We all know by now that PBN’s are one of the best SEO strategies available to us. Unfortunately, it’s a lot less effective than it used to be… however, by taking these steps you can avoid 99% of the common pitfalls that screw your efforts up.
While I don’t have anything against churn and burn (more power to you), I am personally of the belief that creating a useful, informative PBN is a far better strategy than having to create a new site every few months to a year.
Do shitty PBN sites work? Yeah, sometimes.
Should you still build them?
They work, but for how long? Frankly, it’s pretty stupid to think such an effective strategy is going to last forever.
You bet your last dime that Google is working on a way to weed out these expired/auctioned off domains to try and uncover networks – especially ones that are sold on BlackHatWorld, or other public forums and websites.
Every time a link building strategy gains traction, people abuse them until they’re just not effective anymore.
… it’s also the reason I have a very private list of websites that allow posting with little to no moderation.
They haven’t been spammed to death.
And if I ever do release a special list, it will be to a small and trusted group of people.
… but if you do it right, you can reap the rewards for years to come.
For example, guest blog posts got abused. Then they got penalized. But do they still work? Yes, if they’re not blatant garbage just for the purpose of getting a link… or networks that are blatant content farms.
The solution is to build your own PBN, and preferably choose domains that can atleast somewhat relate to your money site topic.
Like I said before, building a quality money site is probably the way to go here.
Firstly because then you can concentrate all your link juice on a few money pages. And secondly, because it doesn’t look spammy linking to websites that might be in completely different niches.
If your money sites ARE in the same niches, then by all means, link to it from your PBN several times… but don’t do it over and over again on different sites because it is a blatantly obvious footprint that’ll get you caught – either now or in the future.
Remember, your PBN sites are an INVESTMENT that help you make money. Treat them with respect and they’ll make you money for years to come…
So how exactly do you build a proper PBN that’ll last for years?
When I first discovered PBN sites when I was an SEO noob, I didn’t really know what exactly that entailed.
I was thinking to myself why weren’t they just called “normal” websites? They’re just sites that you own that are linking back to another site.
But after stumbling onto them after researching a competitor’s link profile, and coming across these poor quality sites through services on BHW, I realized 99% of them were complete and utter trash.
And they DEFINITELY put you at risk of getting de-indexed or penalized (your money site included, no matter how good the content is).
Yes, they actually worked and definitely pushed me up on some competitive keywords.
… but if you want to sleep safe and sound at night knowing your income won’t dry up the moment you get caught… you need to take precautions.
The easiest way for me to explain how to make a “proper” PBN is…
To make it just as good as a REAL website.
Yes, it takes a bit longer. But the investment is worth it, especially if you care about quality over quantity.
But before I go onto explaining how to make your money site look legit, there are a few things you need to take into consideration. I’ve read a lot about PBN sites over the past years, and they all seem to focus on getting the right domains, avoiding footprints and whatnot.
However, nothing I’ve read so far explains any methodology of creating a USEFUL PBN site (and quickly).
With that, here is what I’m talking about:
- Before you spend time on a PBN, make sure your investment is worth it. How? By choosing high metric PBN domains… how you get them is an article for another day, but I typically choose sites based on Majestic metics, because its easy to filter. Keep in mind that Majestic is a third party metric, so obviously it should be used as a guideline only. Once you find domains over a good threshold (like 17+ Trust Flow), they are the ones I take more time with. Buying from resellers or auctions is also a good choice.
- Buy high metric domains and do your due diligence. Due diligence includes checking archive.org for spam, checking previous anchor text ratios to make sure it wasn’t penalized in the past, and checking if the links from previous authorities are still live.
- Again, buying websites with outrageously good link profiles also cuts your costs down tremendously long term… not to mention your sanity of having to manage different registrar accounts and hosting platforms. I really don’t know why people feel the need to make like 50-100+ PBN sites all at once. If you’re one of the big boys making over 100k per year, then I think this is a cost you can bear with a VA on hand. But if you’re just a small player at the moment, it’s not worth it to own so many domains and risk losing them constantly.
And a few tips on making your content look presentable and not spammy for your PBN.
- Use lists or tables in the content
- Use sub-headings in the content
- Repetition of important phrases between sections of content
- Article-specific organization in categories
And lastly, don’t use spun nonsense. I warned people about 2 years ago that were diehard spun content users on valuable domains that it would come back and bite them in the ass.
And guess what, in February it did… with a vengeance. People are calling it the “Phantom” update, but I know plenty of people got knocked back several pages or got deindexed because the websites were clearly rubbish to human readers.
After extensive research, there are a huge number of footprints that can give away your network and expose them for what they really are (to search engines – users are another matter). We’ll talk about those very soon!
Just a few quick reasons:
- Google is taking longer and longer to take links into account. Obviously, if it’s going to cost you time to get things ranking, then you might as well make it a long term investment. “Measure twice, cut once”.
- You can get real, natural links too. Do I really need to explain why this is good? Yes? Okay. Unless you want to constantly fight an uphill battle to get links to your money sites, then actually taking the time to research, and create high quality content can also get you natural social shares and links too. This also comes in handy when you need to cover your tracks and hide your PBN’s among many good links too.
- Google is taking quality into account with algorithms like Panda. PBN’s with poor quality content will get poor quality traffic. In fact, Gary Illyes recently mentioned that thin content will get lower quality traffic. Although this has yet to be put to the test, I can see how this would potentially impact PBN’s… if you had a crappy 300 word, spun piece of garbage linking out to your site (along with links to ugg boots and viagra), then you have a problem – it becomes a low quality link, despite the fact the domain might have “authority links” pointing to it.