buying the domain just because one metric is low. Having one low metric can offset your decision if another metric is really high. Of course, if the single metric is a spam metric which is a clear indication of a spam domain - then just move on and evaluate the next domain without wasting much of your time.
Majestic - Trust Flow and Citation Flow
Majestic
is a web crawler that very much works a bit like the older Google algorithm. The two important metrics it gives us about a domain are its Trsut Flow (TF) and Citation FLow (CF). Of the two, the TF is more important as the higher the TF the more trusted and clean links a domain has. The CF is basically the sum of all the backlinks without taking into account the power of each. So, a site with low TF and high CF could very easily qualify to be a spammy site because it has a large number of links (high CF) coming from very low trusted sites (TF).
I always look for the TF/CF ratio to be more than 1.10 .. that means the TF should always be higher than the CF no matter what. The exception to this rule is if the TF is say around TF25+ in which case the CF can be a bit higher than that - but not very much higher.
Moz - Domain Authority and Page Authority
Ahrefs
has by far the largest crawler base, which is why we use it to measure the number of referring domains as compared to any of the other above tools. The minimum number of unique domains you want linking to your potential PBN domain is around 15 to 20 or more. However, in many cases even a few links is fine (if they are super niche specific or eprhaps there are 2 strong links from an Authority Domain like CNN or Wikipedia).
Checking Backlink Quality of a Domain
I use Majestic to check the topical relevance of each backlink to my potential PBN domain. I also use Ahrefs to quickly visit each page that is linking to the potential PBN, and do a quick check on the type of page it is. I only check the most authority links and then quickly check the lower authority links as well. With more practice you will be able to analyze how powerful the backlink profile is for each PBN domain.
Checking a Domain for Spam
Checking a domain's history for bad or spammy content and checking its backlink profile for spammy links is the most critical metric. Its the very first thing I check when I do my domain audits. There is absolutely no value in buying a domain that was abused in the past as it will not help you rank, and can affect your site negatively.
You are looking closely for any signs of pharma, chinese text, porn, or any other things hat look like spam. Any domains that looked like they were part of a PBN in the past should also be avoided.Here are the tools I use to check this..
Archive.org Way Back Machine
Using Web Archive (also known as the WayBackMachine) tool you can jump to any historical snapshot of the domain in the past. While looking at these snapshots in time, you need to check to see if the site has basically the same content (redesigned sites are ok as long as content does not keep changing as that could be a sign of the domain having already been used as a PBN). Look out for chinese content on the sites, as a clear indicator of a spam domain that may have been part of a PBN. Other foreign language sites may be OK to have. Sites having history of 301s are also not good.
Screeshots.com
Sometimes, Web.Archive.org does not have any historical snapshot, and if I can't find anything I quickly check the domain content history using screenshots.com
Ahrefs
Use the anchor text cloud and history checks in Ahrefs to get a quick look at the anchor texts that appear in the backlinks to the site. Too many money keywords or a single repeating keyword could mean an over-optimized SEO profile and a penalized site.
Checking for "Anchor Text Spam"
You can look at Ahrefs Anchor Text Cloud to quickly look at the anchors that are pointing to the domain.
Essentially, you are looking for anchors that do not look like spam or bad SEO. More branded anchors that resemble the sites name are good, and so are natural anchors with normal generic words like "click here", "visit us" etc.
Too many money anchor texts are a clear indication of SEO and could be a sign of spam / over-optimization or a penalty and a reason why the domain was dropped. Anchors that contain names of pharma, or things like NFL Jerseys etc are also a sign of spam. You are looking for a anchor cloud with naturally looking anchors.
These three checks should be the first thing you look at. You want to weed out a bad PBN domain and save spending any more time looking at the other metrics, which is why you check these right at the start. If it does not pass a spam check - there is no point doing any more research on the domain.
Again, you are looking closely for any signs of pharma, chinese text, porn, or any other things hat look like spam or were part of a PBN in the past.
TIP If you come across domains that have no history snapshots in Archive.org or screenshots.com then look at its anchor profile in Afrehs as a benchmark.
The Domain Age Factor
When a domain is dropped and is not renewed, it does not lose all its SEO power. After all it still has the incoming links. If you renew the domain, you can sculpt the incoming links to pass on link juice to your money sites. You gain all the old link juice power this domain had, as Google re-looks at the power it gives this domain.
However, an auction domain that has not been dropped and stays alive is known to retain a lot more power and SEO juice -but these come at a heft price and may not be necessary to obtain in most cases.
In a recent Google Hangouts, Gary Illyes from Google has said that they are working to devalue all the SEO juice a dropped domain passes on, if its re-purchased after being dropped. That is not via an Auction, but once it "drops" or "expires" and is deleted from the registry. This is a very significant statement, and affirms that Auction Domains are still powerful, but expired domains could be on their way out (and probably are already).
Types of inbound Links to the PBN Domain
There are all types of links that you will see while you examine the link profiles of a potential PBN domain.
Blog Comments - These are good if they stick and are from relevant niche sites. They may not be as powerful as the other backlinks but they are valuable.
Forum Profile Links - These are highly toxic and a large quantity of these is a clear indication that some spam tool for run to build backlinks to this domain.
Directory Links - As long as they are from niche or local directories these are mostly good. They can help if you are trying to build a local money site.
Sitewide Footer and Sidebar Links - These are mostly low quality. If a site has too many of these, consider dropping it unless the other metrics are good.
Image Links - these are gold, if they have proper alt text and the image is above the fold.
Contextual Links - these are the best kinds of links out there. Specially if they come from relevant sites.
Domain Metrics vs Backlinks
Many times, I come across a potential PBN domain with low metrics that reflect in the tools but some very powerful backlinks. I always go ahead and register these, because I know that Google is looking at strong backlinks and that the metrics that I look at are metrics that are from that provider and not Google.
Organizing Your Potentials
When you find a good domain simply open up a text file or spreadsheet and start adding the domains into it based on your analysis.
You can split up the notes into 3 sections as below, and your notes may look something like this…
Organizing Your Potential Domain Finds
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