Let's Talk PBN's

[Nole Dude]

Hey guys, this is my first post here and I'm excited to be apart of what seems to be something great!

After several months of THINKING about starting my own PBN, I finally took the dive and have acquired 8 domains. All DA 20+ and TF 15+. I think it's a pretty good start. As I setup my network, I keep running into different issues and I find myself wondering, "What's the best practice here?". From hosting to setting up the CMS there are a lot of different methods in order to ensure there are no footprints left behind.

As I've seen on other forums, I think it would be a good idea for everyone to give some input on their favorite practices when setting up their PBN's. It will help noobies and even veterans who may not have thought of everything under the sun. So without further ado...

*I'm not pretending to be an expert, just giving a loose guideline on how the format of this thread can be set up*

Purchasing Domains
What service do you use to find your domains? How do you decide if it's a good domain for your PBN?

I have been using DomCop to find expired domains. I don't think it really matters which one you use, just what filters you use to sort the hundreds of thousands of domains. To find cheap gems I set the DA < 30, Ref Domains < 200 and TF < 30. I've found that this filter allows me to find domains that fly under the radar. Obviously the most important thing to check are the backlinks. You want natural links. If it seems like the site has been "SEO'd" your best bet is to steer clear.

Hosting
Do you use SEO hosting? Which company? Best methods for setting everything up?

CloudFlare seems to be a really nice/cheap option. Check it out if you haven't heard about it. My knowledge on hosting is severely limited so I can't really expand here.

Content
This can be a super expensive part of having a PBN. Where do you get your content? How often do you post new content? Spun articles or all high quality?

Blog Setup
How do you setup your blogs? About page, contact page, privacy policy, etc on all of them? Do you focus on passing the "eye test"? How? How is your content setup? A couple of sticky posts and the rest on internal pages? Do you do internal linking within your posts? How many OBL's per domain? How many different money sites?

I know I'm forgetting a bunch of other topics, but it should give you an idea of what you can talk about. You don't have to reveal your "super-awesome secrets", just some general advice and best practices that you think would be helpful.

Let's see what ya got, BUSO

 

[Melvin]

Consider adding social media icons and try to make interactions as well

 

[RomesFall]

The way I do PBN's is the same as I do any money site.

- Unique Dedicated IP/Server.
- Handwritten content by natively English speaking writers.
- Custom theme e.g. Hand coded edits on an existing theme to a greater extent than normal.
- Social profiles, list integration, legal pages etc.
- Monetize in some way (dependent on type of site)

That's really the bear minimum you can do if you're looking for these sites to become long term assets.

I never sell links, or trade them as this just destroys the whole idea of the network being private - as you well know.

My network's are niche specific, including the domains I get. If this sometimes means taking a weaker domain and link building to it then that's fine by me as I handle a small volume of high quality sites per niche and they all become an asset to my entire 'niche take over' and are dedicated to some specific section of that field/industry (certain keywords).

I just don't buy into the way others are doing these sites, certain recent occurrences have shown precisely why doing these sites the wrong way is a bad idea for the long-term longevity of your network. Then again these guys aren't doing niche specific and want to churn out as many as possible.

With 10-20 high quality sites per niche you'll be able to make a big difference (most niches) in combination with SAPE, Spam etc etc. I guess the other crucial aspect here is not wasting the link juice by actually sculpting your money site/s by getting on-page's internal linking right.

So yeah, all those considerations that seem like they're just being paranoid or nitpicking, I'll do them unless I have conclusive proof that they really don't matter. Depending on the niche you should be looking to build a brand for each site.

If you have that one good niche there's no reason why you'd ever need to find another niche if you do things right in my opinion. I'm sure someone else here agrees? Builder society after all.

- RF

 

[RomesFall]

I just don't buy into the way others are doing these sites, certain recent occurrences have shown precisely why doing these sites the wrong way is a bad idea for the long-term longevity of your network. Then again these guys aren't doing niche specific and want to churn out as many as possible.

Sorry for posting twice, but I think continuing on from here is worth a new post, despite the brevity...

In cases where someone has done a half-assed PBN site and are using a non-relevant domain (with good metrics presumably) and they intend on linking out to multiple different niches. Say they have 5 niches for arguments sake...

Surely creating a silo for each niche on each PBN site is the sane thing to do? A silo builds great relevancy and authority from the parent page and you can link out from there, with all the additional content as supporting content.

Personally I don't do this, but it's what I would do if I were doing PBN sites in this manner. I don't mean just whacking it into a category either, that's not a silo and is detrimental on the whole.

Too many people are missing the full picture with PBNs and I'm no expert so it just goes to show there's still a lot of room for improvement in this 'field'.

I'd bet my bottom dollar that long-term PBNs are going to need to not just look real, but be real.

In the mean time if you're doing it the quick and easy way, put a bit more into content and good on-page and kick the crap out of relevancy, keep everything within the silo and treat each PBN site as a myriad of sites (each site being a different silo). Parasite PBNs. For lack of a better term.

- RF

 

[jboogz2000]

High quality pbn ' s is the way to go you can get a lot more power with fewer pbn links. You need to be able to pass a manual review so make your blogs look real with less obl to obvious low quality sites. You can even mix your pbn up by keeping the old content on some domains through wayback. Change your name servers a lot of people do not exercise that. Place some banners on your pbn at a glance you want to make sure it does not look like a spam my pbn. Send some organic traffic to those blogs and social signals. Build the power of your pbn through authority stacking. I can use three pbn links that beat out 20 pbn links start thinking quality over quantity.

 

[TheSeo1]

You got quite a solid write up on here Nole Dude. Basically two things I would make sure NOT to do:

1) SEO hosting. Nothing screams footprint like that. Can you think of any 'real' site that uses SEO hosting? If at all, the percentage is somewhere at .0x for me.

2) Stop blocking all the crawlers. While people go mad about their links showing up on ahrefs, they don't think a step further: who does block all link crawlers except PBNs / SEOs ? Hell, there are more ways than ahrefs or majestic to find a link to a site and with a bit of research, you'll kinda find every PBN out there. The value in blocking all crawlers of the most common tools compared to the disadvantage of a MAJOR footprint... for me, a clear decision.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Rather than talk about what I do, I think it's helpful to point out what people don't do that gets them deindexed.

What Not To Do:

• Spun or low quality content
• Default themes, not customized themes
• Leaving footprints like the same admin username (most themes use this information to create pages that google will crawl and find and connect your sites this way)
• Generalized Niches instead of niche relevancy across the whole site, not just article level
• Being greedy with OBL's. Only linking to their own site a ton of times.
• Leaving a footprint in their robots.txt and .htaccess by blocking the same set of spiders

If you want your PBN to last, you should be adding a boatload of OBL's. It's not all about Page Rank. That's not the only that makes a link valuable. A link from CNN.com will boost your site like crazy, but you aren't getting even a small portion of PR juice... Same concept here. You need as many OBL's going all over the place as possible to hide your own links in there.

I meticulously will create an original logo for every network site. I will customize every theme. I wipe out footprints people don't even realize exist.

I'll also say that SEO Hosting catches a lot of blame from people as being the reason their networks were wiped out. But they conveniently forget to mention that their network was full of domains like BH28sxi28s.info, spammed to PR5, default wordpress theme, and only contained links to their money site. Despite what people think, real sites do get hosted on SEO hosting and entire IP blocks aren't just wiped out, nor are entire DNS's wiped out. Just the network sites get wiped out.

 

[Chitrarath]

• Make your PBN sites looking as a real site

Follow @CCarter 's Big Brand Checklist and you can't go wrong with that.
I know it is time consuming and has its costs but think the sites as your real estate properties.

• Better quality hosting and think outside the box, using solutions that the typical SEO would not put the PBN on and where Big G would not think to look
• Interlink as a normal website would do

OR

Build a PBN with a churn and burn mindset, it lasts untill when it lasts, it get deindexed you build a new one