How to Build a PBN That Doesn't Get Whacked
Making your own Private Blog Network (PBN) is actually quite straightforward -- make several websites and link them. But it is tedious and fraught with danger. It is essential to do make your PBN correctly, right from the start, or it is a waste of time and money and will be penalised by google.
What actually IS a Private Blog Network?
A PBN is a group of websites (Blogs) owned by one person (Private) or organisation that links (Network) to the main site -- also known as the money site -- in an attempt to get higher ratings and thus more free traffic from Google. Google is the primary search engine to get traffic from. Bing DuckDuckGo and any others are just bonus if you rate well on them also. A money site is the main site where the money or income comes from. It could be a shopify site, or a affiliate site -- anything that generates the income and is the site you are trying to get into position 1 on Google search.
Are PBNs legal?
Yes, regardless of what people say, in the eyes of the law, Private Blog Networks are completely legal. Anyone can make a PBN and you won't have the State Troopers knocking on your door with an arrest warrant -- providing you are not breaking any other laws such as copyright, drug or porno laws.
Why Are Private Blog Networks frowned upon?
It is Google, who has taken it upon itself to police the internet. When it says do this to rate -- or else, people do it... or else! It is the BigG who says that PBNs are a big, big, big no-no. the Big G does not like them as they are basically 'artificial' links used to improve the standing of a money site on Google. It is basically gaming the system Google uses links in its algorithm for ranking, but it wants links that are organic, real links that come from websites that have no pecuniary or financial interest in the site they are linking to. This is why paid links are also frowned upon by Google.
How do I build a Private Blog Network?
There are a number of factors required to build a successful PBN.
- Anonymity or Footprint
- Domain Name
- Linking
- Website Design
- Web Hosting
- Website Content
Anonymity / Footprint
If every website in your PBN has the
- Same registrar
- Same date of registration
- Same owner name
- Same webhost or DNS
It is a pretty safe bet that the websites are all owned by the same person. This is called a 'footprint' and in that case it is massive. The Google algorithm will put 1+2+3+4 = delist those websites!
Obviously, you need to use several registrars, register the domain names on different dates and use the privacy option or set up fake contacts and use a different host for each website.
Domain Name
It's not just the domain name, but the niche and content that is important. If your niche is selling "High Performance Automotive Car Parts" then most of your PBN should be about something automotive and ideally, but not always have something to do with Cars in the domain name. Most, but not all as that would not be natural. So if you come across a high ranking de-registered domain, then when you rebuild the network site, consider a post that is 'Automotive' that can have a link to your money site.
Linking
Linking is critical: There should be a number of blog posts on the network site. Somewhere in a post is a dofollow link to your money site.
On one single link -- no more. Remember it is not about people -- although it is possible your site could be 'inspected' by a human who works for the Big G and get slapped if it looks fake -- it is about working with the algorithm. When you have that link from one DNS, to your money site, that is all that is required. One single link. Any other links are unneeded.
The link from a single DNS is why shared hosting or addon domains doesn't work. 30 links from one site still only equals one link. In fact 30 links could be construed as spamming. Search engines only count one hosting DNS host ie 123.456.789.0
Other links: It is important to add other 'dofollow' links to other sites as well. If there is just one single link on a website to your money site, well that is not natural. When you are writing a post consider what are the key words in that post. Put them into google. Then go to a lowly ranked page -- say page 20 and even lower and have a look at the sites on that page . When one post meets your keyword criteria, link to that site / post with add the dofollow link. In this manner your money link will be hidden in a website with other links and in other posts and look completely natural.
Network Linking. Never link between your network links. Some people suggest different tiers, but it is simpler, easier and safer to simply have one link to your money site and never to link to any other site you own. It may feel like you are wasting sites, but if none of your network sites are linked, and they are not all hosted with the same webhost, then it is almost impossible for google to make a connection between them.
PROTIP. If you are an affiliate marketer and you look at your network site and you just want to add your affiliate link.... DON'T! If your networks sites all have the same affiliate link that is a huge footprint. Instead find another affiliate program that sells relevant products and add those links.
Website Design
As the vast majority of websites are WordPress, most of your websites should be made from WordPress. Use a different theme and different plugins for each website. While you may have your favourites, keep those plugins and themes for your money site. For the network sites, experiment with other plugins in particular. However, not all of your sites should be WordPress, it also helps if a few of your websites are made from other website builders -- they don't have to be complex. You can even make a few on free wordpress or blogger sites -- just remember to use a different email with the blogger sites as they are owned by google
Hosting
Hosting is ultimately the crux of the matter. To be effective each website must be hosted on a separate host. Each webhost DNS (123.456.789.0) MUST be different. If you have 50 sites you need 50 different DNS a site with the same DNS (addon or shared) won't count. The best bet is to Google 'budget webhosts' or 'dollar webhosting' where you pay $1 per month or so for a webhost. Remember this doesn't have to be the best website in the world. It only has to provide a link and get seen by Google.
As it will be a simple site, it doesn't require all the bells and whistles of a money site; there are three things to consider for your PBN site web host:
- You only need to host a single site on each account
- You need one email address to be included
- The host provides weekly backups of your site
But make sure you got good hosting from a name provider for your Money Site. This one cannot afford to be offline
Email Addresses
If you usually use Gmail for your email you might want to be cautious using a Gmail account for your PBN sites. We can't say for sure how much the BigG monitors email, (enough for ads that follow you around) but if you use the same Gmail address on all your network sites or your money site, what's to say the BigG isn't aware of that? Or won't be aware in the future?
Or even if you have different emails from each blog, that go to single Gmail account for convenience from the different websites in your network. An email account for each website, separate from Gmail is essential.
GMail now requires a phone number for each new registration, making future email registrations quite difficult
You need to have an email address for each site, and some budget hosts don't allow it.
Concerns, Cautions & Considerations
Look Different
The key here is to make sure your site looks different from other PBN sites. Don’t do stuff that makes your site look like a link farm or a site put up only for the purposes of building links in mass. Those sites will not withstand the test of time and are actually made for the pure purpose of selling blog post links.
Avoiding Footprints by Linking Out to your money site
There are multiple ways that Google can detect your PBN or parts of it and deindex them overnight, thereby making all the sites its catches worthless, and you can't do anything about it.
At the very heart of their system, I believe they have some sort of PBN detection web crawling algorithm.
This has many factors and variables in it, some of which we will discuss below. The algorithm crawls sites and gathers all sorts of information and data about them. Think of each data or variable it checks as a dial that has a value attached to it that it gathers on the crawl (similar to their penguin based algorithm).
Now, if any site site trips (flags off) too many variables or crosses a certain threshold based on the sum of all values at which the dials are currently pointing at – then the site goes into a manual inspection bucket, and a human employed in their team of 12,000+ personnel in Hyderabad (India) visit the site to determine if it’s a PBN or not. Once this happens, you’re most likely going to get caught, unless your onpage factors and site design does not smell and look like a typical PBN – a factor which is entirely up to the manual reviewer to decide. If you have an analytics like statcounter installed in your website – you may notice this visit to your site from Google Bangalore.
At this point you can do nothing really. The manual reviewer goes through their checklist of items and then buckets your site as a PBN or not.
At the same time, all the other potentially related sites connected to this PBN are also detected and pushed for manual verification. They find this my seeing any footprint that is left behind by way of backlinks.
The algorithm zig-zags its way up and down your PBN network through money page backlinks, and then back up to another PBN as shown below.
The only way you can pad this is by doing a lot of (OBL) link padding and linking out to many other sites also from each PBN and not just your money site. That confuses the Google PBN detection crawler as you create noise and it has a lot of data and backlinks that look normal, and hence the rest of your PBN is able to hide from it.
However, if the footprint you left for the initial PBN site or set of PBN sites is common across your entire PBN – then you are going to get detected by the crawler and your sites are going to go into the manual review. There’s nothing you can do about that really.
Leaving a footprint is the worst possible move you can do in this game. There’s a whole set of footprints that you need to ensure that you don’t leave behind. These are all very important.
Leaving any one footprint could prove fatal as that’s enough for Google to send its PBN detection crawler to inspect all your other footprints or do a manual review on your PBN sites.
What is a Footprint?
Put simply, any factor that remains common across your PBN site network – that can be seen publicly and that can be identified and processed by Google or an algorithm.
It could be an onpage factor, a common plugin, some DNS setting, some IP, some text on the page, the hosting account you use, some common backlink pattern etc.
If you leave a footprint, chances are the algorithm will swoop down on all your PBNs eventually. Every footprint has some sort of severity meter attached to it and there are higher risk footprints and lower risk footprints.
The more severe your footprint or the more number of footprints – the more danger your PBN faces to be deindexed.
The Do-Not-Do Footprint Checklist
Here’s a list of things you should NOT do and be very careful of -- one wrong move and you could lose your entire PBN
Hosting Footprints
using the same registrar
registering all domain on same date
common email across all domain
common who is on all domains
try not to use custom name servers all the time– bad IP neighbourhood
bad nameserver neighbourhood
common name servers on multiple sites in PBN
SOA shows your common email address (when doing shared hosting the hosting company SOA appears)
Excessive Cloud CDN (cloudflare)
Site Setup Footprints
Mass redirection via 404 of all pages
Extreme Bot blocking (may be an issue, not too critical)
Same plugins on all sites
Same Theme on all sites
Using Same Analytics
Using same Affiliate code (if affiliate sites)
Similar robots.txt files / blocking same crawlers (use haccess instead as it cannot be read)
Using same author name on all sites
Quick 2 minute setup sites with not much work into them
Site Content Footprints
All posts link to money site
No outbound links to authority sites
No internal page linking / cross linking
All posts have similar number of words (500)
Content is badly spun or duplicate
Not having Pages (only having posts)
Exact number of posts on all sites
Same images and media on all sites
Sites missing contact us, privacy policy, T&C pages
Posts on site made on same day
Site Linking Footprints
Always inserting a link in first post on all sites
Using same number of links to money site
Using too many non-relevant sites as compared to the money site
Linking out to same money site
Linking between PBN sites
Using too much of exact match keyword links
Summary
As seen, it takes a lot of work to put together a PBN. It isn't that difficult, just tedious and all your hard work can be undone quite easily. At the end of the day it's easier and more cost effective to simply go to a Professional Private Blog Network.
