This post may contain affiliate links so I earn a commission. Please read my disclosure for more info.

updated: Nov 29, 2019. If you’re wondering if PBNs work in 2019, here’s the short answer:

Yes. But it’s not that simple… if you want to check out a video I shot all about my niche site roller coaster (thanks to PBNs), watch this on YouTube.

I heard about Private Blog Networks, or PBNs for short, a while back around the same time that I heard about niche websites. PBNs seemed very exciting and very powerful.

PBNs can also be confusing and slightly complicated to set up for a novice, or even an experienced internet marketer.

There are many moving parts to a PBN and several failure points.

This post will cover the basics of Private Blog Networks. Think of it as PBN 101.

If you’re wondering “Do PBNs work?”

The answer is YES. They definitely work and they work really damn well, too. The thing is this:

You have to build your PBN right. You have to safe about it or you’re going to get penalized by Google.

“Do PBNs work?” The answer is YES. They definitely work and they work really damn well, too.

**One thing you may find interesting is that I’m not selling anything PBN related. I used to – I used to have a network that I sold links on, but I don’t anymore. I used to sell a course on PBNs, but now I just give it away for free on this page. I do mention products below and some of them are affiliate links so I get a small commission. The fact is, I don’t make much from this page so I hope you find the information helpful! Good luck building your network!

We will cover the following:

Definition of a Private Blog Network

Why create a private Blog Network

Why expired domains are authoritative

Finding expired domains

Hosting considerations

Content considerations

How to Test Your Private Blog Network Domain

Outbound linking from Private Blog Networks

Resources

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What is a Private Blog Network or PBN?

A private blog network (PBN ) is a set of domains that you or another individual owns. It is possible to have a PBN consisting of free blogs, like wordpress.com, tumbr.com, or livejournal.com. Typically, the free blog domains do not have as much power as self hosted blogs.

For this conversation, we will consider non-free blog platforms that are self hosted.

In most cases, a PBN is made up from expired domains. An expired domain is a domain that was owned at one time and had content – the website was lived in and the webmaster cared for the site. In fact, the webmaster probably created a nice website that attracted visitors and even had other websites link to the domain. Great!

For whatever reason, the webmaster decided he or she didn’t want to own the domain anymore, and let the domain registration expire. When a domain is no longer registered, anyone can buy it for the normal registration fee, normally about $10 – $15 US dollars.

In contrast, there used to be a few public blog networks (like BuildMyRank and Linkvana) in the pre-Penguin and pre-Panda world. The public networks allowed anyone to buy links or guest posts. In early 2012, Google decided to deindex links from some public blog networks. Deindexing the networks removed any value provided by the backlinks to websites. These public blog networks, were easy to identify and deindex since they were accessible to everyone (hence, the importance of a private blog network).

Why would someone create a PBN?

You control the content and backlinks

A PBN is powerful because you control the content and you control the links within the domain. This means that you can create or alter the content so it relates specifically to your niche. Even more important is that you can create and alter the anchor text that links to your website. (Anchor text is the text that appears as a hyperlink – it’s what you click on to go to another site.)

In addition, an expired domain is likely to pass along a good amount of link juice to any website with a link from it. Link juice can be thought of as ranking power (moz.com reference) – so an expired domain can pass more ranking power than a brand new domain. Why does an expired domain pass more link juice than a brand new domain? Because an expired domain carries more authority.

Why do expired domains have more authority?

There are two main reasons why expired domains pass more link juice. The first and less important reason is that Google places some value on the age of the domain. If you can find an expired domain that has been around since 2008, that domain is generally more authoritative and passes more link juice than a domain created in 2014.

The second and more important reason an expired domain has more link juice is the backlink profile. The backlink profile is the general make up of the backlinks to a domain. Here, we are talking about the backlinks for an expired domain.

It’s worth noting that the backlink profile takes things into account like:

The total number of backlinks. The total number of linking domains. The total number of linking IP addresses. The link location on a post or page. The anchor text of the link. The title tag of the link. If the link is from an image. If the link is in the comments. If the link is do-follow or no-follow.

Ideally, we would want to see a number (more than 10) of natural links from related websites. For example, if the domain was about home improvements, we hope to see many links from home improvement blogs with varying anchor text. It is ideal to see high authority and quality websites linking to the expired domains. Jon Haver, from Authority Website Income, published an excellent guide on analyzing backlinks for an expired domain.

How do you find expired domains?

Finding a high quality expired domain is a long, fairly complicated process. It is not easy. I personally have a few sources that I turn to:

The first is time-consuming but free, while the latter outsources the work (meaning minimal effort by you) but comes at a cost.

expireddomains.net

Expireddomains.net provides lists of dropped domains each day. There are many thousands of domains dropped everyday, however, only a small fraction of the dropped domains are valuable to us as part of a PBN. The problem is that there are many domains with high authority statistics, but they were used for spamming the internet for pharmaceuticals, gambling, or porn. Those domains are of no value to us. Most likely they are not valuable for the spammers, otherwise, they would have kept the domain.

Sign up for a free account with expireddomains.net to get access to the drop lists. There are filters that can help you sort through the large volume. The filters work very well and you can customize your column headings to exactly what you want to see.

As a starting point, I look at domains with a Page Authority (PA) over 25 and Domain Authority (DA) over 20, and I may raise those numbers based on the results. A couple other criteria I might use is at least 20 backlinks and 10 referring domains (called min SEOkicks Domain Pop in the filter).

If I find a potential domain, I will check out its history. I review the backlink profile and the archived pages on the Wayback Machine. For the backlink profile, I use free accounts at Majestic SEO and ahrefs. Normally, a quick glance at the top 10 backlinks gives me a pretty good idea about the history of the domain.

If the backlinks look okay, I head over to archive.org’s Wayback Machine to investigate the archive pages. I typically look at the last instance of the site first – just the home page. If there is not anything suspicious, I will spot check the archived pages over the last several years.

Expireddomains.net is very good for a free service.

The good:

An account is free.

The lists are comprehensive.

It’s possible to find a great domain with high authority.

The bad:

Slight learning curve dealing with filters.

Difficult to review the quality of domains.

The process is time-consuming.

It’s possible to find a domain that looks great but is really a dud.

You could waste hours and not find any domains.

This is a newer service, at least on my radar. I’ve heard excellent things about BB so I decided to check out Bluechip Backlinks.

This is a full service suite of functionality so it’s sorta in another realm than say a broker where they just sell you a domain. And, it’s really a service that helps you build domains after you find them so you have a way to build out PBNs faster. That’s because you don’t have to worry about the content.

What? You don’t have to worry about the content??

Here’s the deal – It’s risky in a way, but Bluechip Backlinks has a way to rebuild sites using the content on Archive.org. It’s brilliant in a way since all the old content is right there for the taking.

The downside is that you are potentially violating some copyrights by doing that…However, the risk is probably low that you will ever be called on that.

The service is owned by Terry Kyle, a veteran in the internet marketing space. He also runs one of the best and fastest hosting companies out there called Traffic Planet. If you’ve looked for fast hosting before, then you probably saw Traffic Planet.

Here is a look on the inside…

So, they want you to be successful with your PBN so there is training available to help you learn about the best way to use your domains.

The domains are listed on your dashboard and you’ll be able to buy them for the cost of registration.

I’m normally thinking about the SEO aspect of PBNs, but there is a big opportunity in domain brokering.

If you can get these domains for the cost of registration, then resell them later…Well, that’s a great business model. That’s not my thing, but it’s working great for some people.

There are thousands of domains that have already been scrapped and you get access to them right away. They are over a Trust Flow of 10 so that’s good enough to be a meaningful backlink.

The Archive.org re-building functionality is the differentiator here. You will be able to get your new PBN domain up and running in no time. Typically, I would spend about $50 – $100 to get original content written for a brand new PBN domain. With just a couple of domains, you’ll be able to pay for your Bluechip Backlinks costs in the form of free content.



Check out bluechip backlinks here

THE GOOD:

You can find domains that no one owns so you only have to pay for the registration (about $10)

There is a way to rebuild a site with the original content so that saves you $100s in content costs.

It runs on the web so it won’t slow down your computer like local scrapping tools. You will have 4 scrapers running at the same time so it’s fast.

Excellent Support

Free PBN Training

You can find a bunch of great domains with high authority.

THE BAD:

Slight learning curve.

It’s fairly expensive but is way more scalable if you use it to sell domains.

PBN HQ

PBN HQ removes all of the issues of finding an expired domain.

I currently use PBN HQ for expired domains as my preferred broker, not expireddomains.net. This is Steve Rendell’s and Doug Stewart’s service and they have developed a great process to find expired domains that are of high authority. Finding these kinds of domains isn’t easy. It takes a long time even if you know that you are doing. The service removes all of the issues of finding an expired domain. At PBN HQ, they have been building PBN’s for years and have been selling domains for almost as long. They have expertise that most people don’t have because they process millions of domains daily with their in-house tools and only the best pass the strict 7-stage-spam-checking-process. Luckily you can save a LOT of time because PBN HQ checks: Ahrefs back-links

Majestic linking root domains

The languages of the links

Archived titles

Ensure common spammed words are not used ANYWHERE. Those (few) domains that do get through this automated stage then have the archive history manually checked by a spam checking team. If they like what they see they get promoted to a final check. This final check is done by Doug Stewart (one of the founders) who personally looks over every single domain to ensure it meets the standards before it gets put in the marketplace. They can sell at a lower price than competitors because they have re-invested every single penny into making the process as automated and as streamlined as possible. Check out PBN HQ – you won’t be disappointed – and with domains being added every single day, you’ll be able to build out your on niche PBN without breaking the bank. – you won’t be disappointed – and with domains being added every single day, you’ll be able to build out your on niche PBN without breaking the bank. The good: The time investment is minimal.

You have no risk – there is a 100% money-back guarantee .

. The domain should have great authority.

The service eliminates the need for you to review the backlinks and the Wayback Machine Archives. The bad: It costs more than if you find the domain on your own. Please note that the cost is WAY cheaper than if you tried to buy a domain at an auction. This is the only drawback and it really is a bargain at this price.

Hammerhead Domains (I am an affiliate for this service.) Hammerhead Domains crawls the web for high-authority expired domains and provides filtered lists of these unregistered domains for free. This is your best option if you can’t afford to purchase 10 or 20 domains from a broker, but don’t want to spend the time it would take to find them on expireddomains.net. The domains are not all spam-free so you will have to check domains for spam, but they’ve developed some special filters so you don’t waste much time looking through the lists of obviously spammed domains. Josh, the creator of Hammerhead Domains, did a free in-depth tutorial on spam checking, called How to Get Cheap PBN Domains that Actually Help You Rank. Sign up for a free account and you’ll get access to a list of 10 domains/day. The free account is the perfect way to get started on PBNs on the cheap.

You can absolutely build your entire PBN from their free list, and never pay a dime except for registering the domain names. But the free list limits you to maximum DA19 domains, which aren’t particularly powerful. It isn’t a deal breaker, but depending on your niche you may need stronger domains.

Just like the old google PageRank metric, DA is calculated on a logarithmic scale, which is a fancy way of saying that DA30 is not just 33% more powerful than DA20, but 1000% more powerful, or 10 times as powerful. Don’t get too caught up in the details of this calculation, because all of this is just an estimation of whatever metrics Google uses internally. The point is that your time is much better spent building a smaller number of high DA backlinks rather than a larger number of low DA backlinks.

Hammerhead Domains offers a Pro membership for $19/month that gets you access to a lot more domains each day, including DA20+ domains. A big perk of the Pro membership is that from the day you subscribe any domains which aren’t registered on the day they’re released, get added to your Vault, and after a while, you’ll build up thousands of domains in your Vault.

As it’s not a very expensive membership – I just let it go, and then whenever I want to expand my PBN, I’ll search the Vault for domains in my Niche.

Niche relevancy matters

As Google continues to find new ways to understand how natural link patterns work, having PBN domains that are relevant to your niche can be a huge advantage.

One more product that Hammerhead Domains offers is Topical Domain Lists. As a free or a Pro member, you can get a list of 50 domains with Majestic Topical Trust in your niche for $97. Just like the daily lists, not all these domains are spam-free, but they will replace your list if you can’t register at least 3. And most of the time people are registering 5-15 domains from the list.

(Topical Lists were on sale at the time of taking this screenshot. Usually $97) This is the best option if you need niche domains right now, and don’t want to spend time patrolling the daily lists or waiting for your Vault to build up. It also gives you access to domains that haven’t been released yet on the daily lists. As I said, I am an affiliate with Hammerhead Domains so I get a commission if you make a purchase there. It won’t cost you any extra! And, I certainly appreciate the support. Sign up for a free account here. Good: An account is free. And an upgraded account is very cheap, especially when you consider the price of buying just one domain from a broker or at auction.

Lists are significantly filtered, which will save you a ton of time compared to expireddomains.net or running your own crawling software.

Relatively easy to find great domains with high authority, as well as domains in your niche.

You can build up a large list of domains in your vault, and have access to a big list of unregistered high-authority domains any time.

Perfect for agencies since you can build out a HUGE network. Bad: You still have to spam check the domains yourself

The monthly fee can add up if you are not generating revenue on your money site. Another Option – Done for You Private Blog Network Service:

I have not personally used this service but Authority Website Income and Rank Source offer this completely hands off private blog network service where they find a domain, register it, create content, and build a site. This is one potential option to get the benefits of a private blog network without the hassle of finding domains, getting different hosting accounts for each and building out the sites! There is normally a waitlist.

Want an existing network?? If you want to buy an existing network, let me know. I hear from people looking to sell every now and then so I’d be happy to connect people. Just send me an email.

(Just getting started making money online? Read up on how to build Affiliate Sites using the Amazon Associate program.)

Tips and Tricks

Here are a few things to keep in mind with Private Blog Networks.

IP Addresses and Hosting

Make sure the domains in your PBN have different IP addresses. Why? If domains are on the same IP address, there is a chance that the same person owns the domains. To Google, this might indicate some level of collusion for backlinks. The most important role of the IP addresses is to reduce the footprint of the network. Basically, you want to set up your IP addresses to minimize the possibility that Google (or anyone else) will discover your PBN .

Each of your domains on a PBN need to be on separate C Block IP Addresses. What does that mean? IP addresses have 4 “blocks” – A, B, C, and D.

AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD

You want your PBN domains to have different numbers for the “CCC” set of the IP address. (Reference: This is a nice explanation about C Blocks by AJ Kohn.)

These IP addresses are on the same C Block and this is NOT good for a PBN:

50.18.104.27

50.18.104.180

50.18.104.219

These IP addresses are on different C Blocks and this is good for a PBN:

50.18.101.27

50.18.48.180

50.18.204.219

Why are separate C Block IP addresses important? The IP address reveals a footprint or evidence of the network. Imagine that someone is manually reviewing your money site and its backlink profile. It will be very easy to identify a PBN if there are 15 valuable links to your money site from 15 domains all on the same C Block. That many links from one C Block is a little strange and not very likely naturally. However, if you have 15 valuable links to your money from 15 domains on 14 different C Block IP Addresses, that is far more believable and will not raise any red flags during a manual review.

Who Owns The IP Addresses?

If you’re using a HostNine account, then all of the IP addresses will be owned by HostNine – and that doesn’t look very natural. Ideally, you’ll want to obtain IP addresses from different providers, and ideally, popular ones chosen by individuals when they’re starting out online – think BlueHost, HostGator, InMotion, A Small Orange, etc.

You can use this tool to find out who owns an IP address and make sure that your network is hosted by a number of different providers.

Separate C Block IP Addresses are Essential

Obtaining separate C Block IP addresses was the most challenging part of creating my own PBN and I still struggle with this issue. There are SEO hosting services that happily provide separate C Block IP addresses.

But guess what – those are not the best idea because most, if not all, of the people with domains hosted with an SEO hosting company have PBN domains there. That means that Google could detect a large number of questionable backlinks from a variety of domains all in sets of C Blocks, one of which may be yours. It may be unlikely, but Google does have the resources to figure out the network of an SEO hosting company.

What should you do for hosting?

Some legitimate, non-SEO hosting companies offer up reseller hosting accounts that allow you to use separate C Block IP addresses.

Bulk Buy Hosting

Bulk Buy Hosting have carefully considered the issues faced by other SEO hosting providers and implemented strict rules and limits to the number of PBN sites that they will host on each server in order to keep your network safe.

They use reseller accounts from large, popular providers including BlueHost’s Reseller Club, A Small Orange, HostGator, InMotion and more, so that your sites blend in with other genuine websites hosted by small, individual webmasters.

CloudBoss

This is a newer service that does a great job making hosting PBNs easier. CloudBoss takes advantage of cloud hosting options on dozens of platforms.

The result is a platform that allows you to “Get UNIQUE IPs With NON-Shared Accounts On The Largest Cloud Platforms In The World, ALREADY hosting MILLIONS of REAL Websites”. Terry Kyle was doing such a great job that I became an affiliate for CloudBoss. If you buy through my link, I really appreciate it.

CloudBoss uses platforms such as Amazon EC2 and S3, RedHat OpenShift (uses Amazon servers), IBM Softlayer, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, Joyent & Linode to host the websites of your PBN.

Most people don’t use those platforms to host websites since it’s damn complex and technical. It’s more likely that you’ll see an application run on those platforms.

Using CloudBoss, you can set up very cheap PBN hosting for about $0.15 per month for a very low traffic SEO/PBN site. That’s on Amazon S3 – used by many large companies. The set up can be fairly complex, but if you’re planning on a bigger network CloudBoss can save you a chunk of cash.

Easy Blog Networks

Easy Blog Networks is a PBN hosting service that installs blogs with 1-click on random servers hosted by big brand hosting providers like Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, Softlayer, and others.

The system automatically updates WordPress, plugins, and themes while maintaining daily blog backups.

EBN has a history of low deindexation rate, on par with premium cPanel hosts, proved by independent case studies.

It’s a better solution than SEO hosting because it uses default IPs and nameservers given from other hosting providers (so when your blog is hosted at Rackspace, you’ll be using Rackspace’s nameservers), therefore lacking any footprints. There are also no issues with “bad neighborhoods” because you host only with the best hosting providers.

Easy Blog Networks is one the best, easiest and safest way to host your PBNs. Check out the Black Friday Sale.

Super Cheap Hosting

Another solution is to find small hosting companies that are cheap, like $1-2 per month. A potential downside to using a small hosting company is having to install WordPress manually. Yeah, that’s right…some hosting companies do not have 1-click install for WordPress in 2014. I recommend you do your homework on these smaller hosting companies before signing up. In a post by Matt Diggity, he revealed that a lot of these small $1-2 per month hosts are filled with PBNs and that you should use premium hosting providers instead.

I do NOT recommend IX Hosting. They offer the ability to get 15 unique IP addresses with an Unlimited Pro account at a very reasonable price. However, I have 2 main issues with IX:

First – It is really hard to get unique C Block IP Addresses. They seem to have a small number of C Block available and they assign them sequentially. This means that if you have five expired domains ready to go and try to add them to your hosting account at IX, you could end up with all five domains on the same C Block. In addition, the IP addresses would probably be in order, like 50.18.20.180, 50.18.20.181 … 50.18.20.184. This defeats the purpose of having “unique” IP addresses and could expose your PBN.

Second – 1-click WordPress installation is very hard to find. (It’s in the hosting admin panel under EasyApps Collection.) Once you find the script to install it, the WordPress instance is placed in http://yourdomainhere.com/wordpress. This is frustrating and not ideal because you want to have the domain at http://yourdomainhere.com/. This is not easy to fix for most people and is only a “fairly easy” thing to fix if you have experience moving WordPress from another folder, installing WordPress, or you know your way around phpMyAdmin. I’ve spent a few hours trying to figure out how to do this thanks to the poor implementation of 1-click install at IX Hosting.

The Content and Theme

Post Unique Content & Use a Unique Theme

The content needs to stand up on its own to a manual review. The content needs to be original and not published anywhere else. It is unlikely to have a manual review on your website by someone at Google but it is possible. Ideally, the new content is well written and fits in with the previous topic of the website. The articles should look natural. That means it is probably good to have posts published over a period of time – don’t publish all the articles on the same day. That’s an easy fix in WordPress since you can edit the publish date.

Do not use the previous content from the site. You could technically see the content from the old webmaster on archive.org. However, respect the copyrights of the previous owner and create unique content. Copyright infringement is a whole different topic so I’ll leave it at that.

I recommend 5 articles at a minimum for each domain. Again, the goal is to have a natural looking website that appears to be updated regularly. If you can get 10 articles posted, even better. I like to use free, royalty free images from morguefile.com or find related youtube videos to post. If the video owner allows sharing the video then you can post it on your site since it links back to the youtube page.

There should be a unique “About” page that discusses the purpose of the website or an “About Me” page that discusses the publisher. Feel free to come up with an alter ego for each site.

Speaking of varied and normal – the themes should also be unique across your domains. I never use a paid theme and my method is to search for a theme in the WordPress theme dashboard. It’s best to find simple themes that allow the full text of posts to display on the home page. Stay away from complicated themes that have a bunch of options to set up – your time is better spent elsewhere. Keep the theme simple, clean, and free.

Finally, when it comes to the plugins that you use on your PBN sites, you should randomize them to try and avoid footprints in the HTML code of your sites. You can use the free Plugin Picker tool to randomize between popular themes and functionality like contact forms, sitemaps, SEO plugins and more.

How to Test Your Private Blog Network Domain

Let’s imagine you did all this hard work:

Found a domain with SUPER metrics Installed WP Published a bunch of content Added a link to your money site

And the result was that your rankings tanked. It would be terrible! All that wasted effort and money down the drain.

You can see that testing your network, one domain at a time is a great idea. It should take about a week to do the test and it’s well worth the time. I didn’t test domains back when I had a big network, but I wish I did. This technique is from Diggity Marketing – Thanks to Matt!

First off, even if you look at backlink crawlers you won’t know all the links behind a domain. You just can’t – Google goes deep, way deeper into the web than any 3rd party tool. So even if you do check all the backlinks in Majestic & Ahrefs, you can’t really know.

Here is the process:

Find a 3rd party website in your niche. It needs to be some other website so you don’t mess up your own site. We also don’t want to hurt anyone’s income so… Find a keyword term that is ranking on page 2 for the site in step 1. You don’t want to impact anyone’s income – that would be a jerk move! So find some term that’s on page 2. The keyword’s exact match anchor text has never been used. You want to find a keyword phrase that’s going to be sensitive to a link with exact match anchor text. Something ranking well (i.e. top 20) fits the bill. You should use Majestic and Ahrefs site explorers to make sure the anchor text hasn’t been used. Other Related Keywords should be on Page 2 also. This ensures that Google likes the site. Your test wouldn’t work if you picked a site that was in bad shape already.

Find the keywords using SEMrush – any other way would be difficult and frustrating.

The theory is that an exact match anchor text link will impact the ranking for that term and related terms.

That is only if the PBN domain is clean.

Once you place the link using the exact match anchor text, you should wait about 7 days and check the SERPs. And you should be using a tool like SERP Lab.

If the rankings improve, then you have a healthy, authoritative domain. Add it to your network!

If the rankings get worse, then you should remove the link. If the rankings move back up after a week, then you have a bad domain. Keep that out of your network.

It’s a simple and effective test. The testing ensures that you aren’t shooting yourself in the foot with a bad domain.

Outbound links are the reason that you even started this PBN, so let’s discuss them. You want to have links from an authoritative expired domain pointing to your money site. However, you have to use the links judiciously and exercise caution throughout the process.

You should not link out to your money sites in all the articles.

There should only be one article pointing to a money site. You don’t want to have a domain with five articles that all point to your money site because it doesn’t look natural. If you are a gambler, then you could link from one more article, for a total of two articles linking to your money site. There are diminishing returns on backlinks from one domain so it really isn’t that advantageous to link from more than one article and could potentially expose your PBN.

Each of your articles should also have 2 – 3 other outbound links to authoritative, non-competitive web pages. This is really important because these links provide context about the article and Google takes note that your money site is linked alongside authoritative web pages.

A few examples for the non-competitive outbound links would be Wikipedia, New York Times, Washington Post, or NPR. Other links on the page will also help the website look normal to a manual reviewer. I also occasionally link to a random blog related to the article’s topic. Just make sure that the random blog is not a direct competitor to your site.

Conclusion

As you can see, a PBN, when set up properly, is a valuable tool for your niche site. Setting up a PBN takes time, money and effort, but the trade-off is it allows you to control the content and links to your niche site.

Advantages High Authority Backlinks to Your Money Site

Control the Content Around Backlinks

Control the Anchor Text of the Backlinks

Can Alter the Content or Anchor Text at Anytime Disadvantages Difficult To Find Expired Domains

Must Host On Separate C Block IP Addresses

Must Have Original, Unique Content

Must Manage Several Other Websites

Must Pay For More Hosting Accounts

This section was posted originally at “How to Reduce Risk For Private Blog Networks (PBNs)” “Are PBNs still effective?” I get emails all the time about whether Private Blog Networks are still effective. Since the fall of 2014 when PBNs were hit hard, there has been a great deal of fear about the risk involved in a PBN. The answer is yes, PBNs are still effective even in 2019. But you can’t ignore the inherent risk involved. It is against the Google terms of service (TOS) so Google has the right to remove your site from their index if you don’t play by the rules. However, I explain my thoughts on PBNs here: General Guidelines Keep these ideas in mind when planning a network, building out a network, using a network, and so on. Don’t use a domain that was used for spam or any obvious link building in the past.

Make sure the website has the look and feel of a real website… Use a nice looking theme. You should have an About Page. You should have a Privacy Page. You should have five or more posts, and more posts are better. It is ideal to have a new post published regularly, like weekly, biweekly, or monthly.

Don’t register the domain on Google Tools, like Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics. If you find that you must for some reason, then make sure you use a unique account. Do not use the same account as your money site. Refer back to the deindexing post if you need a reminder. Reduce Your Risk These are the gotchas that may cause issues, and they are less obvious than the points above. Limit the number of money sites that you link to. The ideal situation is to link to one – yes, only ONE – money site. If your goal is to reduce risk, this will keep you far out of harm’s way. I don’t know the algorithm that led to the deindexing (and I doubt anyone does outside of Google) but I will speculate that it was related to this point. The major issues in September of 2014 centered around public networks where each domain had a LOT of outbound links to money sites.

The ideal situation is to link to one – yes, only ONE – money site. If your goal is to reduce risk, this will keep you far out of harm’s way. I don’t know the algorithm that led to the deindexing (and I doubt anyone does outside of Google) but I will speculate that it was related to this point. The major issues in September of 2014 centered around networks where each domain had a LOT of outbound links to money sites. Do not share your network . It is tempting to leverage your network with a friend or two, but the risk is great. The draw is that you can double, triple, or more the number of links you can get by working together. However, it conflicts directly with the previous point, limit the number of money sites that you link to.

. It is tempting to leverage your network with a friend or two, but the risk is great. The draw is that you can double, triple, or more the number of links you can get by working together. However, it conflicts directly with the previous point, limit the number of money sites that you link to. Limit the number of PBN domains linking to your money site. The illustration should make this clear. You want to limit the entry points from your network to your money site. A great way to do this is to set up a tiered network. If there are issues, then you can disavow a small number of links. It generally looks less suspicious, too. The downside is that your money site will have fewer backlinks. However, when you set up the tiered network you can recapture the link juice. Example of a Tiered Network I will try not to over-explain this since a picture is worth a 1,000 words. The keys are: The number of PBN domains linking to your site are limited

If you have to disavow links, you know exactly which 3 domains are in question.

You can funnel the link juice from all of you domains to the exact post the you are targeting.

You can build relevancy by using a HOTH package on the lower tiered domains.

Setting up a PBN is one of my main priorities these days. What about you? Do you have a PBN already?

If you read this whole article, you must be interested in PBNs! That’s awesome and I want you to do two things:

Leave a comment below telling me about your PBN goals. Do you have a friend that you think would be interested in learning about PBNs? Share this post with them.