PBNs For Link Building – Dogma-free Outlook

• What is PBN?
• Advantages Of PBNs
  • Full Control
  • Time Efficiency
  • Enhanced Link Authority
  • Optimized Anchor Text
• Disadvantages Of PBNs
  • Risk Of Penalties
  • Competency To Maintain Infrastructure
  • High Expenses
• How to Build a Private Blog Network?
  • Domain Selection For PBN
  • PBN Content Specifics
  • PBN Hosting Infrastructure
  • PBN Footprints Minification
• Conclusion

Backlinks are like the fuel that powers your website’s engine. They provide the energy and momentum from other sites that help search engines notice and elevate your content. But what if there’s no external source to supply this vital boost? Should you build your own network of fuel stations—essentially creating a Private Blog Network (PBN) — to generate the backlinks yourself?

PBN approach to link building is one of the most controversial topics related to SEO. Unfortunately, there are too many myths and misconceptions about this approach. As with any other sensitive topic – majority of dangers are coming from ignorance, absence of practical experience and irrelevant expectations. Let's delve into the topic to uncover and understand the real picture.

What is PBN?

A Private Blog Network is a network of websites owned by an individual or organization that is used to build backlinks to a primary website (or websites) to improve its search engine rankings. The goal of a PBN is to manipulate search engine algorithms, particularly Google's, to increase the authority and visibility of the target site.

Private blog networks were initially designed to consist solely of blogs, which is why the term 'blog' is part of the definition. Today, however, PBNs encompass a wide variety of websites, including company sites, product comparison projects and even community forums.

Advantages of PBNs

In addition to high-quality content and technical SEO, off-page SEO (primarily backlinks) ranks as one of the top three key factors for search engine rankings. While you can control content creation and technical optimization, earning backlinks from other websites can often feel like an uphill battle.

Most link building strategies share a common approach: they require reaching out to journalists, bloggers, or website owners and persuading them to link to your content. These methods focus on promoting awareness of your content and relying on the recipient’s interest to secure a backlink. However, this approach often leads to unpredictable outcomes. No matter how well-executed your efforts are, there’s no guarantee of achieving a specific number of backlinks within a given timeframe. On the surface, a Private Blog Network might seem like a way to gain more control and reduce uncertainty in your backlink strategy. However, despite the appeal, we strongly recommend steering clear of PBNs and instead focusing on earning high-quality, organic backlinks for sustainable success.

This is where creating a Private Blog Network may offer a competitive advantage. A PBN allows you to generate backlinks that your competitors cannot easily access, providing a unique edge in ranking for target keywords. But why do some website owners choose to build their own PBNs?

Full Control

With a PBN, you’re in charge of your entire network of websites, their content, and backlink placement. This allows you to strategically position links to maximize your site’s search engine visibility and rankings.

Time Efficiency

Unlike traditional link building strategies such as outreach or SEO-focused content marketing, PBNs can deliver faster results. By utilizing an established network of websites, PBNs provide a quicker path to acquiring backlinks, speeding up the process of boosting search engine rankings. This swift approach can be especially beneficial for websites aiming to improve their visibility and stay competitive in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Enhanced Link Authority

PBNs are typically built using expired or auctioned domains that retain authority with search engines. By repurposing these domains, you can transfer their "SEO juice" to your site, boosting its credibility and visibility. It’s akin to inheriting a vault of SEO value and channeling it to your advantage. The challenge, however, lies in finding expired domains that still have strong link equity.

Optimized Anchor Text

One significant benefit of a PBN is the ability to customize anchor text. This means you can align backlinks with specific keywords, helping search engines better understand the context of your site. Keyword-optimized anchor text sends a clear signal of relevance, potentially improving your rankings for those terms and increasing your discoverability by users.

Disadvantages Of PBNs

Risk Of Penalties

Google's Webmaster Guidelines clearly forbid any efforts to manipulate rankings through artificial link building practices. Violations can result in penalties ranging from a significant decline in rankings to complete deindexing from Google's search results. As any other artificial link building strategies, PBNs model usage may result these penalties.

Competency To Maintain Infrastructure

Possessing a network of at least 20 sites means competency in various technical aspects – deployment and support of VPS ifrastructure, DNS and Cloudflare configuration, CMS support & maintenance etc. Responsible team should demonstrate good level of technical knowledge aligned with the latest SEO-specific requirements.

High Expenses

Fast and reliable hosting infrastructure, domains with historical backlinks, content-related efforts – all these aspects can be expensive for independent webmasters and small businesses.

How to Build a Private Blog Network?

Now that there is clarity with potential benefits and disadvantages of a PBN usage, there still can be doubts about feasibility of the whole approach. Here you have a basic list of routine steps and efforts required to build and manage own PBN effectively.

Let’s split the process into several layers.

• Domains selection
• Content for the websites
• Hosting infrastructure setup
• Footprints minification

Domain Selection For PBN

Proper approach here is to find expired domain or to buy it via domain auction. Please note that since the core intention is to re-use existing backlink profile - the purchase of the new domain is not an option.

Criteria for domain selection:

• TrustFlow (TF, Majestic metric) - from 8+
• Domain Rank (DR, Ahrefs metric) - from 10+
• Domain was dropped less than 3 times
• Wayback Machine snapshots availability
• Topical relevancy of the web archive snapshots to the niche of the project you plan to push
• Absence of spammy content snapshots in web archive – e.g. warez, pharmacy etc.
• Historical backlinks have natural anchors – consist of brand, topical and UI-focused anchors
• Historical backlink profile growth dynamics – absence of link ‘splashes’
• Historical backlink profile quality – natural link sources, no spammy patterns

Extra notes:

• Domain selection criteria may vary depending on available budget, and competition rate in the niche
• If the domain is valid in perspective of criteria listed above and the only fault is the absence of the content in Wayback Machine – apart of brand new content creation and publishing it under this old domain may still use it as it is - for boosting your project via 301 redirect.

PBN Content Specifics

Let’s review two possible scenarios:

• 1. Wayback Machine got some decent historical content
• 2. No historical content at all.

In case of scenario #1 you can “resurrect” the website’s static copy (e.g., HTML/CSS/JS/images) using the service similar to ArchivariX - there is no need to create custom Python-based solution for it. ArchivariX makes it possible to “clean up” the code – do not ignore the opportunity to remove external links, ads, original trackers and to optimize html code and images. After the “resurrection” is complete - make sure to check if all the pages are accessible. The problem is that archive.org in many cases keeps just part of the website files, so 404s should be fixed before publishing.

If scenario #2 plays out and the only choice is to create new topical content from scratch (with the help of copywriters or/and AI) – ensure high-quality content is the foundation of credible private blog network (PBN) websites. An effective content strategy should emphasize the following key elements:

• Articles tailored to specific niches, offering actionable insights and practical value.
• A distinctive voice and style for each website within the network, ensuring uniqueness.
• Organic integration of keywords to enhance discoverability without compromising authenticity

You need to clarify the list of historical urls (linked by external sites – Ahrefs/Majestic may help here) and publish your new content under these urls. If PHP-driven dynamic sites setup is part of your vision for scenario #2 – WordPress probably is the most popular choice apart of the custom content management systems.

PBN Hosting Infrastructure

The setup of hosting infrastructure depends on various factors, including the quantity of sites, their types and possible consumption of hardware resources.

One of the options - to set up VPS instance powered with the Plesk Obsidian hosting panel on a cloud platform like Vultr. By abstracting the complexities of server configuration and providing user-friendly tools, Plesk makes it possible to manage web server, PHP configuration and DBMS even to non-technical users while still offering flexibility for advanced configurations. You will be able to accommodate multiple static websites, WordPress instances, as well as those sites utilizing custom CMS platforms. For PBN sites built with WordPress, the WP Toolkit for Plesk will help you to streamline variety of maintenance, security and automation routine tasks.

In the same time, if you or your organization is looking forward on how to make your PBN hosting infrastructure extremely cost-efficient – think about avoiding commercial expensive hosting panels and compensate it with the competence & skills. You may lease panel-free unmanaged VPS instance(s), setup LAMP/LEMP environment and configure everything according to your needs.

PBN Footprints Minification

The greater the diversity among the websites within your private blog network, the more advantageous it becomes. This is because minimizing identifiable footprints, such as consistent patterns or traces, significantly reduces the likelihood of detection and penalization by search engines and competitors.

Common set of steps to implement:

• Utilize Cloudflare to ensure actual IPs of your PBN hosting instances are ‘hidden’
• Try to use at least several domain registrars and hosting providers to follow the idea of ‘patternless’ infrastructure. Diversify Whois information of the domains (including privacy protection approach)
• Block Ahrefs, Semrush and other marketing research tools from crawling your PBN sites by adding directives to your websites’ robots.txt and disallowing specific user agents from accessing those websites. You don’t need to share any data with your competitors.
• Avoid interlinking PBN sites between each other
• Avoid link patterns. Ensure links to money sites are not too uniform or easily traceable.
• Diversify usage of content management systems, themes and plugins
• Use dedicated GA4 and Google Search Console accounts per each site

Conclusion

PBN implementation requires high expertise and substantial investments of time and money. Not every business really needs this model to ensure its visibility in SERPs. However, if you are free from dogmas, have patience, high level of competence and operating within highly competitive industries like iGaming, SaaS, fintech or adult entertainment – own PBN infrastructure definitely makes sense and will pay off in the midterm.