What is a PBN?

PBN is short for “private blog network”.

As the name suggests, a PBN is a network of blogs built with the sole purpose of linking back to your money site(s) in order to increase your organic rankings in the SERPs.

A PBN is usually build on aged domains that can pass A LOT of link equity to your money site(s).

Domains with clean and powerful backlink profiles , decent metrics (DR or DA), clean histories and no spammy anchor profiles.

In this guide we will tell you exactly where to find those domains, how to analyze them and how to create a footprint free site on them.

But be warned.

Private blog networks are not for everybody. While there are a lot of benefits to owning your own PBN, there are also risks involved.

pbn links

Why you should own a PBN

As you may know, Google’s algorithm still uses link signals as one of their main ranking factors.

Perficientdigital did a great study on this topic. They analyzed over 27000 queries over the past few years and found a high correlation between links and the respective ranking position in the SERPs.

And contextual in-content links are probably the most powerful of them all, as they are embedded into topically relevant content.

For the past few years Google has been loving these type of links.

You know, guest posts, link insertions, digitla PR, editorials and of course…. PBNs!

Now just imagine having a network of high authority domains that you can leverage for contextual and relevant links at the click of a button? A network where you have control over what goes where and how you link out to your sites. A network that is able to pass instant link equity and authority to your money site(s).

Sounds pretty good, huh? That’s exactly what a true PBN can do for you.

However, building and using a PBN is not without risks. If you are not extremely cautious with how you build your PBN, you will regret it rather sooner than later.

Google is always on the lookout to de-index the next biggest blog network and penalize all the sites that received links from it.

Remember BMR or ALN? They go de-indexed over night.

So in this following sections you will learn how to get your own PBN, starting with how to find suitable PBN domains and ending with the most common footprints.

Pros and Cons of Owning a PBN

Pros and Cons of Owning a PBN

Benefits of Your Own PBN Risks of Having Your Own PBN
You Control the Narrative: Owning a PBN allows you to dictate the narrative around your main site(s) through the content published across your network. Penalty Risk: The primary risk of using a PBN is the potential for Google penalties. Being detected can result in lost rankings. It’s absolutely vital to avoid all footprints.
You Control the Links: You can decide which sites to link to, the anchor text used, and the timing of these links, offering strategic advantages in SEO. High Maintenance Costs: Requires significant investment in domains, hosting, content creation, and ongoing management to avoid detection. However, the investment can be justified by the SEO benefits.
You Control the Content: Content can be tailored to support your SEO goals, ensuring relevance and quality. Time and Resource Intensive: Needs a considerable amount of time and resources for maintenance and secrecy. Proper setup can significantly reduce maintenance efforts.
You Can Avoid All Footprints: With careful management, you can minimize the digital footprints that make PBNs detectable by search engines, thus protecting your main site’s rankings.
You Have Full Control Over Everything: From site design to backlink profile, you have complete control over every aspect of the network.
You Own the Domains: Secures your investment and control over these valuable assets.

How to find domains for your PBN

Use A PBN vendor

First, let’s start with the PBN domains, as these are the backbone of your network.

The easiest way to get a high authority PBN domain is from a domain vendor.

They filtered through thousands and thousands of expiring domains, analyzed the backlink profile, the histories and noted down all the important metrics.

Is it more expensive? Yes, but it will also save hours of research. There are many vendors to try, like Odys.Global, DomainCoasters and of course SEOlutions … 😉

Browse our huge list of expired and aged domains to find your next killer-domain. Simply join our discord to download the list

  • Over 7000 domains available
  • Filterable Metrics (DR/DA/TLD/PRICE/RD)
  • Top TLDs and ccTLDs.
  • Easy transfer process (24-48 hours)
  • Competitive prices
BROWSE DOMAINS

Find PBN domains on your own

On the flipside, you can also look for domains yourself.

One of the easiest ways is to use https://www.expireddomains.net/

It’s a free platform that allows you to browse through almost all big listings of domains at different stages of their expiring process at big domain marketplaces like GoDaddy, Namecheap, Dynadot, etc.

Domain Auction Period

The first stage at which you can bid on domains is the auction period. This is the best time to snap some really good domains for your PBN, as you can bid on them early in the expiration cycle.

Keep in mind, that there are many registrars listed on expireddomains.net, but GoDaddy is probably one of the biggest. As you can see from the screenshot below, there are a ton of domains (500k+) you can bid on. If you click on “Bid” you will be forwarded to the auction page for that domain, where you can submit your bids.

You can browse through them here: https://member.expireddomains.net/domains/godaddyexpired/?o=bids&r=d#listing

Closeout Period

If the domain name is not sold at auction, it is referred to as a clouseout domain.

Closeout domains can be purchased right away for a fixed price (“buy now”) which is usually quite affordable. They are available for up to 5 days and there are literally hundreds of thousands of sites available to choose from. These are not the best of the best, but sometimes you can still find a nice domain in there.

Go Daddy Clouseout Domains – https://member.expireddomains.net/domains/godaddycloseouts/

Pending Delete Period

If a domain hasn’t been sold during an auction or closeout it will move into the pending delete stage. During this period, the previous domain owner can no longer renew the domain and the domain is scheduled to be deleted within 5 days. It will definitely become available after those 5 days for anyone.

Now before the domain becomes available to the public again, you can use a so called dropcatch or backorder service to be the first to register the domain once it drops.

These backorder services automatically register expiring domains to the highest bidder as soon as they become available. They use highly advanced and super fast methods to register a domain as soon as it gets dropped from the registrar.

You can see all pending delete, backorder and dropcatch auctions here:

Good dropcatch services are:

Deleted Period

If no one snaps the domain during any of these stages and no backorders have been placed, the domain will be deleted from the registrar and it becomes available to the public again.

Anyone can now register it for free.

The domain has officially dropped from the registry.

At this point in time, there are usually not a lof of good domains left, as many PBN vendors start acquiring them during the auction, clouseout or pending delete stages.

But if you’re lucky they missed a great domain that exactly suits your needs.

You can browse through all the deleted domains here:

How to analyze PBN Domains

Check Domain History

We want to make sure, that our PBN domain comes with a clean history.

This basically means, that

  • The domain has never been used as a PBN or 301
  • The domain has no history of being used for shady niches like porn, pharma, gambling, spam.
  • It is still indexed (ideal, but not a necessity)

Check Archive.org

Next we want to see how the domain looked in previous iterations.

We will use https://archive.org for this.

Archive.org is basically a way to see how a domain looked like at any given point in time. After you enter your domain URL you’ll see all the captured records of the site throughout time.

In the case of our .co.uk domain, we see that there are 87 records of the site going back the past 16 years.

That’s a great aged domain with a lot of active use.

Now you want to click on the little circles for each year to check how the site looked in the past.

For our sample domain, we can see that it has never been used as a PBN before and that  there are no indications of spammy techniques being used in the past.

Domain history – CHECK.

Ultimate PBN Guide 1

Check Trademarks

The next step is to see if there are any active trademarks that may apply for the domain name.

Nothing sucks more than having a company send you a cease & desist letter, only because you neglected to check for trademarks.

Each country has their own trademark register.  We recommend to search for both word and image trademarks in all these registers.

For our .co.uk domain we didn’t find any active trademark matches in any register, perfect.

Domain Trademarks – CHECK.

Ultimate PBN Guide 2

Check The Link Profile Of The Domain

Now we get to the most valuable part of the domain analyis.

The analysis of the link and anchor profile.

In the old days we could use Google’s very own internal rating factor called Pagerank (PR) to determine how powerful a domain is. Unfortunately, Pagerank was discontinued back in 2016 and is no longer visible to the public.

Since then, most SEOs started to rely on new third party metrics to determine the value of a domain, namely:

  • Domain Rating (DR) – Ahrefs main domain metric to evaluate the authority of a domain.
  • Domain Authority (DA) – MOZ’s main domain metric to evaluate the authority of a domain.
  • Trust Flow (TF) – Majestics main domain metric to evaluate the authority of a domain.

These metrics can give you a solid idea of how powerful a domain really is. Typically it goes: The higher the metric, the stronger the domain.

BUT, you should take all of these metrics with a grain of salt. While they can offer you a baseline to filter out a lot of crappy domains, they can be artificially manipulated.

So if you find a site with a great DR, you still have to check the link profile to see where the power comes from. Personally, we like to use the following baseline metrics for our PBN domains:

  • RD50+
  • DR10+
  • DA10+

We think Ahrefs DR is currently the most advanced to determine the value of a domain. But DA is also a decent indicator.

But what we are really interested in is the link profile of the domain. 

So let’s take a look at a hypothetical .co.uk domain.

We use Ahrefs as our tool of trade. Right away we see the following metrics.

  • A domain rating (DR) of 22
  • 4400 Backlinks from 177 Referring Domains
  • 90%+ DoFollow links and no drops in RDs over the past years.

Not bad. Let’s dig deeper and check out the 177 root domains.

Ultimate PBN Guide 3

Check the Referring Domains

We click on “referring domains” and sort those by “DR“.

As you can see on the screenshot below, this site has a LOT of links from authority domains like theguardian, independent, blogs.com etc.

Sweet!

Now let’s see how many of those are contextual and dofollow. 

Ultimate PBN Guide 4

Check the Link Types

Click on “backlinks” and choose “link type: content” and “one unique link per domain“. Sort by “DR“.

This will show you the unique contextual links pointed to the domain.

This site in particular has 103 powerful (high DR) contextual links from unique domains.

We also checked the other link types and didn’t see any clear blog comment spam, forum profile or heavily automated links.

This is a GREAT link profile that can pass a lot of link juice to your site.

Let’s check out where those links were mostly pointed at.

Ultimate PBN Guide 5

Check the Link Targets

We click on “best by links” and sort by “referring domains“.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the majority of the links are pointed to the www. version of the homepage. A few others are pointed to the root domain. And some are going to inner pages.

This is great news for us, as we don’t have to re-create a lot of inner pages.

All we have to do is set up the site and redirect the root to the www. version of the homepage via htaccess. And re-create the few inner pages that have some active links, too. Easy.

All that’s left for us to do is to make sure that the domain has a clean and well diversified anchor text profile and that no spammy (porn, pharma, gambling) anchors have been used in the past.

Ultimate PBN Guide 6

Check the Link Anchors

We click on “anchors” and sort by “referring domains“. This gives us a quick overview of the anchor text profile

We see that the brand name has been used 114 times as their main anchor text.

The rest of the times naked or raw URL anchors were used.

There are only a handful of exact match anchors that have been used (<10%) and we don’t see any spammy anchors at all. This looks perfect!

Ultimate PBN Guide 7

This is a sample domain that has it all.

  • Great age (16+ years)
  • A clean history with no active trademarks
  • An incredible link profile with over 100 contextual (dofollow) links from high authority websites.
  • Almost all of the link point to the homepage, making it very easy to replicate the URL structure and pass the link equity.
  • A squeeky clean anchor profile.

It would be a perfect domain for our PBN.

Now in the next section we go over the most common footprints that we see with PBNs.

PBN Footprints (and how to avoid them)

So what have we learned so far?

  • We learned about the pros and cons of owning a PBN.
  • We learned where and how to find suitable relevant PBN domains.
  • We learned how to analyze these domains to make sure they are a good fit for our PBN.

What’s left?

Ah yeah, the footprints. 

These are common factors that Google could use to identify your PBN and penalize it / deindex it. So make sure to read on learn how to build a zero-footprint PBN.

Footprint #1 - Hosting

Hosting is the bread and butter of any PBN.

Where and how you host your PBN domains is probably THE most important step when building your network.

You need a robust, safe and footprint free solution. And in our opinion, there’s only one true way to host your PBN sites and that is cloud hosting.

Why is cloud hosting the best for PBNs?

Because only cloud hosting offers truely unique and dedicated A, B and C-class IPs.

What does that mean?

Typically an IP address is split into different blocks:  AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD.

It may look like this: 145.132.13.94

We don’t want our PBN domains to be hosted in the same C, D class clusters and we don’t want to share this IP with any other website. That would be a huge footprint and that’s how a lot of PBN have been de-indexed the past.

What we are looking for instead is one unique IP address with different A,B and C blocks for each PBN site. IP diversity is absolute key for a footprint free PBN. We can’t stress that enough.

It should look like this:

  • PBN Domain A hosted on IP 145.132.13.94
  • PBN Domain B hosted on IP 65.62.209.173
  • PBN Domain C hosted on IP 49.42.219.174

Cloud hosting can offer us this IP diversity, as we can host each domain on a unique droplet with a unique IP address from a different datacenter with unique A,B,C-blocks. There are absolutely zero footprints with this hosting approach.

  • Is it more expensive? Yes.
  • Is it harder to set up? Of course.
  • Is it worth it? You bet!

We can highly recommend Digital Ocean, Vultr and Linode as your main hosts. 

If you want, you can sign up over our affiliate links to get a bit of hosting credit:

Here’s the link: Digital Ocean (*affiliate link)

Here’s the link: VULTR (*affiliate link)

Setting up WordPress is pretty easy with their one-click apps.

https://www.vultr.com/docs/one-click-wordpress

Avoid These Hosting Providers for your PBN (!!)

Shared Hosting

Shared hosts are your typical provider like Hostgator, Siteground etc.

While shared hosts have the advantage of “hiding in plain sight”, they are incredibly hard to scale and there’s no real way to ensure real IP diversity, unless you get separate servers for each PBN domain.

In addition, the prices are about the same as cloud hosting (or more), so there’s no real benefit here.

Our recommendation: They can work, but it’s hard to scale and manage.

PBN Hosting

There are many so called “PBN hosting” companies out there trying to lure you in with cheap prices and sell you on footprint free PBN hosting.

But what many of those won’t tell you, is that you will share the same droplet (and thus the same IP) with many other PBN sites.

This in itself is a huge footprint. But it’s how they can offer those competitive prices.

VPS / SEO Hosting

This has been the go-to approach in the past for many. Renting a VPS, buying a bunch of IPs (mostly C-Class) and hosting all the sites on the same server trying to mask the real IP.

This will get your network de-indexed and your site’s penalized sooner rather than later.

 

Footprint #2 - Registrars

While using only one registrar for all your PBN domains is not a footprint in itself, it can’t hurt to diversify. Godaddy is the biggest registrar around with millions of domains. You can easily hide in plain sight by just using GoDaddy. BUt we recommend to spread out a bit.

You can save a lot of money by spreading your PBN domains over several registrars, as all of them run different promos throughout the year.

Our top choices are:

These are really all you need. But you can see all ICANN registrars incl. the domain registered with them here: https://features.icann.org/compliance/registrars-list

We wouldn’t recommend to go with the smaller ones (<500k domains), though. You want to hide in plain sight. So if you use a dropcatch service like Dropcatch.com or Snapnames.com, we recommend to transfer the domain to a bigger registrar from our list above. While those are great dropcatch services, they are relatively small registrars, so it can leave a footprint.

Whatever you do, don’t register your domains at the same date. Spread them out a bit.

Our recommendation: Use different registrars and spread out the registration date of your domain.

Footprint #3 - Whois Privacy

Before GDPR it would’ve been a huge footprint to have all of your sites with private WHOIS. After all, real businesses use real addresses.

After GDPR, it has become a privilege. Most registrars offer it for free now, as privacy has become a huge issue these days.

As such it is no longer a footprint to have private WHOIS on all your domains.  At least one positive thing that came out of that GDPR clusterf*ck.

Our recommendation: Use private WHOIS on your PBN domain as often as possible

Keep in mind, that not all TLDs offer privacy.

Footprint #4 - Nameservers

Nameservers basically tell your browser where a website is located. If someone types in seolutionsguide.com into the address field of their browser, these nameservers respond back to that request with the IP address 167.172.150.220, subsequently loading the website.

All the cloud hosting providers we mentioned above offer their own nameservers that you can use, for example Digital Ocean has the following nameservers.

  • ns1.digitalocean.com
  • ns2.digitalocean.com
  • ns3.digitalocean.com

By using these nameservers you will blend in with thousands of other websites. We don’t recommend to use custom nameservers like ns1.pbndomain.com, ns2.pbndomain.com, those can leave a footprint.

Our recommendation: Use the nameservers provided by the big cloud hosting companies to blend in with the crowd.

Footprint #5 - Blocking Bots

Many people like to block the big web crawlers like Ahrefs, DataForSEO, MOZ, Majestic et al., as they are scared that people may find their PBN and report it to Google.

But think about it rationally, how many real websites do this kind of stuff? Not too many.

Then why would you actively try to block out crawlers when over 90% of the net doesn’t?

In our opinion actively blocking bots via plugins like SpiderBlocker (ugh..) is the actual footprint here.

And if you know how Ahrefs crawler works, it makes it redundant to block it anyway.

What you can do is to block certain IP ranges via .htaccess. But finding up to date IP lists is quite hard and they are usually very pricey.

Our recommendation: Don’t block bots. It’s really not necessary.

Footprint #6 - Not rebuilding inner pages

To make the most out of your PBN domains, you want to rebuild the internal pages that have valuable links pointed to them (remember how we checked best by links in the analyis part).

Keep in mind that you have to re-create them with the exact same URL structure.

So if the internal page is domain.com/blog/how-to-fix-a-leaky-pipe/ you would need to create a new page or post on your PBN domain with that exact same URL structure.

You should always add a fresh, unique and relevant 500-1500 word article to these recreated pages and add an internal link to your PBN homepage. This will let the link juice flow freely.

We don’t recommend to use the content from previous iterations of the page. Some people like to grab the content from the archive.org records, but this can lead to copyright issues down the road.

Another option is to 301 redirect all the internal pages that have links pointed to them to a new post on your PBN domain or your PBN homepage. We would only recommend this if there are not a lot of internal pages (<10). Otherwise it’s better to rebuild the URL structure and pass juice to your PBN hompage via internal linking.

To do that you can use the plugin Redirection.

Our recommendation: Only rebuild the most important inner pages (use fresh content or even content hubs) or 301 them to the homepage. Don’t 301 every single URL or 404 pages to the homepage.

Footprint #7 - Themes

Having the same theme with the same layout on all your PBN domains can leave a big footprint.

You want to diversify by using a mix of free and premium themes.

There are many free themes available for WordPress. However, if you want to stick to free themes we recommend to pair them with a site builder like Elementor or Bricks

They allow you to customize almost any theme to create stunning PBN sites that can easily pass a manual review. While they offer a decent free version, we highly recommend that you go and opt for the PRO version

The best free themes that work perfectly with Elementor are Astra, GeneratePress, OceanWP. But you can find even more suggestions here: https://elementor.com/free-wordpress-themes/

Footprint #8 - Design

Whatever you do, make sure that your PBN site looks like a real website.

A website that can pass through a manual review.

You want to avoid the typical PBN look: An ugly ass free theme with default sidebars, 30 full content blog posts on the homepage, no logo, no menu, no contact page, no privacy policy, no cookie notice etc. You know the type of site we are talking about… right? It’s a dead giveaway and easy pick’ems for any manual reviewer.

All of your PBN sites should have unique layouts, custom sidebars, different stock images, different categories, URL structures. 

With modern page builders you really only need a few themes + plugins to build unique sites.

Don’t want to do it yourself? Outsource to us

PBN SETUP

Let our experts build a PBN for you.

  • PBN Server Setup: Full server setup and configuration on your own Digital Ocean or Vultr account. Dedicated IPs and datacenter for each domain, ensuring zero footprints.
  • PBN Site Setup: Fast, popular themes customized with Elementor Pro (license included). Unique design that fits the topical niche. All necessary legal pages, cookie banners. Thematically relevant.
  • Rebuilding inner pages: We rebuild or 301 up to 3 inner pages to pass the link equity directly to your site.
  • Premium content: Well-written content for all pages. Plus two blog posts on top.
  • Footprint Check: Full footprint check based on internal guidelines.
  • White Label: Comprehensive report with all necessary logins and passwords.
ORDER HERE

Footprint #9 - Thin or Scraped Content

A few years ago Google introduced the so called “thin content penalty” as part of their Webmaster Guidelines.

You may have heard that more and more PBN owners started to see these “thin content” messages in their Google Search Console.

Not without reason.

Thin content (scraped, automated, spun) can be a huge footprint that you absolutely have to avoid.

The times of scraping content, running it through a content spinner and slapping it on your PBNs is over. That may have worked in the past, but with the current iteration of the core algorithm it will send you straight into the depths of penalty hell.

What you want to do is handle the content for your PBNs with utmost care. After all your private blog network site is basically a mini-money site.

The PBN content should be well written (if possible by a native speaker) with search intent and relevance to your niche. In addition it should vary in length (500-2000 words) and some of the blog posts should not link out to your money site.

Our recommendation: We highly recommend that you don’t cheap out on content. Go for AI or even better original content.

Footprint #10 - Not building links to your PBNs

Real websites gain and lose links all the time.

It’s a natural process.

As such, we highly recommend to build a few links to your PBNs.

Not only can this increase your rankings by passing more link juice to your site, it also creates a natural link velocity for your PBN domain. This in itself can eliminate a footprint.

You can read more about suitable tier 2 link sources in our link building guide.

Our recommendation: Build a few links to your PBN domains. This can increase your rankings even further (tier 2 linking) and creates a natural link velocity.

Footprint #11 - Using Google Docs, Analytics and Search Console

We don’t want Google to know about our PBN.

So it would be completely irrational to use any service offered by Google on our PBN sites.

In addition all of those are redundant for PBN sites, as we don’t need Analytics anyway. T

his is still a PBN site, not an actual money site. So data is not imperative.

In addition, we wouldn’t recommend to use Google Docs for anything involving your PBN, be that for managing purposes or content creation.

Maybe a bit too much paranoia? Who knows.

Our recommendation: Don’t let your PBN near anything that is owned or operated by Google. Use Excel and Word instead.

Footprint #12 - No Logo

This one is easy to avoid. A logo is a big branding signal.

All of your PBN sites should have a logo or at least a branding signal. You can use MidJourney, ChatGPT or even options like Canva to create a stunning logo within seconds.

Our recommendation: Add a real and different logo to every PBN site.

Footprint #13 - No Legal Pages / Cookies

In times of GDPR all real websites need a proper privacy policy and terms of service page. Your PBN site is no exception.

You can use a free generator plugin like WP Autoterms to generate a privacy policy and ToS for your PBN site.

You are currently viewing a placeholder content from Default. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.

More Information

Another option would be the plugin from Complianz.io (they have a free one and a paid one).

Your site should also have an active cookie banner.

You can use a free plugin like Cookie Notice for this.

You are currently viewing a placeholder content from Default. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.

More Information

Our recommendation: Add a privacy policy, terms of service and cookie banner to your PBN site.

Footprint #13 - No Key Inner Pages (Contact, About, etc.)

Every website should have a good contact page with at least 200-300 words of content and a proper form that actually works.

They are really simple to set up by using the free version of WPforms.

You are currently viewing a placeholder content from Default. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.

More Information

Also don’t forget about the “about us” / “about our company” page. Make sure that you use random names, e.g. /about-us/, /about-me/, /about-our-company/ etc. pp. and that you use at least 200-300 words of content on the about us page.

In addition, you could think about adding common pages like: “Services”, “Staff”, “FAQ” and “Advertise with us”, as many real websites have those too.

Our recommendation: Add a contact us and about us page to your PBN site.

Footprint #14 - Internal Linking

Internal linking is huge. Real sites use it to let link juice flow freely through the website.

We’ve wrote about internal linking in-depth in our Local SEO Guide: Use internal links to create topical relevance

It is one of the most overlooked techniques in the entire realm of SEO to create topical relevance for your website.

If your PBN has no internal links, it leaves a huge footprint. Also if you re-created some inner pages that have links pointed to them you absolutely NEED TO link out to your homepage or the posts that contain links to your money site to pass the juice around.

Our recommendation: Use internal linking on your PBN site.

Footprint #15 - Caching (optional)

Yep, the speed of your website can be a footprint, if you believe it or not. It makes a big difference if your PBN is hosted on a super slow $1 shithost or on a fast and reliable cloud host.

So by using cloud hosting we are already one step ahead of the competition.

To further enhance the site speed we recommend to use a caching plugin like WP-Rocket. It’s $249 / year for unlimited domains. 

But there are free options out there too that work just as well for a simple PBN site.

For example W3 Total Cache.

Our recommendation: Improve the speed of your PBN site with advanced caching plugins.

Footprint #16 - Images

We know that images are super important for the aesthetic of a website.

But whatever you do, please don’t use images you found on Google or on other websites. This alone can leave a huge footprint and even cause you legal problems down the road.

Instead you should use license free image libraries like Pixabay or Pexels.

They offer “stunning free images & royalty free stock photos”.

Our recommendation: Don’t use scraped images. Use license free images instead.

Footprint #17 - Social Profiles

While social media profiles are not absolutely necessary, they help to make your site look more legit.

Most companies and websites these days have a social media presence via a facebook page or a twitter account. So we recommend to create at least these two social media profiles for each of your private blog network domains.

Having said that, we haven’t seen any real adverse effects if you don’t use them for your PBN site.

Our recommendation: Create at least 1 or 2 social profiles (facebook, twitter, etc.) for your PBN domain.

Footprint #18 - SSL

We do not really know if Google devalues links from sites that have no SSL.

All of our PBN builds are with SSL. It’s completely free via Let’s Encrypt and easy to install (we get to that later in our step-by-step guide).

So just get one.

Our recommendation: Since SSL certificates are free now, we highly recommend to use them on all of your PBN domains.

Footprint #19 - Use the right homepage version (root vs. www)

Some sites have more links pointed to the root domain (site.com), while others have more pointed to the www. version. (www.site.com). We recommend to select only one of those, namely the one that has more authority links pointed to it and then 301 the other via htaccess. Most of the time it’ll be the root domain that is used.

Note: If you use the really simple SSL plugin, make sure to enable the 301 via htaccess in their settings, it’ll do the work for you. If you don’t you may need to use a redirect snippet in your .htaccess for the correct www/non-www redirect.

Our recommendation: Use either the non-www (root) or www. version for your domain. We recommend to use the one that has more links pointed to it and 301 the other via htaccess.

Footprint #20 - Interlinking your PBN domains

This probably warrants no explanation.

Never interlink your PBN domains. EVER.

This leaves a big footprint.

Our recommendation: Never, ever link from one PBN domain to other PBN domains you own.

Footprint #21 - Neglecting Maintenance

This is a pet peeve of ours.

Maintenance is a huge part of owning a PBN. If you don’t update your themes or plugins you run the risk of being hacked. WordPress hackers are always on the lookout for new vulnerabilities and backdoors to hack thousands of sites.

So keep your PBN domains updated, install Wordfence and keep frequent backups.

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That’ll keep you on the safe side.

We personally have a VA to handle this for us, as we have quite a few domains 😉

But for any network < 20 sites, you can easily do it yourself.

Our recommendation: Keep your PBNs updated (Themes, Plugins, etc.)

There we have it. Those are the biggest footprints we could think of for PBN owners. If we missed any, please leave a comment below and we will add it to the list.

How to use your PBN

Now that you have created a beautiful and footprint free PBN site you can start adding links.

But you should keep a few key aspects in mind.

There’s a lot of misinformation and confusion about how to link out from your PBN, so let’s clear a few of these up.

OBL = 1

This is the best and safest approach to link from your PBN to your money site.

By keeping the amount of outgoing links to only one (OBL = 1), your money site will get all the link juice and benefit greatly from it. You also reduce the risk of a link footprint.

Having said that, this is also the most expensive approach and can become quite cost-intensive as you scale your network.

This is the best and safest approach to using your PBNs.

OBL > 1

If you want to link out to more than one money site (of course this only works if you have more than one), that’s fine.

Juust make sure the money sites don’t share any footprint (hosting, DNS, email, monetization etc.).

However, we recommend to keep the OBL limited to 10-20, possibly lower.

If you link out to 30 of your money sites, the link juice is split over all of them. So use wisely.

Anchors

Over-optimized anchor profiles can lead to algorithmic and, even worse, manual penalties. As a rough guideline, your anchor text profile (for your money site) should roughly look like this:

  • Branded Anchors (see above): 70-80%
  • Generic Anchors: 8-10%
  • Longtail and Partial Phrase Matches: 5-8%
  • Exact Match: 3-5%

Personally, we’ve seen the best results when we use our PBNs for sniping exact match anchors, longtail anchors and brand + exact match variations. Don’t be afraid to use them.