A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites which you own or control that you can use to build links to your money sites (the site you want to rank in search engines). PBNs are considered blackhat, but at the end I will show you a whitehat PBN method.
It's completely against Googles guidelines so it's important that throughout the process of building your PBN we do our best to hide footprints that can link the websites we build back to us. I will cover this throughout the guide.
Basically when complete you own a collection of high authority websites which you can put links on to your money sites so they rank.
We want to achieve a number of websites completely unconnected to each other that link back to your money site. It's extremely important we don't link them together and form some sort of shitty SEO "link wheel" like we used to do in 2011. They need to be completely standalone and look like natural links that we can use to send the authority they have right to our money site.
What makes a good PBN?
A good PBN has the following qualities:
- Lots of sites, 20-30 as a minimum
- Authoritative, powerful domains with killer niche relevant back links
- No footprints (I'll cover these later)
- Natural looking websites with regularly published content
If you nail these points you're well on your way to success, but as simple as these points sound it's difficult to do in scale while maintaining control, managing updates, content creation and everything else that comes from a PBN.
If you are completely new to SEO the great thing about PBNs is they are NOT hard to build. It's more about putting the work in than knowing all the latest and greatest tech SEO developments. If you can keep yourself organised, don't mind grinding away for long hours for long term results and know your way around WordPress you have everything you need skill wise.
Advantages of a PBN
There are a lot of advantages to a PBN, such as:
- You own the niche, if you build a powerful PBN you can pretty much rank your money sites for anything you want.
- You have complete control over your back link profile, anchor text, volume of links you get, velocity they are built,
- You know you won't lose links in the future.
- They are incredibly effective.
- Scalability, want higher ranks? Build more sites!
Disadvantages of a PBN
- Cost. If you have less than $2500 I seriously wouldn't bother, just find a good PBN provider and buy links.
- Time consuming. Think of all the time you dedicate to keeping your money site running, then multiply it by how many domains you want in your PBN.
- Difficult to manage and organise. You're going to have 60+ domain registrars, hosting passwords, email accounts, VCC's and everything else. It can get too much at times.
- This is blackhat, overnight you can see your investment disappear if you get this wrong.
- Very steep learning curve, very difficult to do correctly.
You can rank quickly and efficiently when you get it right, going from nowhere to top 20 in a week or two for high volume medium competition keywords is not unusual at all. Don't get me wrong, they are not a miracle cure, you still need to build a good website and get everything else correct when doing this but you can get some red panty night results from PBNs but you got to put in the work.