A PBN or a private blog network is several websites that you set up to help your money website gain rankings. You can know more about this on this page here. You have complete control all over them, and you can be the owner of each one. It’s like having 15 to 20 Facebook accounts with different names and profile pictures, but you are the only one who knows their emails and passwords. The purpose of setting up a network of websites is to make them point to your main “money site.”
The money site is where you usually write your blogs, product reviews, travel guides, etc. They are the ones that you wanted to rank higher on the search engines. This can be a page with AdSense ads, Clickbank reviews, a page with affiliate offers, an e-commerce product sales page, etc.
Setting up a PBN can be compared to that of networking. The page that you want to rank is the top of that “pyramid,” and you don’t intend to rank the others. Many entrepreneurs use several tactics when it comes to PBNs. They use a website with expired domains so that they can create several backlinks. These domains may expire, but they still have several links pointing to them from Google’s authority pages.
These domains can be purchased from a website, or you build it yourself. The domains are used to pass more links to the money website, resulting in higher rankings on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.
The trick is to build the website of a PBN in such a way that it won’t look like it’s connected or affiliated to the others in the network. Most of the time, many people who are into PBNs will set up another page for investing while the other pages are about cookies just for variety.
Why Do People Use A Network of Websites?
In search engines, one of the most important factors that Google is considering is the number of high-quality backlinks that a site has. Google will rank first the website with many backlinks pointing to it. This is just one of the factors, and there are a lot, but this is something that many SEO agencies are working on.
In the long run, no matter what the piece of content contains, Google will determine all articles in the same niche to be equal. The distinction that will propel a site to get the first rank is the number of high-quality backlinks that point out to it. The point here is that if you want to be number 1, you really need a lot of excellent backlinks. Know more about the backlinks here: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/4885/backlink.
In the case of PBN, most people use it as a shortcut to acquiring a good number of links. Some don’t want to spend a lot of money and time performing some of the troublesome work that is typical in a link-building job.
The PBN is considered by many as black hat SEO. However, is it better than the white hat methods?
For a strategy to be considered as white hat, the owner will create an excellent and unique article relevant to a specific industry. Then, he will contact other bloggers and owners of authoritative sites for a chance to guest post. The bloggers may let him include a link to his money site, and they can exchange guest posts in return.
However, for many people who want to get to the top as soon as possible, this method is slow, and the conversion rate is very low. This is especially true when there’s software like MailShake and GMass that can do the outreach campaign speedily. MailShake is a tool for cold emails that help many companies in their marketing and sales strategies.
GMass also allows you to schedule mass emails and campaigns that will be sent out to a lot of your subscribers. GMass is an email extension that will personally message people about a particular business or event that they might be interested in.
The white hat process is that other bloggers and webmasters receive hundreds of requests and emails every day for guest posts. Even if you have evergreen and unique content, expect that the webmasters will simply put the requests to the trash folders, unless you have a great relationship with them.
On the other hand, if you want to convince the webmasters to let your posts go live on their site without building a long-term relationship, then you are welcome to the “pay to play” world. Most will agree to every request for guest posting as long as they get a fee in return. The fees also cost about a hundred dollars per link, and this is just the minimum.
For many site owners who want to get to the top, other issues they are facing are the anchor text placement. This is the part of the content that points back to the money website, and it surrounds the link. For some, ending up with a random placement at the bottom can be unfortunate, but this is something that they can’t do anything about.
Many business owners wanted to have complete control of their links. They also wanted to create content with link placement, anchor text, and other factors the way they wanted them to be. A network consisting of a thousand sites can be beneficial to them because they can tweak and twist the velocity of the anchor texts so that the money site will have a “more natural” rise to the top rank. After all, these are all the links that others in the same industry can’t steal.
Black Hat Strategies and PBN
In all honesty, PBN is a black hat strategy. One thing about this is that if you do intentional linking, you will not follow the guidelines laid by Google. If you want to continue, then do so at your own risk and make sure that you’ll never get caught.
If you pay a travel blogger to link to your site from an article on how to navigate Spain, you will be penalized if you did not disclose that there was payment involved. This is also the case if you also provided payment for a journalist to include your website on his daily news column. The thing is, if it’s a lousy backlink, you will get a penalty from Google.
This was a similar situation when Google caught your money site to have a series of other domains linking back to you. Many entrepreneurs fail in SEO because they don’t know that Google is about organic. Anything unnatural such as your flower shop that links to a dog site, is considered a red flag. They will de-index your PBNs and manually penalize your money site in the process. This is some of the potential risks that you should be prepared to face.
Be prepared to get a devalued link if you are caught. Know that you are going against an army of site graders who manually review every website where you get the link. Google will regularly discover many sites hosted by the same IP or discover a footprint then wipe then on its index list in one single swoop.
Why Should You Use PBN if you know you’ll be Penalized?
The thing is, a lot of link building strategies in the past were considered as a white hat, but they become black hats as time passes by. Everyone knows that content alone is not enough to propel you to the top. You needed the backlinks.
Every SEO agency will need to figure out the correct way to get the top rankings, and most of them are aware of the benefits, risks, and trade-offs of using black hat practices in the process. Note that not all agencies use PBNs; some clients sleep better at night, knowing that they are using the white hat to get that elusive top spot.
When you build a PBN, you will control every anchor text, content, quality, and links on that website. However, you also need to accept that you are facing a considerable risk. With this said, building a private blogging network is not everybody’s cup of tea. If you are one of the people who understand the risk, then you will know that you can get to the top and stay there for a long time if you use an effective strategy.
Best Practices to Follow When Building PBNs
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You Need Separate Registrars
Get domains that have separate registrars. This is the business that handles the reservation of a particular name, and it also assigns the IP address. Enable the WHOIS Guard on every domain. More about WHOIS on this page: https://techterms.com/definition/whois.
It is not recommended to use fake details on your WHOIS records. But if you won’t be able to hide your WHOIS, then you run the risk of losing that specific domain. Use several servers for all of the domains to be untraceable.
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You Need Different Hosting
Each of the websites that you have purchased should have a different subnet when it comes to their IP addresses. Some IPs are represented by DDD.EEE.FFF.GGG and in this case, the FFF and GGG should have a unique address. Most web hosts can only provide a limited number of IP addresses, and they can only offer domains in DDD.EEE.FFF. You may think about a different IP, but it’s crucial that you only host two domains in this case.
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Each Website Should Only Link Once
It can be tempting to get hundreds of backlinks to your money site under one domain. But you are also risking everything. The checkers will find it obvious, and you are increasing the risk of being found out. Don’t be tempted into doing this and only bring in a single link.
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Get Mixed Content
The posts should be unique and even valuable for each of the sites. Don’t just copy-paste one content from one page to another. You can know more about this service on the link provided where you can get 100% unique content and be safe in Google’s eyes. Content should never be spun.
If you treat your PBN as you would on your money site, expect them to become fruitful in the long run. Ensure that you get the best source of PBN links from the right website so you’ll never have to worry about a thing. Most agencies will set up and manage everything for you so be sure to buy from trusted sources.
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Avoid Using Sitewide Links
These are the ones that appear many times on an entire website. You can see them in the first paragraph, header, sidebar, footer, and more. You only need a single one that is embedded in a text. At some point in the future, many SEO experts believe that sitewide practices will be devalued.
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There Should Be At Least 1 to 5 Links
It’s natural for some pages to not have any links at all. Some owners do this to keep everything more natural. But at least add a variety of 1 to 5 links that point to authority websites related to the industry you are in. Don’t just choose the top sites such as Wikipedia, vary your links, and give credits to smaller authorities to build up your presence.
These are just the things that you needed to do. Before you build your network, make sure to have a goal, and know the process’s costs. Plan how many PBN links you need to rank and understand how you can manage everything effectively. There are no fixed answers, and this depends on how competitive you are. If you have medium competition, building at least 10 PBN can get you to the top, so you need to plan carefully.
