The Ultimate Guide To Creating A Footprint-Free PBN
Building a PBN, or private blog network, is laborious, costly, and risky. With that said, when it’s done right, it’s well worth the effort, as link building has the best ROI in SEO. If you’re thinking of setting up a PBN for SEO link building, this guide is the best place to start.
At PBN.Hosting, we want to help our customers to successfully build safe PBNs and reap their benefits in the SERPs. So, in this guide, we give actionable insights into how to plan, set up, host, and maintain your private blog network with best practices to avoid footprints throughout. Let’s get started.
What Is A Private Blog Network?
A private blog network is a collection of high authority websites that link back to a “money site”, a domain that you own and want to help rank better in search engines.
Usually, PBNs are made up of expired domains with great backlink profiles. That is, there are plenty of authoritative, relevant, and natural-looking links to those domains placed in the content of other, related sites. The PBN domains pass this link authority to your money site, per Google’s PageRank algorithm, and therefore help it rank higher.
The key to successful private blog networks is that no one domain within it should be linked or affiliated with the other websites in the collection. A footprint, or unique identifier across a PBN, can be used to connect the sites and lead to penalization.
Are PBNs a Black Hat SEO Strategy?
Technically, yes, PBNs are a black hat strategy. However, a lot of formerly white hat strategies have become black hat over time because Google sees any kind of intentional link building as a violation of their Webmaster Guidelines. These days, that even includes paying a blogger to link to your website without disclosing it.
If Google and its manual website graders consider that the links your domain gets are unnatural, it will devalue these links. That’s the risk in building a PBN for SEO link building. But, by avoiding footprints as much as possible and using a powerful all-in-one PBN management tool like PBN.Hosting, you can minimize the chances of penalization.
Do Private Blog Networks Still Work In 2021?
The number and quality of backlinks to your site are the most important ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. By building a PBN, you can enjoy all the benefits of a quality backlink profile without having to go through the rigmarole of building natural links.
However, as mentioned above, there’s always a risk of being penalized if Google and its human website reviewers realize you’re cheating the system. The key is to ensure that your PBN sites are authoritative and that each domain within it is completely unlinked.
Are PBNs Worth It?
Building a PBN is cheaper and faster than natural link building. The conversion on link-building outreach is super low, as authoritative websites receive such a huge amount of requests for backlinks. If you do get through to a webmaster, the price of a link is likely to be way more than you can afford.
With a PBN, you have full control over your money site’s backlinks. That includes the number of backlinks you’re creating, when you want them to go live, where on the page you want the backlink, and the anchor text content.
PBNs are worth the risk and effort if your website is in an unpopular niche or one that is difficult to get natural links for; and when relevant websites are charging extortionate amounts for a link.
However, if your niche is popular and people will happily backlink your site, whether paid or for free, OR you’re not willing to risk the possibility of losing your or your client’s site, PBNs are probably not for you.
Planning Your PBN For SERP Success
Building a PBN requires an investment in money and time so it’s essential to plan correctly and set goals before you start.
- How Many PBN Links Do You Need To RankLink vs. domain quality: whether a big network of weak domains or a small network of strong domains is best depends on the number of money sites you’re targeting.If you’re running an authority site in a single niche, it’s better to have a handful of quality domains with strong metrics. As a rule, around 10 PBN links should help you rank for a medium-competition keyword.If you’re running a network of mini-sites or managing multiple client sites that you want to benefit from the PBN, you’ll need an increased number of domains.
- How Much Will A PBN Cost YouDomain CostGood domains can cost between $80 to $500 each, and really strong ones even more. If you’re creating your first PBN, a good bet is sticking around $100 per domain, but you can go for more expensive domains as you gain experience.Hosting CostHosting is an ongoing cost of around $15 to $25 per year per domain: let’s say $20 as an average.Content CostTo make the sites in your PBN look credible, you need content. You should start with at least 2 placeholder articles as well as the article linking to your money site. So that’s 3 x (at least) 500-word articles at $5 to $10 per article. It should be quality, SEO content ideally written by a native English speaker.You then need to add content regularly so that Google recognizes it as a legitimate, updated website. The minimum to keep your content fresh is one article every 5 months. A new article per site every month is better.Say you’re starting out and want to build a PBN with 10 domains and 3 articles: 10 x ($100 + $20 + $30) = $1500. Plus the recurring annual cost of hosting: ($20) and content (say 6 articles at $60) x 10 = $800.Total estimated cost for a PBN with 10 domains = $1500 set-up plus $800 per year. And that’s the bare minimum.When you factor in the cost of your time as well, it can work out better value to invest in a tool to manage your network. PBN.Hosting’s pricing plans start at just $29 per month to host, launch, post to, and monitor 10 domains. All you have to do is provide the URLs and the content.
- How To Structure Your PBNHow you structure your private blog network depends on whether you’re managing one or multiple money sites in the same niche, or multiple money sites in different niches, e.g. as a marketing agency.One or several money sites in the same niche: build one PBN of domains that are all completely independent of each other but fall into the same category of content. You’ll link to your money site(s) from these sites.Multiple money sites in different niches: create master networks dedicated to the top-level niches that your (or your clients’) money sites target. Then link from each of these master networks to your domains. More generic money sites can be linked from any of the master networks.
- Timeline To Build A PBNBuilding a PBN is not an instant SEO strategy. Creating a footprint-free network of domains to avoid penalization takes time. You need to plan to:
- Spread the purchase and registration of your domains over several days (bear in mind some domain brokers require domains to be registered within 7 days after purchase)
- Wait at least 2 weeks after registering each domain to check that it has been indexed and that it ranks for a naked URL search
- Add content regularly but slowly – say one article per week, maximum
- Only once at least 30 days have passed since a domain has been indexed should you start adding in links to your money site
- Make sure you leave at least 3-5 days between adding backlinks across the sites in your PBN