Most SEOs understand the importance of setting up a PBN inappropriate manner, with the right processes it requires, and the potential risks involved. This article is meant to guide you on how best to set up a PBN with the lowest possible risk of being discovered and possibly getting de-indexed from the search engines. PBNs can lead to ranking losses, or even manual penalty if they are not properly setup.
And PBNs can also provide a great boost to your money site when done properly and serves a long-term value to your websites.
But before we proceed, let us try to explain what a PBN is all about, for those who are probably hearing it for the very first time.
What is A PBN?
PBN, which stands for Private Blog Network, is a network of blogs that you have absolute control over and of which, you want to build links back to your money site. The money site refers to your main website which you want to rank higher in the search engines.
It is typically created with expired domains that already have great backlinks, and these domains help to pass high authority to your money site, through the acquired links and help to rank it higher in the search engines.
PBNs affords you complete control of all backlinks since you are the owner of the blogs linking back to your money site.
Does PBN actually work?
As long as backlinks remain the most important search engine ranking factor, their acquisition at all costs is often worth it.
If you’re serious about improving your site ranking on Google, you’ll need to acquire a lot of good backlinks. PBNs offer a shortcut to acquiring quality backlinks in a great number without having to pay an arm and a leg or undergoing some tedious tasks that are typically required for link building.
Building PBNs is cheaper and faster, and the best part is that you have complete control over how often or how many links you want for your money-site.
5 Tips to Build A Great Private Blog Network
PBNs gathered a lot of steam in 2014, but afterward, Google penalized a few private blog networks, making it die down due to some bad practices. However, modern SEOs now understand that it takes some tactics to build quality PBNs that will be much tougher for Google to find out.
1. Get Expired Domains
Expired domains are preferable for PBNs as they have been online and most expired domains have already accumulated SEO-friendly backlinks.
These Expired domains have SEO power, which means they can be ranked easily on Google. And getting indexed is much faster, even as soon as the site is live, and some expired domains already have traffic.
PBNs built using expired domains work great and many are still working today, however, you must consider the other tactics below if you want to build a great PBN.
2. Multiple IP Hosting
PBN requires a multiple IP hosting provider (for instance, SeekaHost) to host the websites and blogs owned by the same person. This helps to ensure that the search engines do not notice that they are all under the same network.
Also, getting unique IPs from different data center servers around the world is mandatory, so that you can pick where exactly you want your site to be hosted.
You’ll be able to pick multiple IPs from VPS, shared, or even dedicated servers to host your PBNs.
3. Use A CMS to build your PBN
The use of a content management system (CMS) for PBNs is very important and can benefit your site in many ways. And WordPress is perhaps the best and most popular of CMSes, because of its user-friendliness and usability. Although, you’ll equally find that most other content management systems can offer you the same or even more benefits.
CMS will allow you to easily input SEO values even if you’ve never worked with code before and it’s easy to update and much more productive.
4. Create Quality Content
Most of the time, PBNs are detected due to low-quality content, as many SEOs fail to ensure their private blog networks are provided with quality content.
So, if you want a credible private blog network, it is very important to make sure that the content is of high quality and won’t raise any flags for the search engines to penalize it.
You need to have unique and valuable content on each of the websites and there should be no spun content on your PBN, treat it with the same respect as your money site and invest in quality content.
5. Build Niche-focused PBNs
Niche-focused PBNs always give the best SEO boost to linking money websites. So, make sure you build your PBNs within a niche and if possible same niche as the original site hosted with the expired domain.
And always remember that just because they are referred to as private blog networks doesn’t mean you should try to hide them from search engines.
You should publish the blogs in a way that they’ll be acting as privately owned and hosted for many people on the web.
Conclusion
In the end, how you go about building your PBNs will determine the results and if you want to use PBNs, you must know that there are also cons for your website’s SEO.
However, legitimate pros do exist, but only if you follow the provided guidance. While traditional strategies will always take longer, and they aren’t nearly as risky. But you’ll most definitely be able to generate quick domain authority with PBN SEO.