Last Updated: 1st February 2019
In this guide we are going deep inside the world of private blog networks.
Starting from the absolute basics, we’ll be guiding you through how to setup, manage, and use a PBN in 2019.
With 8,000 words of step-by-step training, even intermediate to advanced SEOs will learn something new.
Let’s begin…
Don’t fancy all this work? Have my agency rank your sites for you, read the case studies.
Contents
- 1 What is a PBN?
- 2 Is it against Google’s guidelines?
- 3 Does it work?
- 4 Why does it work?
- 5 An Introduction to Metrics
- 6 Where To Find Domains
- 7 Finding Hosting For The Domain
- 8 Setting Up The Website
- 9 Creating Content For Your Website
- 10 Site Structuring
- 11 Linking To Your Money Site
- 12 Advanced Clustering
- 13 Alternative Solutions
What is a PBN?
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a network of authoritative websites used to build links to your money website(s) for the purpose of ranking higher in the Google search engine.
A money website is the website you intend on ranking i.e. the one that actually makes money. This can also refer to a clients website.
In its most basic structure, the finished result appears like this:
PBNS stands for ‘PBN Site’, referring to a website that is part of your private blog network.
One very important detail here is that each of the individual PBN sites are not linked to each other in any way. The idea of a private blog network is that the websites appear unrelated to each other, therefore natural links, as opposed to someone linking to their own website from their other websites.
Is it against Google’s guidelines?
Absolutely.
The only time Google are going to tell you exactly how to rank is when they are advising you to use AdWords. But for ranking within the organic results, they are the worst source for information.
And I would do the exact same if I were in their position. Why tell you how to rank for free, when you make over $40 billion per year from ad revenue.
Does it work?
Take a look at these headlines from September, 2014:
If it didn’t work, I’m sure Google wouldn’t be attempting to target them and scare people away from the strategy.
And yes, this was little more than a scare tactic, people are still building networks and ranking as easily as ever.
Why does it work?
Links are the most important ranking factor.
It turns out that backlinks, even though there’s some noise and certainly a lot of spam, for the most part are still a really really big win in terms of quality of search results.
That is a quote from Matt Cutts, when asked about excluding backlink relevancy from the algorithm.
What makes this strategy effective is the websites that form a PBN are regarded by Google as authoritative. You are not receiving links from some brand new website, nor a spammy untrustworthy one, you are receiving links from a popular website Google’s algorithm loves.
To understand how this works, here is a figurative example…
An initiative was launched in 2011 to help clean up the streets in Chicago. They had a website setup under cleanchicagostreets.com.
The initiative received a lot of publicity, they were featured on their local governments website and local news websites.
They raised enough publicity and money to follow through their plan. And they did, all within a year.
Now their website is no longer needed, and has become a pointless cost to renew the hosting and domain. So they leave it to expire.
This is a domain that has links from local government websites and local news websites. And because it has links from these highly trustworthy sites, Google also presumes this website is trustworthy.
Fast forward to today, an SEO finds this domain, can look up the metrics to see how trustworthy and authoritative it is regarded, then purchase it from any domain registrar to use for their PBN.
That is in essence, how domains are found.
Between 30,000 – 50,000 domains expire every day, many of which will have good ‘metrics’ for a PBN.
An Introduction to Metrics
There are 4 main metrics to use for measuring domains. You can use all of them at once, but often times 1 or 2 is enough.
These are…
DA – Domain Authority by Moz.com
PA – Page Authority by Moz.com
TF – Trust Flow by Majestic.com
CF – Citation Flow by Majestic.com
I’m not technical enough to know exactly how these all work, but here are the basics…
DA measures how authoritative the whole domain is, based on the links to it.
PA measure how authoritative a single page on the website is, based on the links to it. This is also influenced by the DA of the website.
TF measures the trustworthiness and authority of the websites links.
CF measures how powerful the links to the website are.
Here is a quick reference guide on what to look for:
DA – 18+
TF – 13+
CF – 15+
I have bought domains weaker than this on numerous occasions, but this is the general guideline I try to follow. Don’t worry about following it exactly.
These metrics represent the power of the domain you are looking at, but there are a few more things to check before purchasing it…
Referring Domains – A metric that shows the number of websites that link to the domain you are looking up. Anything above 30 is good enough here.
Backlinks – This is the number of links the website has. If a single website links to the domain 3 times, then it’s 3 backlinks but only 1 referring domain. Make sure you check these before purchasing a domain.
Anchor Text – This is the text people use when linking to the website. Look to see if they contain a brand name (which is normal), and avoid ones that are: heavily keyword targeted, have big brand names that are often associated with selling of fake goods, and other obvious things like viagra or adult themed.
Metrics Checking Tools:
OpenSiteExplorer – Check DA & PABulk DA Checker – Check DA in BulkMajestic – Check TF, CF, Referring Domains, Backlinks, and Anchor Texts- Ahrefs – Largest index of live backlinks aka most reliable (Recommended)
I highly recommend you get yourself an Ahrefs account, sign up for a 7-day trial here.
The only metrics that matter in 2019
Trust Flow is BS? Domain Authority is BS? These have been the trending comments in our community for a while now, but who do you believe?
The answer is:
The only thing that matters is what Google thinks. Not Majestic, Moz, Ahrefs, or anyone else.
From the moment Google announced they “have no plans to do further updates” to PageRank, there’s been no way of knowing exactly how Google measures a domains quality.
That is where the above metrics come into play. They’re not perfect, but they’re third party algorithms for measuring domain quality, based on their theories of what Google finds important.
Sometimes they’re inaccurate. Other times they’re a great analysis.
The most important thing is that you manually check the backlinks. If the backlinks are from an automated link building tool, chinese anchor texts, thousands of blog comments, mostly directory listings, etc. Then it’s a bad domain.
To take this further, here’s a breakdown of metric checking in 2016:
- Do the metrics pass your requirements?
- (If no) Are any of the links from super authority domains?Some times these can be worth purchasing anyway i.e. BBC.co.uk links
- (If yes) Are the backlinks spam or low quality?
- (If no) Does the Wayback Machine show it was used for spam?
The Wayback Machine allows us to see exactly how the website used to look in the past, so we can verify if it was ever used for spam in the past.
Where To Find Domains
Knowing what to look for in domains is only part of the game, next you need to know where to find the domains.
Before we cover that, you need to understand the types of domains to find.
Expired VS Expiring Domains
Expired Domain – A domain that fully dropped and is available to register from any registrar at standard domain registration costs.
Expiring Domain – A domain that reached its expiration date but was held onto by the registrar for auctioning / selling. These domains retain their age i.e. if they previous owner registered it 5 years ago, it remains a domain registered for 5 years.
There is no conclusive data as to which type of domain is better. Some people believe expiring domains provide more power, but many of those with this are biased by the fact that they’re selling expiring domains.
All I can tell you for certain is that both types work. You are however much more likely to get an expiring domain with high metrics, than an expired, but you’ll also pay for that privilege too.
As for finding domains, there are a number of strategies for this:
- Find a broker – Easy
- Scraping – No longer viable
- Auctions – Time Consuming and Easy
- Backordering – Time Consuming and Advanced
Option 1 – Finding a Broker
Here is a list of brokers websites you can buy from 1 at a time or in bulk.
Please note that I have not used all of these brokers, but I have at least heard good things from others about all of them.
- PureQualityDomains
- HighPADomains
- TBSolutions
- Join the Lion Zeal Marketplace for a 4,000+ person FB group for buying / selling SEO stuff
Option 2 – Using Auction Websites
Before scraping was popular, most people would buy domains from auctions. These are expiring domains, they keep their age because the registrar is selling it off after they owner failed to renew it.
You can usually find more powerful domains on auctions than from scraping because the dropped (expired) ones are picked up fast by your competition – if not already bought in the auction stages. The downside to auctions is that you pay extra to get first pick.
Some auction sites you can look at are:
- NameJet – Potential to find high quality options
- GoDaddy Auctions – Used to be THE place to buy PBN domains
- NameCheap Auctions – Thousands available in the marketplace
Option 3 – Backordering
The final strategy for purchasing domains is probably the most advanced, but it is the best domains you can get for the money they cost.
A backordering service is a company you pay to catch a domain for you as soon as it drops from registration.
We briefly covered earlier that when a domain expires it doesn’t really expire. It’s often kept onto by the registrar, sometimes auctioned or sold, and usually doesn’t drop for around 2 months.
Scraping tools search for very old websites and attempt to buy domains that were missed by people backordering. But with the advent of scraping and selling domains as a business, and with our industry literally purchasing millions of dollars worth of domains per year, it’s very difficult to scrape very high quality domains today.
With backordering however, you can request domains that have expired but not dropped yet through a backorder service. They’ll repeatedly check if the domain can be registered yet, if it can, they’ll attempt to register it for you. This part is called dropcatching.
The success of this ultimately depends on the competition. If everyone is trying to get this domain, you may be out of luck. Also some services are better than others at it.
To increase your chances, you can backorder with multiple services, depending on how badly you want the domain.
If someone else backordered it with the same service, and that service catches it, it’ll go into auction between you and them – which can get pricey.
Here are some backordering services:
Many of the above services will provide you with pending delete lists too, this is a list of domains that are about to drop that you can backorder.
Here are some specific links to help you:
This strategy is listed for the advanced users, it is far from simple. You’ll also need some tools to help check the metrics of all the domains in the lists above to check for quality. If you want to get the best expired domains though, this is the way to do it.
Important Things To Note About When Purchasing Domains
Private is the first word in PBN.
You can’t hide from Google, you need them on your websites to see the links and pass on the power. But you do need to make sure there is no association between these websites. They need to look independently owned.
When buying domains, this means mixing up your domain registrars and registration dates. Do not always buy from the same one. And do not have your name and information in the whois for every domain.
Here are a few domain registrars to try:
- NameCheap
- Internet.bs
- Name
- Dynadot (quick heads up, these guys show your name even if you purchase whois protection)
- GoDaddy (watch out for their expensive renewal fees)
Finding Hosting For The Domain
Now that you have the domain(s) in your possession, you need to setup hosting so you can get your website(s) live.
To avoid Google (or anyone else) knowing you own all the websites, you need to put each of them on different hosting accounts.
If they were all hosted on the exact same server, it would be clear they are all associated with each other.
This need for separating hosting providers sparked the popularity of SEO hosting services.
The problem with “SEO hosts” though, is that most of them have footprints which show they are all the same provider. You can read about hosting footprints here.
The best thing you can do then is to hide in plain sight.
You do that by using popular hosts that real websites would use.
Here are some examples:
- Premium Shared Hosts
- DigitalOcean (technical)
- Amazon Web Services (technical)
- CloudFlare (read my guide)
- Incapsula (read my guide)
Most of these are expensive in comparison to SEO hosts or cheap shared hosts, but it’s worth it for the reduced risk of losing your network.
Thankfully, there is a cheaper option.
My friend Kevin decided to purchase reseller accounts from all the popular shared hosting companies recommended here, and will host your PBN sites on them for a significantly lower rate (starting at only $1.82/m per site).
Learn more about Kevin’s service here
There is a cost associated with setting this all up, and it can be scary for beginners, but the overall ROI from ranking top with multiple sites should easily justify it.
Later in the guide we’ll cover an advanced strategy named clustering. This will allow you to host multiple PBN sites on the same hosting account with zero risk – but only if your hosting plan allows it. So make sure the packages you purchase allow multiple domains and MySQL databases.
For now, just know that the safest way is to only host 1 website per host, and to use high quality hosts.
Setting Up The Website
You have a domain and hosting, now you need to setup the website.
Don’t worry about being a HTML whizz, we are simply going to use WordPress and free WordPress themes.
Most web hosts will make this extremely easy for you by offering the Softaculous auto installer, here is a quick example of how it works…
Login to cPanel (the host should provide you with login details for this) and locate the Softaculous auto installer, it usually looks like this:
Then hit the blue install:
Next you need to choose the protocol, which will be ‘http://www.’ in 90% of cases, and also set the ‘In Directory’ field to blank.
To determine what to look for ‘Choose Protocol’, have a quick look on Majestic.com. Enter the root domain, and then the domain with ‘www.’ in front, to see which one has the highest TF and CF. Quick example…
Without WWW:
With WWW:
The reason there is a difference is, most websites were setup with either one or the other, which is what will receive most of the links – therefore have higher metrics.
Back to the setup… Select the protocol and make sure the ‘In Directory’ field is blank:
Next fill out the site information, I’m sure you don’t need to know how to do this:
That’s about all there is to it, then you simply scroll down and click the ‘Install’ button.
Building websites and installing WordPress has never been easier.
Before you do that though, you need to know what the website will be about. That is called Theming.
This has already been covered in the Future of PBNs post, I’ve just pasted it here to make it easier for you…
Many people starting out ask whether to re-theme a domain or not. This is where you take a domain that was previously about one topic, then change it to be about another.
Site re-theming is a perfectly normal thing to do, and seems to be unaffected throughout Google’s many shots at PBN users so far.
Domains are re-registered all of the time, and tons of brands have random names… maybe LionZeal.com used to be a blog about Lions.
So lets cover a few ways of theming a PBN site…
Option 1. Re-themed Blog
This is what most people do.
It is where you register a domain that used to be about one topic, then change it to a topic more relevant to your money sites.
If you are willing to put a little extra work in, you can step this up a level.
Take for example, you register the domain ‘thecatowner.com’. It used to be about cats, but you need a blog relevant to travel.
Easy. For maximum relevance for the domain and your money site/client, you could create a blog about travelling with a cat.
You can also keep the links relevant. If you were linking to a hotel client, write an article about finding a cat friendly hotel.
Let’s cover a few more examples of this…
- LaFerrari.com – used to be news on Ferrari’s, you need it on internet marketing. Make it a blog about doing internet marketing and your goal to own a Ferrari
- WooDesign.com – used to be a web design agency, you need it on home and garden. Make it a blog by a home design fanatic
- TheDarkSide.com – used to be a Star Wars fan site, you need it on health and fitness. Make it a blog about the dark side of the health and fitness industry
- LaptopBagsNow.com – used to be a site selling laptop bags, you need it on style and fashion. Make it a blog on style and fashion that used to be just a laptop bag style review site, explain this in the about page. You could even “sticky” a post on ‘Laptop Bag Styles for Women’ and another ‘Laptop Bag Styles for Men’.
- SocksAndUnderwear.com – used to sell socks and underwear, you need it on entertainment. Make it a blog on keeping entertained in your socks and underwear aka at home on your own via the internet, TV, etc.
Sometimes this is really hard to do. In which case, you can use these last resorts:
- “I am a really big fan of XYZ and wanted to name my blog after it”
- “I just had this domain lying around from an old XYZ site, and decided to use it for this blog”
This is the most common way of theming a site. The downside is you’re locking it down to one niche, so it becomes difficult to link to others.
There are a few different strategies you can use to overcome this. The first one we’ll cover, is brought to you by Lion Zeal Mastermind member, Johnny Walters:
Option 2. Cityscaping
Cityscaping: The act of building a website around a real city with semi-fictional content.
Say you are setting up a PBN and come across the domain “springfieldmoms.com”. You’re thinking, “that’s stupid, I don’t even have anything going on in springfield, that’ll look fishy on a manual review”. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Sites like these are truly dynamic. There are over 30 cities named “Springfield” in the US. Pick one that suites your purpose and go check out the official city’s website. Perhaps you are targeting something in Massachusetts. In that case, head over to http://www3.springfield-ma.gov/cos/ and get all your content. Your menu and pages might look something like this:
- Home
- About (About Springfield Moms, mission statement whatever)
- Club Officers (Fake names and roles in the club, great place to put some photos)
- Springfield News (Page that just pulls in the actual city’s news feed)
- Event Calendar (Embed the actual city’s event calendar)
- Contact (contact form + small blurb)
And here is an example format of your first 8 posts:
- Blog introduction
- City event from the official calendar (Festival, Farmer’s Market, etc)
- Featured Business of the Month – If your niche is weight loss your featured business of the month might be “Lake View Fitness Center”. The Article could be “5 tips on losing that holiday weight” with your link strategically placed in there.
- Fun facts about the city (wikipedia link)
- City Event from the official calendar (Festival, Farmers Market, whatever)
- Youtube video from that city
- Featured Business of the Month (Repeat formula from the last one)
- Pictures from the last city event
- and so on…
Option 3. Keep the old niche
If the domain you purchased is relevant to your money sites, then perfect, just keep the same niche. But even if it wasn’t, you can still follow this option.
Start by figuring out the niche of the domain.
You can often guess the old niche based on the domain, but there are two other ways of finding it very easily.
The first is the Wayback Machine, a website/tool that saves regular copies of websites, allowing you to “jump back in time” to see what a website used to look like.
You can then look back in time and select any date that comes up, for this example I just picked Jan 1st 2014.
You will now be shown what the website used to look like on that date.
Some times there are issues loading it completely, maybe some images are missing, or the style is messed up, but it shows you exactly what the website used to be about.
The other way is to use Majestic or Ahrefs and look at the websites that link to it. Majestic also has a very useful “Topical Trust Flow” feature:
This tries to figure out the topic or niche of the website, based on the websites that link to it. In this example, we can see it is fairly accurate for the website goodreads.com, with the top 2 topics being libraries and literature.
Some times this isn’t that accurate, and you can look at the top links near the bottom of the page:
You can see that it has links from Amazon, which is relevant, and it even shows the anchor text used to link to the website “goodreads book reviews & recommendations”. Very easy to see what this website is about.
Most of the time it will be quite easy to figure out, if the top links are from travel blogs, it’s most likely a travel relevant site, etc.
Option 4. Local Business site
The 4th option is completely different to traditional PBNs, but why it works so well. This is an easy way to fly under the radar of what most people think of as a PBN site.
What you do is set it up to look like a real local business.
For example:
- Have a business logo
- Add a list of products/services, preferably with images
- Have a contact page for people to get in touch
- Have a local address and phone number for people to contact (make it up)
Do everything a real local business would do.
Then you just “sneak” the links in later from your homepage. Relatively easy to do if you have 500-2,000 words on your homepage.
The downside of this approach is the PBN sites niche needs to be fairly relevant to your money site, since you won’t be able to create a new 500+ word post dedicated to the topic.
Moving on, now you’ve decided on the site theme, and installed WordPress, here is what you need to do next…
WordPress Theme
There are a LOT of free themes available for WP, they’ll be more than sufficient.
The only important thing for this is that they show the full posts on the homepage, not an excerpt. With the exception of the local business site type, since they won’t be showing blog posts on the homepage.
Examples:
We need the full length post to show on the homepage, so our money site links also display on the homepage. This is most often the most powerful page on the website.
Make sure you’re constantly using different themes for each of the websites. Using the same one is another clear footprint that the websites are probably owned by the same person.
Don’t fancy all this work? Have my agency rank your sites for you, read the case studies.
WordPress Plugins
It’s recommended that you install a few different plugins on your website just to make it seem natural. Again, make sure these are not the exact same ones every time.
Part of retaining the linkjuice on the website is by capturing any linkjuice sent to old pages from the previous website.
So if the domain you purchased used to have a page like “example.com/cat-food.html”, and that page has links pointing to it, then you can rebuild it to capture the power of those links.
The safest way of doing this is to manually replace or redirect the pages from the old website.
Here’s how:
Use a tool like Majestic to find the top pages for a domain, like so:
At this point you can either re-create the pages, or use a plugin such as Simple 301 Redirects to manually redirect the page to a similar topic page.
For rebuilding the pages, you can either manually write the content as a “Page” in WordPress, or even directly copy it from the WayBackMachine (as mentioned earlier).
If the URL is “/something/” then use that as the permalink, but if it’s something you can’t normally create with WordPress, such as a “.html” file, then you can use the Custom Permalinks plugin to let you create that.
WordPress Settings
It’s advised that you turn off notifications to websites you link to, this will only annoy you or your clients with the notifications.
This setting is under Settings -> Discussion:
Creating Content For Your Website
This is where most people get lazy and make big mistakes.
The initial content you add will make a huge difference to how legit your website looks and how likely it is to pass manual reviews in the future.
I personally recommend you have a minimum of 2-3 pages and 2-3 posts. The more the better.
This process is called PBN Padding, you are effectively adding content to the website to hide the fact that it’s only setup for link building.
The first step to creating the content is deciding on an author persona. Who is behind this blog?
This gives you consistency in the writing style on a single blog, but mixes them up across all the blogs.
One blog may be written by a backpacker sharing their experiences and travels, another by an association sharing industry news and best practices.
You’ll want to introduce these authors on some type of about page, share their photograph, and tell their story of why they started this blog. Basically what anyone would do if this was a legit site.
Be careful with YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) niches. These include:
- Pages soliciting personal information, such as personal identification numbers, bank account numbers, driver’s license numbers, etc., which could be used for identify theft.
- Pages used for monetary transactions, on which users might give their credit account or bank account information; for example any page that allows you to buy something.
- Pages offering medical or health information that could impact your physical well being.
- Pages offering advice on major life decisions, such as pages on parenting, purchasing a home, a vehicle, etc.
- Pages offering advice on major life issues that could impact your future happiness and finances, such as pages giving legal or financial advice.
- If you have a blog about parenting, or finances for example, make sure you do NOT pretend to be an expert. Otherwise they will start judging your websites credibility, if it has a real address and contact information, if it’s a real author, how reputable the site is, etc.
Instead of pretending you’re an expert in these niches, you want to create these authors/personas as personal experience bloggers, for example:
Kim Jones is a ‘stay at home’ mom of two, Alex & Jessica, living in North Carolina. She loves kids, and created this blog to share her personal experiences with taking care of kids, to hopefully help some newer mom’s that may be struggling.
With this example, Kim isn’t pretending to be highly qualified, an expert at teaching kids, or any of that. She is just a mom sharing what she learnt from bringing up her kids.
Creating Posts
In the past, the method was to quickly write 300 words, include an image, and you’re done.
These days we take it to the next level while actually making it even easier on ourselves. There are now five types of blog posts…
- Infographic Posts
Where you share an infographic, add an introduction, and write a conclusion or summary of what you learned from this - Video Reviews
Where you share a video (or multiple) and summarise / review the videos - Image Gallery
Where you share an image gallery and explain the images - Standard article
500-700 words with image or video - Introduction post
Having that mix of videos, image galleries, and infographics make it much more visually appealing.
Plus they make it even easier to write content, all you need to do is recap an infographic or add your own thoughts to it, much easier than researching and writing a whole new article.
Creating Pages
There are numerous types of pages you can create, niche relevant ones are a good idea, but here are some absolute standard go-to ones if you need:
- About – Write about the website, team, author, or all
- Contact us – Explain why people should contact them and include contact form
- Events / Workshops – For dates put “in 2 weeks” or “this sunday”, explain what the event is about
- Advertising – Have information about advertising on the site and a contact form
- Why we created XYZ – Explain the backstory of why the blog was created
- FAQ – Answer frequently asked questions about the topic / website
- Tips – Have a contact form with information about how to send an article tip in
- Resources – Useful advice, links to useful authority sites/videos, book recommendations
- Privacy Policy / Terms and Conditions
Make sure to mix up how you are naming these though across all your different websites, for example:
Rather than “about” it could be.. About us, About this website, About [sitename], What is this, Who are we.
How To Steal Free Content
As we’re already breaking rules, here’s an unethical (and illegal?) method people are using to get free content for their sites. Use this at your own discretion.
Remember the Wayback Machine we referenced earlier? It’s a great way for determining what the website used to be about.
Well, as well as doing this, you can also completely copy the contents of the previous website [of your domain]. You can do this by completely copying the website, which can be outsourced for a measly $5. Or you can simply copy and paste the content into your blog.
The reason this works is that the content is that the content is no longer being used, therefore not indexed by search engines. This can even pass manual reviews.
Anyway, once you have the content down, you need to do the final touches before it is ready to start linking, this part is called…
Site Structuring
Even with the addition of content, your blog will look very “default”. You need to make it look like a real website someone setup to use.
This breaks down into 3 parts:
- Logo
- Navigation Bar
- Sidebar
You can read how to do all of these step-by-step, in this PBN structuring post.
Linking To Your Money Site
Recap – A money website is the website you intend on ranking i.e. the one that actually makes money. This can also refer to a clients website.
Quick Guidelines
- Create one new blog post to link to each money site
- No more than 2 links per money site
- Do not link to more than 8 money sites
- Try to include around 4 links in total to authority sites
When linking to your money site, you do so within a brand new blog post. This should ideally be 500+ words and be relevant to the money site.
How you determine the content to use for these posts, will be decided by how you themed the website.
If your PBN site is about the same topic as your money site, it is easy… write another post about that topic.
If you followed the cityscaping guide, then you can create a new post like ‘Featured Business Of The Month’.
But if you decided to keep the site in the same niche as it was previously in, and that is different from the niche of your money site, you need to do something called “Niche Matching”.
Say you have 5 domains, that were previously used as a:
- Personal weight loss journal site
- Web designers blog
- Legal advice site
- Financial blog
- Construction related site
And your money site is a weight loss affiliate site. You can create an article that is relevant to both topics on all the sites above, like this:
- Anything related to weight loss since the site is relevant
- Designing a weight loss site
- Be careful when offering weight loss advice
- How to not break the bank when trying to eat more healthy and get in shape
- Turn any room into a home gym without spending a fortune
This is matching the niches.
Try and find some type of commonality between the two niches and write an article about that.
Once you have an idea of what content will be used for the linking, you need to decide how many links you will build, and the anchor text to use.
I recommend doing 1 or 2 links to your money site from a single post.
There will only be a single post for each money site. Meaning from a single PBN site you only link to a single money site 1 or 2 times.
The anchor text is the text you use to link to your money site. This is a very important ranking factor.
The general rule is to use a different anchor text every time you link to your money site, never repeat them unless using the brand name.
(The advanced rule is that it varies dependent on the keyword. Some keywords will have top ranking websites with 30% exact match anchor text, meaning 30% of their links use the exact keyword they’re ranking for as the anchor text. It’s not recommended you copy this, but clearly you have more room for optimising than 1 single use)
You also want to use the keywords, variations of the keywords, and synonyms of the keywords, that you want to rank for, in the anchor texts.
Let’s say we wanted to rank for ‘weight loss’, we would use anchor texts like:
- weight loss
- lose weight
- weight loss site
- how to lose weight
- easy weight loss
- read this weight loss guide
- Learn more about weight loss
- guide to losing weight
- weight loss for women
Each of these would only be used once.
What you are doing here is creating a natural linking pattern, not always using the same anchor text. But while being natural, you are still highly relevant to the keywords you are trying to rank for.
How this differs for exact match domains vs branded domains
An exact match domain (EMD) is where your domain exactly matches the keyword you are trying to rank for. If you were trying to rank for ‘weight loss’ as an example, your domain could be weightloss.com, or weightloss.net.
If you are trying to rank for a keyword with two words or more, and two words or more of that keyword are also in your domain, then you need to be extra careful to avoid over-optimisation.
Let’s make up two theoretical examples to explain what to do for each. Both sites will be trying to rank for the keyword ‘weight loss’.
Example 1 – BestWeightLoss.com
This domain already includes the words weight loss, we need to be extra careful not to over-optimise.
We can’t use the site name “Best Weight Loss” or the domain “BestWeightLoss.com” multiple times in the anchor text because they both include the keyword.
Instead, use longtail and topic relevant anchor texts, like this:
- lose weight guide
- weight loss for beginners
- losing weight
- lost weight
- weight loss blog
As before, use a different anchor text every time. Save the exact “weight loss” anchor text until last, this will give you a final push in your ranking, but it also provides you security from over-optimisation when you have a small number of links.
For links you use for diversification i.e. web 2.0s and social profiles, you will need to use generic and industry relevant anchor texts exclusively because there is no brand name to use, and the URL contains the keyword. These anchor texts could be:
- Read more
- Learn more
- visit website
- read the full article
Example 2 – HealthyJoe.com
This time you have no real risk of over-optimisation, allowing you to start a lot more aggressively with your anchor texts:
- weight loss
- weight loss blog
- lose weight
You’ll still need branded anchor texts, longtail / topical relevant, etc. But you can start more aggressively without the same risk as over-optimising which you would have with an EMD.
When linking to your money site, you should link to the page that you intend on ranking since you want the “juice” or “power” from the link going directly to that page with the relevant anchor text.
As you can include 2 links though, which I do most of the time, you can also include a link to another page on your money site.
Usually this would be the homepage, since the homepage naturally tends to get more links than any other page. If you are trying to rank the homepage though, or after every few links to the homepage – to mix things up, you should link to any other page on the site.
Having other powerful pages on your money site will boost the authority of the whole website, making other pages rank better.
If we had a website about umbrellas for example, say rainblocker3000.com, and we had the page rainblocker3000.com/mens-umbrellas/ which we wanted to rank…
And we had 10 PBN sites in total to build links from, meaning a maximum of 20 links to our site.
With mixing things up every so often, we may have the following links/link counts:
rainblocker3000.com/mens-umbrellas/ – 9rainblocker3000.com – 6rainblocker3000.com/about/ – 2rainblocker3000.com/why-us/ – 2rainblocker3000.com/history/ – 1
With a solid foundation of links on top of this i.e. social profiles, which we will cover in a later guide, your homepage will have more links than any other page – which generally appears more natural.
Once you know which page(s) you will link to, and what anchor text to use for each link, you need to add the link(s) to the article. There are two ways of doing this…
1. Text
The most common strategy which you will use the most.
2. Image
Makes sense for mixing things up every so often.
For a text link, here is how you create a link in WordPress:
After this, all you need to do is figure out how to include it in the most natural appearing way possible. This can be really difficult if you are targeting say local keywords.
You have to learn to just roll with it here, even if it doesn’t sound that great. Here is an example of targeting a local keyword “dog trainers in texas”.
There are many important factors that go into properly training a dog. As the owner of a not-so-well trained dog, I’m probably not the best person to teach you. So I won’t. Instead, I’ve asked a friend of mine, and one of the top dog trainers in texas to go through it with you.
Images on the other hand, are significantly easier. All you need to do is set the alt tag on the image:
Now when you link this image, same as you do for text links, the alt tag will be treated as the anchor text. This is completely invisible to readers, so no issues with out of place anchor texts.
How many different money sites can I link to? 8 is about the max.
You want all of the links to be on the homepage. Most people link to the homepage of a website, so it is where all the link juice and power is, which we will be passing on to our money sites.
The limit of posts on the homepage is 10. After that, they go onto a second page.
If you do not use sticky posts at all, you can link to 10 different money sites, but it’s not advised that every single one of the 10 posts has a link in it, since that’s not natural behaviour for a blog.
Advanced Clustering
Network Clustering
Earlier in this guide, we covered hosting and I briefly mentioned that you could host multiple websites on a single hosting plan with zero risk. This is done with clustering.
This is very professional diagram showing what the opposite of clustering looks like…
You can see that the mixed network just links out to every money site. Not every PBN site will link to every money site, but there will be a linking footprint throughout the network. Example here:
PBNS stands for “Private Blog Network Site”.
If Google found out about the Weight Loss Site, or PBNS1, the entire network could be infiltrated. Like so:
Here is a quick example of clustering. Usually people do it around niches their PBN sites are in. This allows you to get niche relevant backlinks, but there is a flaw..
Once again, the risk here is that if a single money site or PBN site is infiltrated, they may be able to pull apart your whole network.
Instead you should ensure that no money site has links from more than a single cluster. For example:
Using the example above, if you had 25 sites per cluster. If the weight loss site received a full backlink manual review, the worst case scenario is you lose the health cluster – not the others. Same if the health cluster sites were manually reviewed, you could only lose sites part of that cluster.
You can link to as many sites as you like in a single cluster, and you can have as many PBN sites in a single cluster as you like, but this gives you a security pre-caution of not potentially losing your entire network at once.
It also saves you a small fortune. It also allows you to host PBN sites from different clusters on the same hosting account, as they will never link to the same websites.
To put this into perspective, if your average hosting bill is $8 per blog for reputable hosts, but you own 10 different clusters, that brings your bill down to only $0.8 per blog.
If you are just starting out, now is the perfect time to learn about network clusters. Once your network is big enough to rank the money site(s) you are currently working on, you can separate that as one cluster and start building the next.
Remember you can rank up to 8 money sites off of a single PBN site, therefore off of a single cluster, it’s just about eliminating your risk as much as possible.
If you work with high end clients, you can even go as far as creating separate clusters for each individual client. Same goes for if you have affiliate sites that make 4 figures plus per month.
Also a cluster does not need to be niche relevant, that’s just convenient. You can mix this in with any of the site theming methods covered above.
Bot Blocking
A private blog network does not mean private to Google. We need Google on our sites to see the links we create. Instead, the idea of a private network is that it is private to the rest of the world, especially your competition.
The padding and structuring parts of this guide will go a long way with masking your strategy to your competitors, but blocking bots takes this to a whole new level.
If you want to see how your competitor is ranking, you need to look at their links. To do this you will probably use the same tools we covered earlier in this guide (for domain analysis):
Majestic.com, OpenSiteExplorer.org, or Ahrefs.com
But with bot blocking, you can completely hide your PBN sites from showing up in these tools. That means your competitors would have no idea how you are ranking, and never see your PBN sites.
This can be achieved by adding the following code to your htaccess file:
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*exabot.* bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*mj12bot.* bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*dotbot.* bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*gigabot.* bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*ahrefsbot.* bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*sitebot.* bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*spbot.* bad_bot
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=bad_bot
Here is how to do that…
Login to cPanel and click to open the File Manager:
If there is more than one domain on this cPanel account, make sure the correct domain is showing in the dropdown box (I removed it in this screenshot).
Tick ‘Show Hidden Files’. Click Go.
Locate the ‘.htaccess’ file, right click and then ‘Edit’.
Click Edit again to open the editor.
Now above the #BEGIN WordPress line, paste in the whole code from above. Save Changes, and you’re finished 🙂
If Google wanted to, they could still check this. All they would have to do is impersonate the user agent of the bots you block [to see if they are blocked]. I wouldn’t put it past them.
This would only be an indicator after checking other footprints, I doubt they impersonate bots and crawl the entire web to find sites that don’t work.
If you are purely targeting local or other non-competitive keywords (aka little SEO competition), you may even want to allow bots.
For affiliate SEO’s competing on things like ClickBank products – that isn’t an option for you.
Outsourcing and Creating Systems
If you have not realised already, there is a heck of a lot of work involved with building a private blog network. It is however, a long term investment in your business.
One of the big differences from the newbies with less than 50 sites, and the experts with hundreds or even thousands, is the use of tools and systems to leverage their time better.
I’ve already given away the exact tools and systems (inc. Excel sheets) I use in an earlier post, you can access all of them here. I highly recommend reading that post before starting.
Alternative Solutions
If this still sounds too much for you, even with the outsourcing and automation options, there is another more common solution:
Rent links from other peoples blog networks.
That way, you can avoid all the time and costs of building and managing a network, yet still get all the value.
There’s several services that do this, including my own, which you can apply for here.
Please be careful though that the network you’re renting links from is well maintained, otherwise you could be at risk.
Anyway, that’s about all I’ve got for you in this guide. If you enjoyed it and would like more posts like this in the future, leave a comment and let me know, I try to respond to them all.
Don’t fancy all this work? Have my agency rank your sites for you, read the case studies.
Nice one Daryl. Nice one indeed.
The only thing I might add would be correlation between anchor text and target URL. Since it’s not the same anchor text pattern linking out to EMD and branded URL.
Thanks Tibor!
You’re right, I could go much more in depth with this. Will do a small update shortly 🙂
Daryl,
Your post is perfect timing for me. I’m getting ready to launch my SEO agency and this is just what I needed!
Good luck with it Leo! We have some client getting content in the works too, which may help.
Hey Daryl, this is the best pbn guide I’ve read.. I’ve been doing seo for a few months and I wish I had seen this first…
After reading about the canonical issue, I’m a little perplexed as to what i should do since I just realized I have literally done ALL my PBNs wrong.. they should have been http://www and instead I installed them as http://
What can I do to fix this? Am I losing a lot of link juice? Some of them I just set-up and put on hosting and i’m tempted to uninstall and restart a few of them. Any suggestions? Greatly appreciated!
Thanks Jennifer! I wouldn’t worry about it, the www version will get 301 redirected to the non-www version anyway.
In most cases, the www version will have more links, therefore more linkjuice. So it makes sense to set it up with that. The 301 is still there no matter what you do though.
You can easily change it to include www by going to Settings in WP admin, and changing the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) to include it.
Hope that helps 🙂
Thanks, Daryl – extremely helpful post. You just won a new convert 🙂
Did you write the update yet regarding what the first commenter mentioned? I was intrigued by that!
Also, you mentioned up top the risk of being “niche locked,” but then went on to describe “niche matching” further down. I guess this is always a solution?
Do you think buying niche-relevant domains (i.e. topical backlinks) will be the safest way to proceed moving forwards?
Glad to hear you enjoyed it.
I have not got round to writing that update yet, it is on my list!
Both of these are great options, I use niche matching regularly. Purchasing niche relevant domains is definitely the best option, and saves you re-niching. When I’m purchasing new domains now, they are always niche relevant.
Hey Daryl, I was actually linked to your site from a member in the Private Inc. forums. Excellent guide, as said before. I’ve only recently been learning about SEO and I’ve been going through a lot of guides and I think yours has to be one of the most thorough and helpful (albeit somewhat over my head in certain areas.)
So thank you for the free educational content, truly.
Out of curiosity, how much time have you put in since you started 18 months ago and what has your progress been like? I’m working full time as I’m sure most beginners are and I find starting a PBN somewhat daunting as it seems to require so much learning, time, and finances (for hosting and domains).
Did you start as a complete n00b to SEO and/or computer stuff?
Hey Jeremy, glad to hear you got value from the guide.
I’ve been doing SEO full time since I first got started. The time/finances is not much if you’re doing the client model, acquire a client then do it later – using their money.
Before getting into SEO, I had already been doing internet marketing since 2009, and had a fairly good technical ability, but did not know SEO at all.
The reason I managed to grow my PBNs was leverage. Using client money to first start building it. Using that same network to start ranking affiliate sites. Using client and affiliate income to continue growing PBNs. Acquired more clients, continued to reinvest. I did not use any money that was earned outside of SEO.
That is why I highly recommend the client SEO model to everyone, it is extremely newbie friendly, and easy to scale.
Good article about PBN thanks for sharing
Glad you liked it Achraf 🙂
Great article. Love all the content here!
Question: When checking metrics in Magestic, do you base the TF and CF based on fresh index or historic?
Glad to hear Steven. I check fresh index since it is up to date, links from the historic may no longer be active.
Hey Daryl,
This blog is amazing, I’m going to go through and read all of your posts. You’re doing a great job.
Just thought I’d let you know that ive tried to get two activation emails from the site and they’ve both gone to spam. My email provider is gmail.
You should be able to run your emails through an online program to tell you which keywords are triggering the spam filter.
cheers!
Thanks Cam!
That’s weird, I’ve changed it slightly now, hopefully it will fix it. Not sure why that happened.
Sup Daryl!
Just here to steal link juice 😛
Jokes
Awesome article dude
Jabbs
Thanks bud 🙂
I have a question to hide from competitors that CODICO I put where? the hosting of PPB one by one or in money site
Waoo this is the best guide ever..very nice Daryl
Thank You!!
Glad you liked it Jose.
I’ve just started building my network. I have a few links showing in Majestic. I did go in and edit the file to block bots as you suggested. Does this mean that I will no longer see my links in Majestic? As of now they are still showing up. I was not sure if I did something wrong or Does this just block access to future links that I will build. Also, what if I want to see my metrics and links in Majestic at some point? I’ve been building my trust flow for several months and like to see if I’m making progress. Thanks for the great guide!
They will basically always show in Majestic from now on.
Next time they try to access your website, they won’t be able to, so the links will be set as “Deleted”. It will take months until they stop showing as deleted and finally get moved into the “Historic index”.
You need to install the code on your PBN sites as soon as they are setup, before they start linking to your money sites. Then Majestic and other backlink checker tools, will never be able to access your PBN sites, so never know those links exist.
Hey Daryl
Great post. Been using lazarus to scrape domains and finding some gems. Seems everyone is on the PBN hype at the moment its only so long before it comes crashing down!
What do you think?
That’s awesome, glad to hear. There are so many crawling/scraping tools out there now.
PBN’s have been hyped for years. I feel they’ll be around much longer. Google may try to crack down on specific strategies of doing it, but ultimately, we’re getting links from authoritative sites, and that’s what their algorithm wants. They may try to crack down on things like by removing juice on a domain if it expires, but people have been worried about that for a long time. As of this moment, it’s working as well as ever, so go full charge ahead!
The content here is superb, I’ve paid for information that was less helpful. I’m just wondering about the purpose of turning off rss feeds. Could you elaborate?
Thanks man, glad you like it.
I’ll just quote Glen from Viperchill:
Thanks for the content. I am in the process of setting up my first network using your guide. How do you turn off RSS feeds? I looked into wordpress settings but cannot find any option. Do you disable it through a plugin or by adding code in functions.php file?
Thanks Mark.
Try this guide at WPBeginner, there isn’t a setting for it. That’s a function you can use.
Or, what Glen was saying, you can change this setting “Syndication feeds show the most recent” under Settings > Reading, to 1.
Thank for the guide Daryl. Awesome work!
Thanks Yassir, glad to hear you like it!
thanks man, i was confused about the brand name domain with exact keyword on it. now i know what to do.
Hi Daryl,
Just in the process of setting up my first PBN. Thanks again for the value your site is providing.
One question I have:
– Would you recommend setting up the ‘money site’ with Google webmaster, Google analytics, etc?
I obviously wont be setting up the PBN sites on there, but I wanted to see if you’d recommend extra caution with the ‘money site’?
Thanks in advance 🙂
I think you’re perfectly fine setting it up, I’d make sure they’re under different accounts though. Especially with Google Analytics, since otherwise there is a footprint allowing anyone can find all your sites.
I usually don’t set up Google WMT, but if it’s a big authority site I’ve built, I’d usually set it up after a while. It’s useful to have.
One of the best articles i ever read on the web, better than most of pro newspapers. Thanks for clarifying me about PBNs .
I try, Andrei. Lol. Thanks for commenting, appreciate the feedback.
this is probably the best guide i have read about PBN thanks for this guide
Really spammy using your site name as the comment, but I’ll leave it.
Glad you liked it! Don’t think you needed to add ‘probably’, lol.
Yo, does it matter where you put the bot blocking code in the .htaccess?
I usually put it after the wordpress code but in this guide you specifically said put it above it.
Above or below, it doesn’t matter. Just not in-between, otherwise WP will overwrite it.
Daryl, thanks so much for such a comprehensive guide. I am just starting out and have been a little apprehensive that this might all be a little beyond me, but reading your information gives me confidence to get stuck in and turn up the heat. I really want to make this work and I sincerely appreciate your advice.
Awesome, really glad to hear that Kerrin! Good luck with it.
Hi mate, good info here, but with all the respect you forgot the most important info when choosing a pbn site that expired, you have to make sure it’s still indexed by Google. Otherwise it will lose all its power when registering it again.
Glad you liked it.
That really depends on the type of domain you buy: expired vs expiring.
Expired = It won’t be indexed since it’s fully expired. This is domains you can buy from any registrar at standard registration fee.
Expiring = It’s not yet fully expired, and usually available at auction from the current registrar.
Expiring domains should be indexed.
Thanks for good Article
Can you recommend some good Network clustering hosting providers instead of PBN ? Can you explain little more about this ?
Clustering isn’t a hosting solution, it just comes down to how you link. Only link to certain sites from specific clusters. I explain more in the PBN future post.
Awesome post. The best I have seen so far. I have a question.
Where do I find the list of the 50 hosting companies? I do not see an option to enter my email. Also, Should I always use different domain registars or can I have just one with different accounts and information.
thank you dude!
Thanks Alex!
You can sign up here and you’ll be automatically sent the list.
You don’t have to always use different registrars, but it’s good practice to mix it up. I’ve got my domains spread out across a few registrars.
Hi Daryl, when using the same registrar, do you do this with multiple PBN’s in the same domain registrar account? Or do you only use 1 PBN per domain registrar account, with multiple accounts at each registrar?
I have multiple accounts with a single registrar, but only because of the sheer volume of domains I have, it helps me organise some things better.
Google can’t see that all your domains are all in the same account with that registrar. Only the registrar can see that.
How important is it to show full post vs just a paragraph? What if all my pbn then have full posts, doesn’t google notice this and think its un-natural?
And the most important question: Why should we choose to show full post page on our blog? And can u recomend a few themes that have this function?
Lots of websites have full posts on the homepage, not just PBNs. You can do it without, but you’ll lose a lot of power this way.
The reason we do this is that most of the power is on the homepage, so that’s where you want the links to your money site. If you don’t show the full posts, the links will be on the posts instead, which is 1 link away from the homepage. Not to mention that these posts will have zero external links pointing to them.
I don’t know the names of any themes like this, my VA’s handle all that stuff, I just showed them what to look for. There are plenty of themes that support this though.
Is it ok to display only excerpt of all posts on the home page? The link to money site will be in this excerpt.
Hey Dary,
your quote “I recommend doing 1 or 2 links to your money site from a single post.
There will only be a single post for each money site. Meaning from a single PBN site you only link to one money site 1 or 2 times.”
Did you mean “… Meaning from a Single PBN POST….? it is a post not a site right?
You can link to multiple money sites (I do up to 8), but you should only link to one single money site a maximum of 2 times from a single PBN site.
Hi Dary,
I have a question, is there a ratio that should be kept with Backlinks and Ref Domains?
For example I have three domains
188,000 Backlinks and 520 Ref Domain
80,000 Backlinks and 400 Ref Domains
and
1,800 Backlinks and 700 Ref Domains
None of these are spammed or anything, but the ratio is different, does that matter too much, or as long as it’s above 10 it’s good?
Hey Marko,
It would usually be a red flag if there are a lot of backlinks and few referring domains, but only to look closer at the backlinks. If they’re all legit, there is no problem. That’s all metrics are for, an attempt at measuring the quality of backlinks. If you manually check the backlinks and they’re good, buy the domain.
Hi,
I’ve also recently started a PBN and I wondered if it is necessary to keep each PBNS regularly updated. I’d considered feeding each site with relevant rss content so that it appears to regularly update. As I grow the network I cannot afford the time to manually publish new posts and/or pay for regular new posts to be created. Have you got advice on this?
If I don’t keep them updated then it may be a red flag that each site was registered, content published and then no activity all around the same timeframe.
The problem is that you want the posts containing links to your money site, on the homepage. If they fall off the homepage, you will lose a lot of power that these links have.
Personally, I don’t regularly update my blogs. What you can do however is date posts. You can set them to future dates, and you can backdate them. So in general my PBN sites look like irregularly updated blogs.
I personally feel having no fresh content certainly is a cause for concern and your site will within time start to lose value. Google is trying its utmost to think of other ways apart from links to rank sites and although I always feel links will be the main factor then I do feel in years to come they will get better at the metrics in de-valuing sites even with strong links if the engagement on the site is not good, no fresh content, social, traffic through from the links because it is unnatural so personally fresh content, new links to the PBNs and trying to physically rank your PBNs to get natural traffic is key for future success. There is tools out there which can help you with this for sure!!
Daryl this post is epic pal and keep up the good work. I have joined the facebook group and joined the cool club 🙂 x
Hello Daryl,
Great share. thanks a lot .I’ve a question.
How many articles should i make for a PBN site? And I want to rank with a keyword, Let’s say Weight lose. So, how many PBN links I will need? And Is there any good PBN service to buy? Actually I don’t have enough time and money to build PBN myself
Weight loss is a huge niche, so don’t even go there, lol. The only way to determine how many PBN links you will need is to start building some links, then judge accordingly. You can judge by how much movement you get from each links. Some times 3 links will get your first page, other times you’ll need 30+.
I personally have 3-4 posts, and 3-4 pages of content on my PBN’s. Aside from the posts that contain links to my money site.
Hope that helps.
Hey Daryl,
I am Brazilian and I want to bring quality content for SEO market in my country. There are few people talking about PBN here and I use this strategy in several of my projects.
I need to know if I can create a post based in your PBN Guide post. It would be something new and I would give the credit to you.
Tks!
Hey man, you can email me what you’re looking to do and I will take a look. My email is daryl at lionzeal dot com.
Hi Daryl,
Some quick ones:
1. Why you recomend keeping OBL from your pbn sites up to 8? Can I make more ( let’s say 20-30) if all the OBL are to different sites.
3. Why not make some links from inner pages that have some power.
2. Can I turn some pbn sites to legit sites with a lot of unique content and start making hundreds of links from different pages.
Thanks!
Hi Alex,
1. Not 8 OBL, link to max 8 sites. I do 1-2 links per site. Then also link out to a few authority / niche relevant sites.
2. You can, but the most power is almost always on the homepage. So you would rather the links there.
3. You can, but it’s a lot more work.
For #2 and #3 the problem would be the linking footprints. The more of your sites you link to, the more crossover there is. So you have 150 sites, and they’re all linked to from the exact same 30 PBN sites as an example, very clear footprint.
Basically, don’t try to cheap out. This works great, is safe, and is cheap as is. The margins are so great in this stuff, you don’t need to waste time trying to save money at the risk of more footprints.
Thanks for the answer.
But why exactly 8 sites? why not 15 or 20 websites? is it just because of the risk involved?
Thanks!
My personal rule is a max of 8. You can only have a max of 10 if you’re linking 1 from each post, unless you change the WP settings to allow more posts on the homepage (which you can do if you want to). The problem with more is that you’re diluting the link juice more and more.
8 is a good amount for linkjuice, and allows you to link to a few authority sites too for lowering footprints.
Thanks Daryl!
Last one if I may…
Upon registering a new website with cloudflare I keep getting same name-servers:
ns1:austin.ns.cloudflare.com
ns2:dee.ns.cloudflare.com
Is it a footprint / should I change those to new ones for each domain & how?
Thanks a lot!
P.S
Great VIP club you have!
Hi Daryl,
Excellent post, I’ve been doing loads of reading on this subject recently and this is by far the best one I have come acoss so far.
I just wondered if you could clarify a question I have regarding linking to multiple money sites per blog network.
For example, if I had a 10 site PBN on the health niche and then 2 money sites on this niche that I wanted to rank, how would be the safest and most effective way to build the backlinks from the 10 site PBN to these money sites. Obviously I could just build a link from each of the 10 PBN sites to each of the 2 money sites but would that not create a bit of a footprint as the same 2 money sites would be on each one of the PBN sites or does this not matter?
Thanks,
Dave
Thanks Dave, glad you got value from it.
For 10, it’s not a big deal.
When it becomes more i.e. 100 PBN sites all linking to the same 2 sites, then it’s a big footprint.
I wouldn’t really worry about this if I was you, it’s not a big deal while you’re first starting out.
As you grow, try to implement clusters, as explained in this post: http://lionzeal.wpengine.com/pbn-future/
Hi Daryl, Nice info….
Just wanted to ask that If I use the same Htaccess file on all of my PBN sites, wouldn’t it be a footprint?
Thanks in Advance.
Thanks Paula. Google can’t read your htaccess, so no. The only way it would be a footprint is if Google were to imitate these bots and try accessing all of your sites, which is unlikely to happen.
Hi Daryl,
I am intrigued with the concept of PBN.
It just seems so effective and quick to get rankings.
However, i was strongly advised by a friend that runs an SEO company that PBN’s are very risky and any websites using PBN’s will be severely penalized and cause rankings to vanish when the next Google Algorithm rolls out.
What are your views on this? Is this a calculated risk?
Can we take such risks with our client’s websites?
Regards.
Your friend is entitled to believe whatever he likes, doesn’t mean it’s correct though, lol. PBN’s are working great, and are likely to continue to for quite some time.
As long as you approach it correctly, they’re perfectly fine to use on your clients sites. Of course there is always a risk of being hit by a Google algorithm update, but it’s a small risk if you do it right.
100% agree, PBNs are fine, as long as you follow the guide!
@Daryl
What are your thoughts on restoring content from the archive?
Good question. I wonder this to. Is it better to restore or create new and thus get the advantage of wordpress for simplifying and making the process easier and smoother?
I normally use WordPress and copy the content if I do that approach, only because my VA’s do 100% of the work for me and they’re very good at WordPress now.
But yeah, restoring content works as a way of padding it out, I did that and passed a manual review as a test. Just don’t do it if they were some big corporation.
Holy crap, that is the most comprehensive article i have ever read on the internet, about anything!
Finally someone who knows their stuff!
Agree totally with everything part of this Daryl, especially regarding the old theme of the website.
What are your thoughts on restoring the old content, and redirecting the old urls to their new locations?
Cheers Matt.
Literally just answered this in another comment:
“Restoring content works as a way of padding it out, I did that and passed a manual review as a test. Just don’t do it if they were some big corporation.”
First of all thanks for writing such a great article. I cant express how useful it is, its a pure gold mine. If used properly. One of the rare sites where the explanation is clear and to the point.
However, one question, do you still recommend using 404 Redirection. I contacted another PBN expert and he advised to be careful with 404 redirection.
Whats your take on it?
Cheers
Thanks for the quality content! There seem to be many different methods shown in a search for “how to setup a PBN”. Your methods make the most sense to me.
I do have one question. Is it ok to use a static front page?
My test PBN has categories as the top nav bar with pages in a sidebar widget along with some ads, breadcrumb navigation & a static front page. Any thoughts would be truly appreciated. ~Tom
Thanks Tom. Static page is fine, it’s just you want your links to be contextual within relevant articles, on the homepage. This becomes more difficult on static homepages unless the whole site is specific to 1 niche.
I was reading through your guide and then I start looking for couple of domains to build small PBN to boost ranking of my business.
I have a business website that takes online order to provide a specific service to buyers. And I found a nice old expired domain (with good stats) of a company in exact same field. That company was also providing exactly same services by taking online order. So I wanted to use this expired domain to 301 redirect to my domain but only problem I see is that this website was in Spanish (foreign language).
Although the domain was not used for spam that I checked. So the question is, should I use this domain to boost my authority and serp rank. I read that you should not use foreign language domains.
Can you put some light on this? I could really use some expert opinion. 🙂
I wouldn’t 301 a foreign domain, personally, but it’ll be perfectly fine using it as a PBN. Though it also depends what the anchors are, if they have a lot of service name anchor texts, and they’re the same services as you sell, then that would be great.
Hi Man!
I was wondering how the hell do you block all majestic/moz/ahrefs bots on JOOMLA?
httacces/plugin/robots?
I use Joomla sometimes in order to diversify my pbn (using wordpress mainly)
Thanks man!
Your posts are a great read!
Alex.
The htaccess code in this article is the exact same, that can be used for WP/HTML site/anything.
I don’t use Joomla so don’t know of any plugins for it.
Daryl, this pbn guide is KILLER man. Thanks so much for the value here… I have been trying to understand PBN’s myself to help with growing my start up (Local SEO Clients). This guide was easy to follow and excited to implement on my personal websites and my clients sites.
Thanks again for the great article! 🙂
Awesome, glad to hear that Nate!
Hi Daryl!
Thank you for the great article!
Question about full posts on a homepage. Why is this so important? I mean can I just link my money site from the first or a second sentence of the post? This way it will show up on a homepage anyway, in an excerpt.
Thanks!
Excerpts don’t contain links, they strip them out. Full post guarantees the link will be on the homepage, which is where all the power is.
Thanks for all the info, very informative.
Just wondering about the Privacy policy page. How do you avoid having very similar Privacy content on all the PBNs? I see there are a handful of plugins and a few websites that create a free policy, but I am worried of leaving a footprint through this one page.
It’s not a big deal having similar privacy policy pages since many websites will be using the exact same ones. I also mix it up and don’t use them on every single website, especially smaller “personal” looking ones.
This is Insane Bro. I want to say big Thanks to you, for posting such awesome Guide, on Building PBN Sites.I Don’t think that i need to read any other guide, after read this Awesome Article. Thanks Again !
Regards
Arsh Arora
Hey, do you ever reuse content that used to be on the site using wayback machine?
Yep, just answered this above.
“Restoring content works as a way of padding it out, I did that and passed a manual review as a test. Just don’t do it if they were some big corporation.”
It would normally be a red flag if there is a lot of backlinks and some areas relating, but just closer look at the backlinks. If they are all legitimate, there is no problem. That’s all metrics are an attempt to measure the quality of backlinks. If you manually check the backlinks and they are good, buy the domain.
Darn Daryl, this is a great A to Z PBN guide. Great job here brother. Questions if I may…
I was wondering what you think about registering the expired domains yourself with VPN across different I.P address(hidemyass) the likes or would you ask friends/VAs to buy and register the domain names for you instead?
Just saved your site Daryl, good one for late night study after sites for clients are done!!
You don’t need to use a VPN or anything to buy domains. The only person seeing the IP you purchased with is the registrar.
Glad you like the content 🙂
Great write up, was going to ask about copyright infringements with the way back but you seem to have answered above.
Thanks Greg 🙂
Hi!
As you mentioned i installed and run Xenu 2 but don’t have any tab for status code. Just status and few other … Also when im tryng to import in excell it doesn’t show up…
Hi Zeal!
A short one:
I’m looking in majestic right now. If an expired domain has 150 RD in root and only 50 in URL
And I’m Re purposing it with just http://www.domain.com
Do I get the link juice from the 150 RD or the 50?
(or should I use link juice keeper or anything like it)
Thanks a lot!
You’ll get all of it since non-www will be 301 redirected to the WWW version, and you can manually (or automatically) 301 all pages that have linkjuice to the homepage too.
Great article, you really break down the essence of this process. What I believe this link equity theory is all going to lead to is more quality websites overall. As people increase the quality of PBNs, the quality of “real” sites will have to improve as well. I personally think that the algorithm is broken as hell, and I prefer the way that Bing ranks data (sounds crazy, right?) by favouring on-page seo. But “nobody” uses Bing, and if all the SEOs started to it would probably turn into a dumpster fire too.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Justin. I’d say Bing is way easier to rank in, but you’re fighting over a much smaller % of the market.
Hey Daryl,
Thank you for the great article. Just got a question about re-niching a domain.
If a domain has a backlink profile of tech/computers. Would it be suspicious to google if i re-niche the whole thing to home/gardening?
Nah, it’s fine. People regularly buy domains and completely change the topic. For example, Lion Zeal could have very easily been a domain about lions in the past.
Woooowww! Nice post!
I became your fan! I will read all posts from the blog (already in my Pocket).
You write like Glen from Viperchill, your posts are easy to read but very detailed in the same time! =)
4 quick questions:
1) What are the minimum metrics you usually use to get an expired domain? (TF/CT/DA/PA/Root Domain…)
2) Using this strategy, hosting PBNs only in high quality hosting, as the network grow, and there are fewer good hosting, we will have to put 2 PBN in the same hosting. When putting 2 PBNs in the same hosting, do you recommend creating different accounts (with fake infos)? Or using 2 PBNs with the same hosting account? (I will use PBNs just for 1 money site)
3) Do you know any site/service that evaluate bulk list of URLs (like > 100.000)? I checked Majestic but you have to pay $500 for API. Moz and Ahrerfs the same…the other services I found they limit to just a few (< 500) checks… (it could be a paid service, but cheaper than $500/m)
4) What are the blogs you generally read to get updates about PBNs? I was following Viperchill and now you =) any other suggestion?
Thanks man. I’m a big fan of Glen’s.
1. Answered in the post
2. Nobody can see the info you provide the host, it doesn’t matter. And look at the clustering strategy mentioned in the post.
3. Use Moz free API, they allow quite a lot. Just rotate accounts if you have to.
4. I honestly don’t read any blogs on PBNs. I learn from running my own network, and from my friends that have their own.
Hi Daryl Rosser,
In my opinion your article is the most detailed one about PBN i have ever found on the web. Thanks for that.
I found interesting the Cluster concept and i was wondering if we should use it with our registrar accounts too.
F.e. if we we have 1 Godaddy account with 3 domains in it, then should this 3 domains be in the same hosting cluster or should them be distributed on two or three different hosting cluster? will this second option leave any footprints, especially if we will do it systematically with others registrar accounts?
Thanks in advance,
Antonio
Thanks Antonio!
You can think about it if you like, but it’s not important. Definitely don’t overthink it. Quite normal to see 3 sites linking to you all using GoDaddy for domain registration.
Hi! Great guide, Daryl, have been looking for something like this for a while now.
Wanted to ask a couple of questions I haven’t seen anyone ask yet, but maybe there’s no good answer for them.
1. Have you talked anywhere about what to expect once you start implementing these PBNSs in terms of traffic boosts the like? Say for instance I find myself a not too shabby DA 30 expired domain and I manage to register that domain and do all of the above and then point it at my money site. What kind of effect would that have and how long would it take? I only ask because if I knew it was going to require me to buy like 40 domains with similar profiles in order to noticeably affect my traffic, well.. that would be good to know. I know its probably different in every case but there must be some generalities around what the average person can expect of their PBN.
2. Are there any other obvious footprint things to avoid? I’ve talked to a few people now who seem to think that you need to change the clock on your computer and login from a different wifi to even work on a PBN. Pure paranoia? 🙂
Thanks!
-Dave
Thanks Dave.
1. It’s very very hard to say, which is why nobody gives scientific responses to this. Ultimately the best way to figure out the power behind a PBN, is to add a link and see how much the site moves. There’s no formulas like X links of DA30 = Y rankings for Z competition level. It just doesn’t work that way. All these metrics are simply algorithmic *attempts* at understanding backlinks in a way Google does, not that exact.
2. We’re a pretty paranoid industry. But you should be fine if you follow the practices in this article. Separate host for every site, don’t link PBN sites to each other, and make each site unique.
Hello Daryl,
Thanks for this constructive post.
I have a question about the hosting.
Does it possible to use a dedicated server on OVH with different IPs for each pbns Sites and be sure all ip’s are on differents class.
Does it leave a big footprint knowing the MoneySite is french and OVH host 60% of all the french sites ?
Best regards
I’d skip on OVH dedicated servers and advise grabbing a bunch of shared hosting providers instead. So much easier to manage than trying to run your own server (if you’re not a server guy).
Otherwise you can select the country you want the IP to be from, so that mixes them up quite a bit.
Hi Daryl.
When you build your PBN, does it needs to a http://www or http://?
The PBN I have has high metrics in http://www but low on http://. However, when I build it, I made it http://. Do you think it still has the same power as http://www?
It’s fine generally because the non WWW will 301 (permanent) redirect to the WWW version [or vice versa]. There can be a slight loss of linkjuice from this though, so it’s more ideal to set it up with the version which has the most power.
Thank you for the great article. Question: where do you host your money/base sites? Do you host each money site on a separate hosting account? And do you always host your money sites and your PBN sites on different hosting accounts away from each other?
I’d preferably use quite a decent hosting solution, even if it has little help with rankings (debatable), it’s worth it considering you’re attempting to make money out of the site.
So I’d say make sure your money sites aren’t all on the exact same server, which is a very clear footprint. And never host your money sites and PBN sites on the same host, especially if they link to each other.
Hi Daryl,
I have an inventory of aged domains between 5-12 yrs old most of which google has indexed 1 page as many of them are parked and/or listed for sale.
I am thinking of using these as a PBN as the vast majority of the domain names relate closely to the niche that I am trying to rank for
The niche is not affiliate sales related
If I go shopping for domains related to this particular niche I know that it will be very difficult to find related domains with backlinks that have not been spammed to death or has a TF anywhere near 1or more
So my question is:
As none of these domains in my inventory do not have any incoming links to them is there any point in using these domains in a PBN or would I be putting in a lot of effort for little or no mileage
Regards – Mel
If there’s no links pointing to them, there’s no power, so not worth the effort.
Thanks for your reply Daryl
So in an ideal world in the medium term If I could get incoming links from other sites to these domains without having to link back to them that would then make them useful to then link them to the money site?
Is it important that these links match the content of these potential tier 1 sites?
But what if I have to carry the website links of the people linking in to these domains, for example if you set up a directory for blue widgets then every site listing on that potential PBN site would be getting a link back to their website would that then dilute the strength of any links that I put to the money site
Bit of a catch 22 as these domains are aged and of course costing renewal fees each year
Daryl how would you handle a situation like this?
Mel
Hey,
If you can only put 10 links max on PBN is it not a poor investment? How do people sell permanent homepage links on PBNs if you can only put max 10. This isn’t very scalable. Surely people are linking from more than just homepage??
Thanks
Permanent homepage links are usually paid for on a monthly basis. A good provider will only do 10, a bad provider may do 30+, since they don’t care about results.
It’s very scalable because you can just build more sites. 10 links from a single PBN is a lot, if you’re using them correctly i.e. actually ranking, you should be making a solid ROI.
Friend, this strategy seems to have incredible strength, I’m starting and found domains with good metrics however, not indexed, then evaluated and percebir that had not been expired for spam, it is possible to index them again? have any tips to help me.
Article very good hug.
wow very good & Excellent complete guide on PBN Thank you for posting….
Hi Daryl
Thank you for your post and I really love your website. Very helpful and it explains everything in great detail.
Cheers
CR
Hi, Daryl. I read entire your post and have a question. If I use ghostpbn plugin for my entire network. Is it a footprint? Thanks you very much for your informative post
There’s no way Google can see you’re using this bot specifically aside from pretending to be different bots to test for it. With that said, I’d heavily advise against using any plugins (my own included) throughout your entire network. It’s much safer to mix it up, and not much hassle to do so.
Question- with the pages on an expired domain that are indexed. Is it better to rebuild the pages? If so, do you then link them to your home page? I read the 301 redirect was a footprint. Does this help for link juice to rebuild and link to homepage?
If there was a lot of power on it, I’d probably manually 301 redirect that specific page to the homepage. You can rebuild it and link to the homepage, but lots of the juice will still be lost with only a link.
Thanks for this Daryl. Signed up with ASmallOrange, HawkHost and it’s been a breeze. There’s something I just don’t like about HostGator though!
I had a quick question which I would appreciate if you can help with…
Can 1 PBN with a static front page and all posts displayed ( around 3000 words) have 2 links to 2 different inner pages of the money site?
Thanks in advance
Daryl, you’re a life saver. I’ve subscribed to Source…blah, Dripppy…blah, and Backlink….o…blah, I don’t want to give them any mention love. They have all let me down big time with PBN setup so I can’t thank you enough.
Want to ask your quick advice: I have one major client that I need to rank over 20 webpages for. Then I have 4 other much smaller clients that have under 10 webpages each to rank. Would you recommend I setup my PBNs as clusters on shared hosting or individual hosts? Obviously I want to get the most out of my PBNs but stay very very safe.
Could you help me map this out or refer me to someone that I could have a 30 minute consultation with? I’m more than happy to pay for the setup advice because I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot.
If you build a site using PBNs and then your site starts to make a lot of money and gets natural links. Do you ever start removing PBN links to minimize your risk? I’m facing this dilemma now.
Hi,
Thanks for writing such an awesome article. I have a question which I would appreciate if you can help with
Let say I bought a pbn site today. When will be the right time to give back link to my money site. Is it like after 1 week, 2 weeks or a month?
Thanks in Advance,
Anurag
Glad you liked the post Anurag. You can start building links straight away from it, no need to wait.
Absolutely amazing post Daryl. Thanks for taking the time to create such a detailed post about this topic – very helpful especially if you’re a beginner. I’m currently in the process of building my first affiliate site, how soon would you say I should begin building a PBN since I’ve already secured a handful of other domains to work on in the future too?
Look forward to hearing from you!
Dude, one of the most comprehensive step by step guides ever produced.
Thanks bro
Cheers Roy. Hope you put it to good use!
Thanks for sharing .It nice informative post on PBN.
I have a question Daryl, Can i use separate google webmaster for each PBN domains. Thanks
You can, but I wouldn’t advise it. Lots of effort to create accounts every single time, and lots of effort to hide your footprint.
Hello, Just read you guide and it’s so clear; your writing style is one of the best. Now If i create one pbn and rent out a max of 10 links that would be like 100/amonth, scale that to 10 pbns and that would be a nice monthly income. My question is is there a huge demand for people looking such links or is the market saturated. Also where can i find such clients?
There’s plenty of demand for high quality niche-specific PBN links. Important thing is the words “high quality”. Check the marketplace group for buyers and sellers: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lionzealmarketplace/
Thank you very much Daryl for this valuable article, that’s exactly what I need
But I still have some question to get the idea clear in my head
– Can I start building my PBN by setup PBN sites one by one? i.e: I will buy a domain names once per week or 15 day until reach my goal.
– Linking to money site should appear in the home page of PBN sites? I see that you recommended to use themes that allow to show full article (without “see more”).
– Should I link money site in the time of writing article or publish articles then link money site later.
– Should I build other links (social media, web 2.0 …..) to my money site and PBN sites?
I’m so sorry for all these questions, thank you again.
1. You can space it out however you want, usually going to be cheaper to buy multiple domains at once if using brokers though.
2. Yep, links on homepage.
3. Not 100% sure what you mean. Create initial content to fill out the site. But whichever post you’re going to link to the money site, include the link from the start.
This is tight! Thanks for being so thorough.
Is there any issue with registering all these domains/hosting accts through the same IP? Seems weird that google wouldn’t tag that.
No way Google can access that information
Thanks for the awesome content Daryl, really helpful!
I have a quick question about whether you think its ok or not to login to your PBNS via the same browser/ip?
Cheers,
Jonny
I don’t overthink this stuff. I won’t use Chrome since I’m logged into it, even that’s a bit of paranoia really. But I’ll normally just switch to a secondary browser like Safari and use that. No IP switching.
Excellent text! I ‘m still a beginner on this subject, but I will start putting into practice their tips.
I downloaded the XENU and I am visiting some sites about expired domains. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Daryl,
Thank you so much for this guide, it has helped a lot! I’m starting to build my own network and I have just one question for you –
When you say we should use premium shared hosting like BlueHost, what kind of plan should I be using if I plan to keep only a small network (of say 10 blogs)? Should I go for the “1 website” plan and setup multiple of those accounts hosting 1 blog each, or is it ok to go for the “unlimited sites” and host everything on the same account?
Again, much appreciated!
Best regards,
Nicholas
1 site plan. But it’s much more expensive that way. Cheapest way is if you have say 5 networks of 10 blogs, then you can put 1 from each network on Bluehost, since they never link to the same money sites.
Hey Daryl,
I’m one of your new readers on this forum – currently CEO in danish digital agency, Memoo.
I know it’s a little off-topic, but when are you accepting new member stop the Facebook group? Looking forward to join the community.
Cheers,
Miklas
You should be approved within a day or 2 of applying for the group. Got someone going through them all. Ping me on FB if you don’t get accepted.
I searched for what is PBN on Google. I think this is the right post to know about PBN. Great post Daryl Rosser.
Thanks for sharing…
Good ol’ Google helping people build PBNs.
Hi,
That’s an amazing article.
I’ve a question pertaining to all the CCC Records and Domain name Registrations
1. I own several domain names with one registrar
so basically if I use them for PBN it will be clear that they are from same
so if i change or buy different hosts, will it be fine leaving no footprints ?
also keeping in mind that SOA (Emails) are all different used for those domains ?
i’m just confused with this
as of now all are linking to one DNS,
But since I cannot change domain registrars I’m planning to change HOSTS and setup sites there
Hope you’ll reply 🙂
Doesn’t matter if they’ve using the same registrar really, that’s not a big footprint. Just as long as the whois information is protected, or not the same.
But if they’re all on the same hosting now, it’ll always be in the history that it was once on that hosting.
I have a related question to all of this. Now suppose someone had website A let’s call it the old website, they re-branded and now have website B the new website. They went ahead and did all the correct 301 redirects to website B for a a year or so, and then let website A die and expire.
Is there any value to the old website A to obtaining it for my PBN? is all the juice gone on website A due to the 301 redirect in the past? or do the old external backlinks stay flowing with good SEO juice?
Thanks,
Shady
@shady,
Here is the same case which I had experience. I bought Website A in an auction, set it up and submitted the site to google for indexing. You won’t believe it outranked the website B in search results within just couple of days. Of-course this is for a low competition keyword. This might not be the case for all websites.
Thanks,
Raj
Hi,
I’ asking if using website directory’s in your niche is better than old blog post.. More website to search between..
Sorry, not sure I understand what you’re asking. Submitting your site to website directories? That’s useful for citations, presuming you’re not submitting it to spammy ones, but it’s not even close to as good as PBNs.
No, when it comes to scraping domains yourself, instead of searching for old blog pages, what about entering old directories websites on Xenu .. there is more links there
Thanks
It can work. Old directories themselves as a link, add little to no power. But it’s a good way of finding very old sites. Still going to be difficult though, since people have been doing this for years now.
Daryll, I have a noob question if u have the time, I have a Weebly created money site, wich i monetized with adwords, but now i discovered the whole pbn “free traffic thing” and i dont wanna reck this site to transform it into a wordpress site, but im not seeing it anywhere in the organic traffic for the pages i want to rank (only in adwords, as i placed my ads for different pages), do i have to pin this sites pages in order to have them appear in the organic search? How do i modify the way the different pages of the site appear in google organicly? I mean like the Title and content that appear organicly in Google but with out using an adwords ad… hopefully u understand. Thank you!!
In other words. I type in my home domain and the page name in Google search. And my website does not appear, even though i had it in Webmasters tools for a while, but maybe u have to do something different to have it indexed, like pin it for example? i dunnot now what im missing.
I ask this for when i do build my pbn, I want to know how to control what appears in the SERP for each page (or keyword linked to that page) that i want to rank. Thanks..
ps: basicly how to modify how my SERP appear on each page organicly.
Honestly, I’d ditch Weebly and set it up with WordPress. Weebly is just horrible, so while it is some extra work, it’s worth it. Then just install something like Yoast SEO plugin, will help you modify title/meta description tags.
Hey Daryl
Thanks for the guide
My question
If you were building a directory style site targeting local niches but on a national scale(eg, service/state/city) , would it be a bad idea to link all of the cities on a single blog post so that they all recieve equal attention and all rank higher for local search terms. Obviously I would try to make this seem natural for example if talking about tree stump removals I would say something along the lines of:
Thanks to (BL) money site the unsightly tree stump was removed from with in a couple of hours here in (BL to) money site/state/city as a favor we have listed all the states that money sites/company name are currently cover so you too can perfect your garden
And then add links to the list
State1 > Moneysite/state1
State2 > moneysite/state 2
Ect
Or Is this a horrible idea where the footprint would be to big and the link to obvious as there including some many links to all the 50/100 pages
Huge footprint. I only ever do 1-2 links per PBN site, even to different pages.
Doing it once could be natural, maybe, but not doing it multiple times.
Hey Daryl,
Awesome post. Just out of curiosity, you say you link to up to 8 different money sites from one pbn blog so, for example, you could have 10 pbn blogs that all link to the same 8 money sites? Isn’t that a massive footprint? I was always told / thought the standard was to only link out to max 2-3 so a cluster of say 10 pbn blogs only ever links out to same 2-3 money sites. Please can you confirm and explain how you would manage ranking say 10 money sites that all need say 20 pbn links? Thanks!
Thanks Dan. Yeah I rarely ever link to that many money sites these days. But in terms of outbound links, you can get up to like 8 without diminishing linkjuice. If you want to link to that many though, you need a very big cluster so it’s not like 10 sites linking to the same 8 sites, since that’s a huge footprint.
i just want to ask you one stright question do we need to index PBN sites to GOOGLE WEBMASTER GOOGLE ACCOUNT OR SIMPLY BUILDING SITEMAPS USING PLUGINS AND Leave it
should we use google webmaster tools for indexing pbn site yes/No ? Please Reply thankyou
Just set the site up and it’ll index, you don’t want to set it up with Google Webmaster Tools. And don’t need to do anything fancy.
Great article. One question though. If we use network clustering with one host provider, wouldn’t all the hosted websites in that network cluster have the same IP address? Isn’t this a problem? If one cluster is exposed, couldn’t Google connect other websites with the same IP address? And thus exposing the other clusters?
Since we’re using shared hosting, there is hundreds (or thousands?) of sites on the same IP address. So it’s not an issue.
Congratulations Daryl, I am learning about PBN and your post is fantastic, but i need to read and read again because i am from Brazil and sometimes i understand,
Awesome, thanks buddy. Will have to get it translated into different languages some time, lol.
Hey Daryl
I have Two Questions after 8000 words content.
1. The domain metrics you mentioned are ok as I follow the same. But Do we need to buy domains having links from authority tech sites or authority in any niche. Or We can also buy other domains without having links from these domains or having only 1 link from authority domain.
2. How you add starting filler content to PBNs other than then their own archived content.
1. Doesn’t have to be mega authority sites, just needs to be good links. Not crap like directories, comments, and basically any link you can very easily replicate. The more referring domains, the better.
2. Write it…. (or pay someone to)
Awesome PBN guide, i want to ask you i found some good expried domains , but all not indexed in Google when i use this site:domain.com , do I need to register theme?
If it’s an *expired* domain, that’s okay. Meaning the domain has dropped, it’s no longer registered by anyone.
If it’s an *expiring* domain, like from an auction site, where it’s still registered by someone (even just the registrar), then it should be indexed.
Hello Darryl,
Thanks for the awesomest articles on your site and I truly gained a lot from these articles.
Correct me if i am wrong .. :from my understanding of reading your posts
and PBN – GUIDE ,
what i’m thinking is to building PBN with –
– different registrars
– and different hosting
– on several expired domains
– and with different WHOIS information
(probably fake)
and with didfferent SOA
– also with good DA, PA, TA
– on several different Niches / multiple niche
– with different Theme & Structure as you have mentioned
– with full page article or that can be decided
as per the requirements.
My question is
1. Can I do it from one PC that I have or should I do it from Different PCS at different locations so that registering IP will also be different .
2. If there is a suggestion of NOT Indexing your PBN sites then how do we rank them ?
3. Do I need to check backlinks and outgoing links on the expired domains for SPAM ?
You should have a different computer for every PBN site. And you should take off all your clothes while building them, unplug or turn off all other devices, and cover your windows. Lol. I’m kidding, I wouldn’t worry about anything like that.
I’m not sure where you read not to index your PBNs… you definitely want them to be indexed.
And yeah, definitely check the backlinks for spam.
lolz. Nice
I read somewhere, is not to be bothered about indexing, the site will eventually index. may be it wasn’t the correct piece of information.
since PBN is primarily based on expired domains – so in that case it must be already index so i mean should we take some extra pains of manually submitting to all places.
secondly, i am asking you is to check the outgoing links of the domain for spam too ?
Sorry I completely misunderstood your questions. You don’t need to manually force them to be indexed, they will index over time. But obviously you want them to get indexed.
I don’t get why you’re asking about outgoing links, since there isn’t any outgoing links now, the domain is expired. You create the outgoing links. But yes, you should check the WayBackMachine and tools like it to see if it was ever used for spam in the past.
ohh yes correct. The domain is expired and we will not make the outgoing links.
some few questions more if you don’t mind.
Would it be okay to use PBNS can also be used for authority / service portals (client / own).
I am looking for examples of PBN sites how they look and stuff, I’m yet to find some good one.
you want to say that no need to different computer for building PBN ?
Been researching PBNs since 8am this morning and just stumbled across this article at about 6pm. So helpful to really bring together a lot of the information I have been reading about today. You cleared up my questions about hosting which I really appreciate!
Im focusing full time on SEO right now boot strapping it (although investing in the required tools of the trade!) and living in Thailand. If you ever come through Chiang Mai it’d be cool to attend anything you have going on.
Glad the content could help Andrew 🙂 I was living in Chiang Mai most of last year, and dropping by next week for a few days to meet some friends.
Hi Daryl,
I am having confusion at one point. After selection of high DA, PA, CA expired domain having 1K+ links, am I supposed to write new content or restore the earlier version of the site from archive.org with same link structure to catch and maintain link juice?
Or shall I produce fresh content and redirect all broken links to my home page? Please shed some light.
Either option, except the last one. Preferably rebuild the old URL structure with new content, so it’s not violating anyones copyright.
I’ve always brokered links and am just starting to build my own PBN so sorry for the newb quesiton:
Question on keeping your content fresh on the PBN.
What’s the best way to “freshen” content and add new fresh content without bumping the links to your money site off the first page?
Or do you just add another article linking to that money site when it gets bumped off of your home page?
It’s really one of the bigger difficulties with PBNs. Your homepage links will inevitably drop off the homepage if you continue to add more blog posts.
For adding fresh content in a way that won’t do that, aside from a small number blog posts you may be able to add while keeping things on the front page. The only real solution is to simply edit and improve old posts, and to create new pages (not posts).
why not set articles with moneysite to sticky?
H. daryl… I need mask my link PBN for competitor, any plugin recommended for it ?
There’s so many man, just Google something like “PBN Bot Blocker”.
PBN’s are incredibly effective from my experience, this is a great guide and explanation!
Great guide Daryl!
What are your thoughts on “Bulk Buy Hosting”? for hosting PBN domains?
Thanks Brad. I’ve never used them, but from what I know, they just use reseller hosting plans from hosts like the ones I recommend. So it’s just the same as going direct and buying shared hosting. If that’s the case, as I believe it is, then it shouldn’t be a problem at all.
Hey its really fantastic article, through this i gain lot of information . what is pbn masking, padding etc…
its really awesome. with your information in future i will be develop lots more pbn sites , thanks
Sorry for my words, but you are fucking awesome. No one has ever shared such complete guide. I have a doubt regarding plugin. If I’m using Ghost plugin to hide my network, won’t that be a footprint as every pbn has the same plugin installed?
Thanks man. The plugin hides itself, but even still, I’d advise to always mix things up and use different plugins. The only plugin I use across my whole network is MainWP, and that’s because it just saves my team and I, a massive amount of time.
Daryl, Can you explain in Bot Blocking which bot name is for which tool. I just know majestic, Ahrefs in above code.
Just Google the bot names and it’ll come up.
Hi, I’m Brazilian and I work in the digital marketing market. I’ve been learning a lot about PBN lately. This article brought me another vision. Thank you!
Looks like you guys are catching up with PBNs. Seeing quite a few Brazilian’s here. Glad it helped Diogo.
If you take price in to the decision. What tool would you then prefer Ahrefs or Majestic?
I’m still using Majestic these days, what I personally preferred. But Ahrefs looks like they have far more functionality, so looks like I’ll have to try them out soon for potentially switching.
Great, stuff! Here’s my question:
1. Bought domains from auction
2. It was transferred to a registrar, let’s say enom. But the Whois protection isn’t applied right away. So ICANN etc. sees the history of these domains.
Let’s say I got 20 PBNS, different registers and hostings, with different WHois.
Isn’t there a Foot print when I originally transfer the auction domain name to registrar, then get hosted and apply the WHois protection? Can’t Google look at your history of your Whois account and say this guys has Whois protection, different registers and different hosting but the history says that I owned all of them in the past, and how likely is that they are linking to the same domain?
Ha sorry this is a really deep question, new to pbns and just want to make sure I’m set.
Thanks!
Hey Tom, that’s absolutely a footprint. Nothing to stop Google, or anyone else for that matter, seeing this.
I’m not so sure if whois databases provide a history though, or they’re just built by whois tools querying the database then keeping a history of what the past results were. But I’m not that sure on that.
I’d never worry about it with like 20 PBNs, but it’s something to consider, especially as your PBN grows. I’d just make sure that when they’re transferring to a registrar that the default whois information they’re set to isn’t always the same. I’m sure you can customise this with your registrars.
Hi Daryl
HNY to you.
I’m new to website building and trying to rank one of my sites. and now I’ve been reading a lot on PBN’s, and your write up is one of the best I’ve read.
Now I’ve had a look at an expired domain. D age 9 years CF 21 TF 24 DA 17 PA30 RD 22 BL 58
The site isn’t indexed, is it worth having just for the cost of registering the domain? will if have any juice? as it was last indexed in 2014 going from wayback machine
Also if you have hostgator could they all be ok on the same sever? as it’s a shared server right?
Thanks 🙂
When you say expired, do you mean fully expired? Available to register anywhere? If that’s the case, then the domain age is irrelevant since it’s dropped. But the biggest issue is the lack of referring domains in the metrics you shared (22), I’d personally aim for more, unless they’re all individually great links.
And no, sticking them on the same HostGator server is not good practice. Re-read the hosting section.
Hi again,
I found another expired domian, however when i put it in to Moz, it said it have a redirect to another domain, is that still ok?
Thank you!!
You’re welcome 🙂
Happy New Year Daryl, this must be the best Private Blog Network Guide I have ever read, it goes through everything that I could possibly need. Thank you!
That was the plan! Thanks for commenting.
Hey Daryl! I’m thinking you are becoming popular in Brazil as we can see a lot of brazilians here! Well, what do you think about PBNs in 2017? Excellent Guide, btw.
Greetings from Brazil!
Noticing a fair few Brazilians visiting myself. No huge differences, just an increasing importance of quality, like this guide pushes.
Hey Daryl,
The images on the blog look blurry on Retina Displays – do you know what to do about it other than re-editing and uploading with 2x the aspect ratios (would be loads of work for all of my sites)?
Cheers
Marc
Hi again Daryl
Yes the domain was fully expired, i didn’t know that once it expires the domain is also age restarts.
One other question, say as my website is new and has has a CF of 12 and TF 0 would it be worth be trying to find a fully expired domain that is relevant to my niche that has good CF TF and 301 to boost my site? or even transferring my site to the new domain? lets say you were looking to start a new money site, would you get a domain that already has good TF?
cheers
CFT
Hi again Daryl
Yes the domain was fully expired, i didn’t know that once it expires the domain age restarts.
One other question, say as my website is new and has has a CF of 12 and TF 0 would it be worth be trying to find a fully expired domain that is relevant to my niche that has good CF TF and 301 to boost my site? or even transferring my site to the new domain? lets say you were looking to start a new money site, would you get a domain that already has good TF?
cheers
CFT
Hello Daryl, thank you for the awesome guide.
As one question, how long should i wait for a new blog post or setting up a new domain? Can i buy 10 domain and set all these domains in a day with 2-3 posts? i know i can not do this, but i want to know “what should be the safe time schedule when creating PBN’s”?
greetings.
Hey,
Great guide, but what’s the point in blocking the crawler bots on your PBN sites when you can just do that on your money sites?
Cheers.
Hi Daryl,
This is one of the most informational PBN guide I have ever read. Though Google is penalizing PBNs now, but still many people are using it without any hassle. What do you think about guest posts, and contextual links ?
They are much safer than PBN links or not ?
Regards
Wow this is what I need the most! I just learn about PBN a couple days ago, then looking for some information on Google, than I found this site, really give a lot of enlightment.
Right now I’m trying to start build my own PBN, maybe I will follow your advise above, to build PBN using money from client, hope I can succeed.
Thank you so much Daryl.
Thank you Daryl Rosser,
I have 2 BPN, if I post 2 language in my PBN what danger is there not?
This is on of the best Private Blog Network Guides I have ever read. You have a way with words. I envy
Good article about PBN , Your information is good and friendly this article very helpful for me. Thanks for the post.!
Wow Daryl,
This is the most comprehensive article I’ve run across that covers pbns. I’ve heard the term used, but never understood the significance, so I looked the term up on Google. That brought me to your web site.
Thank you for the explanation and the drawings that show how sites in a pbn are linked (or not linked.) It looks like a lot more work than our little outfit should be involved in. I really appreciate your concise coverage.
Best regards,
Karen
Thanks for commenting Karen. It’s definitely a lot of work to build up and manage one on your own, but there’s also plenty of services that will do it for you, or more relevant for you – services that will rent you a link off of theirs.
Hard to find free content on PBN on the internet, really complete and well detailed. Congratulations
Hey Daryl,
Very new to the PBN world and I am on a hunt for domains at the moment. I am looking at some of the metrics and a site for example, will have a DA of 15 but a PA of 1. What is the reason for this? Is it just that the sites age has given it a DA but it has no links to it? Also, when you suggest the minimum requirements for a Domain:
DA – 15+
PA – 15+
TF – 13+
CF – 15+
Does that mean you need to hit all of those as a minimum or just 1, 2 or 3
Sorry if that seems like a daft question. I am still learning 🙂
Thanks,
Sally
As a guideline all. PA means page authority. So maybe you checked “example.com” whereas “www.example.com” would have a higher PA. Either that or another page on the site.
I’ll add though that they are guidelines. I’ve picked up domains that seem weaker than these because the links are great. One recent example was a domain that had links from about 6 different universities.
Hi,
Thank you very much for all your content. I am starting my PBN journey and your content is of great help.
I have one suggestion, I think the javascript solution to hide links from bots (I saw it first on one of Yashar’s post) is actually better especially when you use CDNs! This is crucial because if your page was cached for users and bots access it, they will see your links.
Also if it was cached first for ahrefsbot for example, nobody will see the link during the caching duration (even google and bing which is really really bad). I realize that because I am planning to only use cdn to hide my PBNs. Do you thing that is a good idea?
So I won’t only use CF but around 5/6 CDN providers (even if not free, it will be cheaper and more importantly management will be much more easy).
Thanks in advance!
Sorry I forgot to mention that I was comparing it to the ghost plugin and other kind of solution like htaccess, spyder spanker, etc
Hey Guys,
Recently I pointed a horrible TOXIC PBN, all my keywords dropped rankings. I want to know what are the propper way to remove this… bad pbn and recover results.
I presume it’s not just been like a day or few days? Did you ever test the PBN before pointing it? You can just shut down the whole PBN site later. Completely shut it down.
But don’t judge the results based on a sample of a few days.
Hi I’m just wondering but how many PBNs can I build in a week?
That’s probably something you should be asking yourself, lol. Depends how much you hustle and how much effort you put into each one.
Hi,
Great article! thank you. I have got a question. What about if I do have several sub projects hosted on the same host and domains registered in the same place. Is it possible to spread those projects and build some kind of PBN at this time from those projects/domains or it is too late ? ….
regards,
Joe
They’re all on the same hosting, probably all have your information in the whois database? It’s super clear you own them all. And obviously the point is they have links going to them, so they have some power.
It just sounds like way too much work to get one or two links from each website… Guest posting has the same effect and it’s more legit.
There’s upsides and downsides of both methods.
Hey dude! I read through almost every guide you wrote including the PDFs around PBN tips and I learned and picked up on some new things.
I had a quick question though!
If I wanted to rank one of my “money sites” which is a med-high competitive niche/keyword to rank, I guess I’d have to build over 25 PBNs or way more.
After I take the time out of buying the expired domains, hosting the domain, creating the content then linking to my money site on each one without leaving any type of footprint, could I just stop building PBNs for that site?
I’m really confused how people can do this because it seems very time consuming to build a PBN, or to keep building one specifically for one money site to keep the rankings the same. I’d appreciate it a lot if you could hit me up with some advice 🙂
Thanks dude
Anthony
Once it’s ranked, you don’t *need* more. You can build more to advance the gap from competition if you like, and keep regular links flowing to it so it’s not a sudden drop in velocity. But you don’t need to.
Hey man thanks for the suggestion. I hope you don’t mind, I have one more question.
When you started building your first PBN, did you invest a lot of money towards it? For example, did you register at multiple $10/month shared hosting per each domain? I don’t want to sound cheap but would you recommend $1/$2 or $10/$12 per year hosts for each PBN? Or would that be a massive footprint – as I’ve heard from SEO forums where mostly everybody with a PBN took over those cheap hosts then those networks got penalized.
However, if I did go with the cheap route of using $1 per month hosts per each PBN, would that really be considered a footprint and a possibility that Google could penalize it? What if I made the website look as real and natural as possible? Would that not matter? Or Google just cares about the IP/host a website uses to determine if it’s a PBN/bad neighborhood?
Let’s say for example: What if a guy who doesn’t know anything about SEO or PBNs wants to create a website for his new business to sell his own skateboards decides to host his site at one of those $1 per month hosts. He creates a dozen articles for his new website, linking to authority sites in his niche. Then creates another post linking to “a money site” a long with other authority links. Would Google consider this a PBN even though this site is being hosted with a $1/month shared host? Would this site get penalized just for being hosted with that host?
I’d appreciate it if you could get back to me.
Thanks in advanced for the help though, I appreciate it a lot!
Anthony
If you’re going to do it – do it right. Proper hosting from legit companies like HostGator, BlueHost, etc. Hosts that real websites would use.
If you don’t have the budget to do that, then just rent links for now from people that do.
Hey Daryl,
I am Brazilian and I am studying a lot about the SEO market. Here in Brazil still few people talking about PBN. I’m starting to apply this strategy to my projects.
I want to thank for making such good content available.
Tks!
You and the 5 other Brazilian people that commented the same thing on this post Sheila, lol.
I don’t have words to say thanks for your efforts. Before reading this guide I was damn confused with PBN’s and all but now I am pretty sure that soon I am going to start my own PBN network very soon.
Good luck dude
If I want to rank a post do I just link to the post? Or the URL? Confused!
Link to the post mostly, but you’ll also want links to other pages on the website so it’s natural (especially the homepage).
Hi, my money site is hosted on digital ocean so is it fine if i host my pbn site pointing to same money site on digital ocean too. I will be doing that with new email and new account on the digital ocean with the server in different region.
Thanks for the guide.
I mean anyone will know they’re both hosted in DigitalOcean, but for a single site on a different server, it’s not going to matter at all.
Hi Daryl,
Thank you for your excellent post, thats the best start I’ve seen in years for better understanding PBN’s SEO.
As I’m still a newbee in the domain, what do you think of Mr. Fishkin, member of moz.com community, saying
“You might also check out http://flippa.com. Just be careful with buying expired domains, presuming that PA/DA may still be preserved. Google is actually taking a lot of steps to reset a site’s authority/link profile on change of ownership to prevent manipulation through expired/sold domains.”
*Yawn* It still works great
About what exactly? “presuming that PA/DA may still be preserved” for expired domains?
Great detailed method but I’m still stuck at “Expired VS Expiring Domains”
And, do you set all your 8 PBN on same IP? Sorry it it was already discussed
But exactly how do the PBNS get their authority like you spoke of in the beginning. Are they just sites with no what you would consider high authority, and only linking to your site boosting its own authority.
Re-read it from the beginning. You buy domains that have existing authority based on their past usage.
Hello Daryl, thank you for the awesome guide.
As one question, how long should i wait for a new blog post or setting up a new domain? Can i buy 10 domain and set all these domains in a day with 2-3 posts? i know i can not do this, but i want to know “what should be the safe time schedule when creating PBN’s”?
greetings.
You can set it up straight away. May look weird though if you setup the site and have dozens of links all created in a single day though, of course
Hey Daryl i just discovered your blog, started learning seo 2 days ago, im 19 trying to drop out of college and get this client seo going asap, this seo thing was really confusing at first, but you made it more simple. Thanks for that.
I’m glad to hear that man, keep at it.
Hey, why can’t we block links of.our money site instead of hiding pbn links. Just hiding all the links of money site, we are protecting our pbn too. I’m little confused/about this.
If competition can find links of our money site then what’s point of blocking bots in pbn sites?
Because you can’t block them from knowing what links your money site has, it’s impossible.
We block them from accessing the PBN site, so they don’t know the link to your money site exists. Then when they look up your money site, they don’t see any of the PBN sites.
Thanks a lot for this awesome and transparent step by step method, i will definitely use this method for my PBN Sites.
Cool stuff Daryl.
Question! Thoughts on cloak hosting?
Greets from Norway
Wow what an amazing article I love SEO and this article helped me a lot
Just wanted something cleared up.
let’s say I have pbnsite1.com. I write 10 articles for this PBN1.
I should only link from this pbn twice to the same money page or money site?
Thanks, Great article!!
Once or twice to the same money site. The idea is to use it for multiple money sites.
Thanks for this amazing guide for pbn’s. I have a problem with my money site my domain is emd which includes my main keyword, my anchor ratio is : %37 full url, %2 main kw, %12 mydomain.com, others are generic. and i stucked at #14 it was #19 until i changed my exact match pbn anchors. So now i disavowed all url, brand anchors waiting for results. Is that good idea ? Do i got overoptimization problem ?
Excellent guide on pbn, would you indicate some guide / post / video on how to host blogs in clusters? I found it very interesting and did not know this technique, I researched and I did not find anything really practical about it. Again thank you very much for the great content.
Marcos Aguiar, from Brazil.
Hi Daryl,
Thanks a lot for that article, really helpful.
One question, you said it does not really matter if the topic of the expired domain is relevant to the website you build or the money site. What about language?
Through way back machine I noticed that some domains originally in say spanish had been used in english pbn. So ultimately the pbn was writen in English and the link was in a conceptually relevant post from the money site point of view. But doesn’t that look supicious to Google? And wouldn’t Google start to give the less weight to the original links (from spanish domains and in spanish) ? And other were simply a 301 from those foreign domains, any difference?
Last point, if you have several money sites, would it be risky to host them together in an unlimited offer?
Thanks for your time
I wouldn’t use domains that were previously used as a PBN of course, but in general, you can do that without issues right now. Who knows if it’ll work forever, but right now it’s fine.
And personally, I wouldn’t host all my money sites on the same server/IP. Doesn’t matter if you use different PBN sites, but if you’re linking to multiple sites from the same PBN, and they’re all on the exact same IP – that’s kind of a footprint.
Hi Daryl,
It’s pretty hard to find relevant and powerful domains at the same time. Is it good enough to get some random spelled domain which is clean and also powerful to build PBNs?
Thanks for this guide, mate! Really appreciate your effort!
For now, yes, that’s completely fine.
Literally seconds away from spending $300 on a PBN course… I think i’ll put it towards my new PBNs lol
Awesome guide, so good in fact I didn’t even add my link in my username lol Kudos.
On thing has stopped me from beginning my network (I hate building links but LOVE building sites so it’s pretty logical):
Domain Registration… in particluar WHOIS.
Everyone seems to skirt around the domain registration process so I can’t really get a clear answer.
1 domain for 1 registrar… I get that.
But aren’t I legally required to enter my accurate personal details each time?
If I protect the WHOIS data upon registration, isn’t that a footprint for all sites? I know this upsell appeals to a lot of new paranoid ‘legitimate’ website owners, but maybe not natural for say 5-10 PBN sites?
Would appreciate your advice as this is stopping me from progressing 🙂
You have to use “fake” whois information to mix it up too, that’s what most people do. I wouldn’t use whois protection more than 30% of the time.
Hard to find free content on PBN on the internet, really complete and well detailed. Congratulations
Hey Daryl quick question. I know a guy that is ranking really good in a health niche with PBNs that are created on fresh tld domains on T1 (.info for .88$ I guess). With no existing link profile at all. You will find 3-4 posts where 1 contains a link to the MS. Then those T1 pbns are spammed with web20 (probably rankerx) on T2 and gsa on T3. Can you tell me how is that possible? Shouldn’t such domains have no impact at all?
HI there great tutorial, I have a question regarding the outgoing links: better nofollow or follow? I mean the external backlinks to authority websites and not to the money site, that’s have to be follow for sure I guess
Thanks
Just ask “what would a real blogger do?”. I doubt they’d nofollow the links, especially to authority sites that are trusted.
Great article you really explained a lot on PBN, I was going to hire an SEO Frim, but now I think I can do it myself, I have lots of quilty backlinks, but no PBN backlinks, now I now a lot about my competitor, they have links I can’t find, a lot of redirects. but thanks, i will try your techniques on PBN backlinks.
If you have the budget, I’d highly recommend just hiring someone. So much easier. Your decision though!
” Why tell you how to rank for free, when you make over $40 billion per year from ad revenue.”
For exactly that reason. Google provides guidelines on how to rank and as long as the guidelines are followed the serps should take care of themselves.
Organic != Ad Revenue
Hey Daryl,
I read Matt Diggity’s comment on the Lion Zeal FB Group the other day where he suggested most of the PBNs are failing these days and that he had to employ new methods – which he could not share for obvious reasons.
My question is, I do not have as big of a test sample as Matt Digitty. I have been testing my PBNs lately. One week the test case has boosted in results, other times, it drops 2 pages. The fact that PBNs can now even damage your website has me scared.
So is it feasible for any average Joe to pursue PBNs anymore because it seems like only those who have the capacity and capital to perform conclusive test cases on large scale can deploy powerful PBNs.
Perhaps I am overthinking it.
What do you think?
Thanks
High quality PBN sites are still working great. But I’m personally a fan of just renting links these days, lets you be lazy. Less management. But up to you, they’re still working great, and still possible for even beginners to get into.
Good content but I really believe – building some reputation for your PBN before creating different links directing to your main site will actually help as your PBN also will have some reputation and will help when Google updates are released or even for a manual review.
Quality is definitely important, especially going forward
Excellent guide explained in clear crisp details. One question. How do you make sure you get Unique IP address when hosting so many sites on one Host.
You don’t host them on one host
Good answer buddy!
Hi @Daryl. Can you please tell why you recommend not linking to no more than 8 money sites from a pbn? Why is 8 (or there about) the ‘magic’ number? And what is the potential consequence of linking to 15, or 20 money sites? So If for instance all 20 money sites are hosted on a different IP? (Or at least only about 3 – 5 of these 20 money sites are hosted on the same IP,) do you still see a potential problem?
Well 10 is max to fit on the homepage if you’re doing standard style blog PBNs. I’d personally do way less than 8 most of the time, that’s just a max I’d recommend.
Hey Daryl,
I was searching some great tips on PBN where I must get all the information. I found your post and I read it. I am amazed after reading your post. You have Included all the information what I was seeking. Can you suggest me some good hosting provider name which will be better for PBN sites?
Thanks
Mostofa
There’s a few in the post if you search, it’s a super long post lol, but they’re definitely in there somewhere.
I confused about PBN !! i have a financial blog and i am also hosting other two blogs under same hosting account, is this the same as PBN?
thanks
Hi Dary,
Thanks for the wonderful guidance. I intend to use PBN service to increase my traffic as some people said this is a good method to increase the website’s ranking. From here it seem PBN is against to google rule as it will affect to their Adword. I don’t know if PBN is still very useful.
They work still, but yes, it’s against Google’s webmaster guidelines. So that’s up to you.
Hi, dary.
I found that u answered almost every body…
My question is..
Can it be ok to use PBN on diffrent mixup web 0.2 like blogger, wordpress.. and so on…
Hi Daryl,
I have tried to rent links from Matt Diggity Service. They are opening and closing without a chance. This month I have waited for 5 hours and checking their selling page to join in the 50 members list, still no luck.
Don’t know what I am doing wrong. Please do suggest me any other link sellers you known personally.
Helly dary,
Its simply awesome article. I have left blogging since a long time back, getting feel like having outdated knowledge..
But after reading and studying entire article since last two days.. i am got my confidence back for seo.
Thanks for all your efforts.
I have one question….
Will search ranking effect along with pbn by ussing https, or will be same with and without https.? Whats your recommendation…
Hi Daryl,
Thanks for the great guide. Can you please clarify the below questions
Does changing the niche of an expired domain still works in 2017?
Do you use niche specific PBNs or re-themed PBNs?
Thanks,
Shyam
Now I completely understand the full history of PBN backlink. Thanks for the description but Google policies should be followed. I’m also going to search some valuable expired domains. 🙂
Hey Daryl,
after how many days can I link out to my moneysite? Is there a difference between auction / backorder & expired domains?
THANK YOU :))
Awesome article. Very helpful post, Thank you very much.
How long will pbn effect on money site? I’ve done the optimization for 2 months using pbn, but the results I get not maximized. Thanks before
Thank you for this informative article. I look forward to more articles like this in the future.
Hello…
I wonder can I monetize my PBN sites using Amazon affiliate or Google adsense.
I just want to make my PBNs just like standard moneysite, while give link juice to my main moneysite.
This comment is for everyone else making comments in the future, for Daryl’s sake, please take the time to read the other comments and the replies Daryl made. He took the time to write the guide and he took the time to answer many questions over a couple years. Don’t ask the same question over and over again. It’s disrespectful of Daryl’s time. I’d rather him spend more time creating up to date content than answering “why limit your backlinks to only 8 money sites” a bunch of times. Read all the comments and answers. Then if you don’t see your question address, then ask. It’s frustrating for me reading it over and over again. I can’t imagine how Daryl feels answering it over and over again.
PS.. good job Daryl. This is a great foundation for me.
ov these vids – Mate u r a genius and my guru : ) – I have an important question – should we submit the sitemap to google search console for the PBN blogs and also should we have in wordpress >settings>reading> – SEARCH ENGINE VISIBILITY radio button ticked or unticked – >>>Discourage search engines from indexing this site.
Wow! So long a post but complete guide indeed. I read once and had to read over again cos this is actually my first great post I’ll be reading about PBN. Thanks
Very long and detailed post. I did not have to go to any other site to learn more about PBN in SEO.
hi, to determine protocol on majestic we hv to use – http://domain.tld vs http://www.domain.tld ie
root vs url in the drop down box right? or should it be subdomain dropdown?
thanks
Great Tutorial. Looking forward to giving it a try in the future. Thanks for the time you put into creating this amazing piece of content. It gave me the push to start doing it my self.
Great tut., its interesting to see some other opinion as everybody scream these days that PBN-s dont work anymore.
Hi Daryl, great info, thanks!
I have a question regarding footprints.
Can any of those mentioned in your “37 PBN Footprints” be discovered by an algorithm ?
Or are they mostly subject to manual review only?
I have built PBN recently ( last couple of months) containing 20 blogs and was pretty sure I am doing it fairly safe.
Came across your tutorial and beginning to doubt my work.
Here are my weak points:
1. All 20 domains are split between 3 Large Registrars all with hidden domain ownership.
2. Hosting is split between several Providers located all over the World, all domains have mixed NS ( custom and generic) .
I mean , everything else is good. All unique content trough out, all PBN domains are hosted on unique A block IP’s. Each blog links only to 1-2 money site etc
Would that be still fairly strong footprint for an Algorithm to pic up?
And if yes, would it make sense to try to fix it at this point?
Blogs are indexed etc.
What would you change for sure?
Thanks for your time.
Hello Daryl,
Money site should be like a new domain name?
Seriously, it was a great article. Excellent guide explained in clear details. Thank you so much for this guide, it has helped a lot!
Hey Daryl,
after how many days can I link out to my money site? Is there a difference between auction/backorder & expired domains?
THANK YOU :))
Hello Daryl Sir, Great Tutorial , Thanks you for this informative article. I look forward to more articles like this in the future.
firstly I can say your article is awesome. It’s right way to create PBN. I have some web site. I don’t know how many link take from PBN site?
Thanks
Beautiful very big article I really enjoyed
And I like Alternative Solutions which suits me. 🙂
Thanks once again…
The only thing I might add would be correlation between anchor text and target URL.
Hey Darryl,
I have to say, this is one of the best tutorials in how to build a pbn. I am very impressed with it. I’ve bookmarked your blog so I have it to refer to from here in out. Awesome content man! I have one question for ya and I know the answer differs for each niche, but say for just an example, I have 10 PNN with Trust flow – 18 and up DA at 25… could I rank much of anything with that? Or would I have to build a the PBN larger. Considering I can only get 20 links tops from that PBN.
Hello Daryl,
Whats the maximum spread should TF have over CF?
Hello Daryl,
If I have read half of the article but I have achieved a log about pbn site. It is awesome article to guide Pro and Newbie webmaster.
Thank you for sharing this great article
This is one of the most detailed posts ever ! Thank you for not holding back information 🙂
A complete guide, but PBN i think need a lot of time, and some money.
Daryl – great Guide. For me the idea of creating of own PBN is great and save a lot of money, especially if we think of “guest blogging” – many bloggers want a lot of money for it. Cheers from Poland 🙂
Wow, super detailed post. Thanks for putting this together.
If Google catches a website using a PBN, what’s the best course of action for a website owner?
How does Google decide if a website owner deserves the penalty or not? If sites can be penalized by Google for having PBNs linking to them, we can get our competitors manual penalties by linking PBNs to their sites?
I was searching For PBN backlinks and I found you on the top. This is really an amazing Post. Thank You for this. I will Give this a try soon.
Amazing and most detailed post i found on pbn, really amazing. I recently created a pbn network of 10 sites. Every site has da pa above 28. I post 1 to 2 post a month on every site. Theming is done on each site. But my da and pa is decreasing after taking care of everything. Is this because i am not building links on those sites. Is their any way to build links of this sites to regain its authority? Help needed.
Thanks a lot for this awesome step by step guide, i really appreciate your effort. I am going to use this for my PBN sites. Thanks again 🙂
Very good guide. But nothing about rebuilding expired domains with content from archive.org. It is useful thing for PBN
Google has said that they will devalue all the SEO juice coming from an expired domain when it is re-registered after dropping and deleted completely. Is it true? Or can we continue using expired domains for pbns?
Not true, but non-dropped auction domains tend to be more powerful and consistent these days.
Hi, what about SSL certificates? Google is pretty much forcing them to be used, but I don’t see a lot of information about how to approach this as far as PBN’s are concerned.
This is a fantastic post Daryl. I am just starting down the path of PBN and it definitely looks like quite a long road. This guide, and all the other guides I now have to read will help immensely. Thanks again for all the free content. Looks like it can be quite costly so the more free stuff the better…
You’re welcome, thanks for commenting Adrian.
Wow! This is the BEST guide I’ve seen after searching and reading for hours about PBN. Thanks for doing this!
Money site should be like a new domain name?
Thanks for a good relevant post Daryl,
You wright good understandable content – We need more people like you!
Thanks Kevin
I had to write a comment to say “THANKS” after reading your detailed post.
Thanks for taking the time to write this!!!
You’re welcome Joy! I hope you learned some new things.
After reading this article I got a complete guideline to start my journey on PBN. But here a little ask about backlinks of expired domain.
1. Can I choose an expired domain that has a good level of all metrics but non-english backlinks?
2. If a domain can be taken with non-english backlinks what will be ratio of backlinks between english backlinks & non-english backlinks?
Hi Daryl,
This has got to be hands down the best PBN guide that I’ve seen anywhere, thanks so much for putting this up!
Just a quick question. It seems that PBNs are only useful for multiple sites – if you just intend to rank one site, renting seems more economical than the $200+ you’d have to spend setting a PBN up. What are your thoughts on this?
Thank you!
After reading this article I got a complete guideline to start my journey on PBN. But here a little ask about backlinks of expired domain.
1. Can I choose an expired domain that has a good level of all metrics but non-english backlinks?
2. If a domain can be taken with non-english backlinks what will be ratio of backlinks between english backlinks & non-english backlinks?
Great guide!
This is a good read Daryl thanks, leaned some new techniques that i didn’t know already
Reading this article I got a complete guideline for start my journey on PBN. But here a little ask about backlinks of expired domain.
2. If a domain can be taken with non-english backlinks what will be ratio of backlinks between english backlinks & non-english backlinks?
And in last i had to write a comment to say “THANKS” after reading your detailed post.
Thanks for taking the time to write this!!!
I got a complete guideline to start my journey on PBN.
I had to write a comment to say “THANKS” after reading your detailed post.
Thanks for taking the time to write this!!!
Its so informative that institutions across the globe offering seo courses must make it a part of their curriculum. Thanks for writing Daryl..
Hi, what about SSL certificates? Google is pretty much forcing them to be used, but I don’t see a lot of information about how to approach this as far as PBN’s are concerned.
For sure, set them up.
Hey Daryl,
I am Brazilian and I want to bring quality content for SEO market in my country. There are few people talking about PBN here and I use this strategy in several of my projects.
I need to know if I can create a post based in your PBN Guide post. It would be something new and I would give the credit to you.
Tkx!
Thanks for all the info, very informative.
Just wondering about the Privacy policy page. How do you avoid having very similar Privacy content on all the PBNs? I see there are a handful of plugins and a few websites that create a free policy, but I am worried of leaving a footprint through this one page.
Thanks for the guide – it’s really good!
The only think that bothers me is the question – Is it worth it?
Isn’t it better to just have a budget for paid articles and uses other safe tactics for link building and not spending time for something that could potentially kill your site?
Let me ask, how much TF domain can be used best?
Anyone here know how to block PBN hunter?
Hello Daryl,
l discovered your blog yesterday when l was reading other peoples blogs about PBNs and l found the information captivated. l spent the whole day reading and searching, so l am trying to assimilate every piece of information coming.
Thank you very much
Wow… dont normally post comments on blogs.
Ive been researching PBN’s for the past month on websites such as BHW and there are lots of good info… but this is another level… love the detail of how to cluster the pbn’s.
Ive just brought 3 domains and looking to add more but now i understand how to group them to minimise risk.
Thanks!
Hi,
Great Information about Pbn Backlinking. Helpful For All the Beginners Who want to Setup PBN And Complete Guide. I also Learn Something New From This Article. And Implement It When I Build my Next PBN Sites Setup.
Thank Man,
Jagdip kumar
Fantastic read man! You truly are an SEO wizard. I’ve built a 50 domain pbn and I’d like to continue growing it but tools like pbn hunter have now got me worried a competitor is going to report me. I guess I have to figure out how to block these or up the quality of my pbns so they survive a manual review?
you want to say that no need to different computer for building PBN ?
This article clear my confusion on PBN. Thanks for sharing a complete information with us.
I don’t understand “We can’t use … or the domain “BestWeightLoss.com” – if my domain is BestWeightLoss.com what is wrong if i put 1k anchor text with “BestWeightLoss.com”
I’m confused,
Thanks!
The domain has the keyword in it.
Hi Daryl,
I saw you speak at CMSEO2017. Seeing this post was first drafted in 2014, what factors have changed in your experience in the last 5 years?
Especially with the extra attention to real traffic and user experience, many PBN’s that have little to no live traffic. Similar to many old directory pages. Everyone wants those links for the metrics, but the pages are dead for some time.
Still, results is all that matters to me so in anticipation for your reply.
Same stuff, more “quality”. Sites should be setup better, with better written content that actually ranks (for low competition keywords), on better hosting solutions.
Thanks for this tips.DR and TF is same thing?
Same idea at least, different tools.
Excellent article man! Covered everything I needed to know about PBN. Cleared up my whole perspective on the topic!
Definitely the absolute guide on PBN! Bookmarked 😀
Glad to hear 🙂
This is the first time I have visited here. I found a lot of interesting information about pbn. From the volume of comments on your articles, I guess I am not the only one!
keep up the great work.
Hi! Quick question.
You state not to use a PBN for more then 8 money sites.
But it is okay if all these 8 money sites run on the same server/ip/registar? Offcourse the PBN runs on other ones.
Cant google find about this way?
Great post btw!!
Not really, that’s a fairly obvious footprint.