What Is a Private Blog Network (PBN) and How It Impacts SEO: A Complete Guide

by

A collection of websites that are owned and operated by a single individual or group is known as a private blog network (PBN). A PBN’s goal is to increase a target website’s search engine rating by creating backlinks to it. Not to be confused with the Pre-Boarding notification (PBN) in shipping.

Backlinks are connections to your website made by other websites. They are a significant ranking element for Google and other search engines. A website will normally rank higher in search results if it has more backlinks.

Backlinks from the PBN domains to the target website are how PBNs operate. These backlinks are constructed in a way to gives the impression that they are organic and natural. This is accomplished by producing high-quality content for the PBN websites and including relevant links to the target page.

PBNs require a massive amount of work and money to set up correctly. Then there are recurring maintenance costs to keep them hidden and up to speed. The goal is not to associate the blogs with others in the group in any detectable way. When done right, PBNs can offer huge gains; when done wrong, and will get de-indexed (the money site receives a penalty too) or hacked.

Private Blog Networks offer significant quantities of high-quality, fully-controlled backlinks so sourcing links from external sites is a luxury. PBNs still work today (they have been in the market since 2005), but on-page optimization, AI, and content algorithms have started to shuffle the cards. Nevertheless, in many local niches and other languages, PBNs are the top backlink tool considering the time invested. Of course, outreach campaigns are the best for sourcing inbound links, but some businesses can’t appreciate the ROI when delivered long-term.

Who Needs a Private Blog Network

Some niches are too competitive, and a few earned backlinks won’t move the needle. Gambling, adult, pharma, and loans are niches that don’t allow sourcing links from external websites as their content is not fit for all audiences. Black-hat SEOs have giant networks where they source links for their clients. Yes, PBN can be taken as grey or black-hat, because it manipulates search results en masse.

PBN Costs

You have to factor in the cost of buying the domains, hosting, privacy, and maintenance costs, plus the cost of content creation. Typically you start from $1,500 for a small blog network of 10 sites (for local niches with low competition) and scale it up to a crazy level with costs north of $30,000 (for very competitive keywords). The prices above include hosting for one year but don’t cover content creation or maintenance (webmaster costs). Keep this number for easy calculation, the cost per blog/domain is $60 yearly without content or maintenance. Add about $100 per blog for article writing, so total costs are $160 yearly per blog.

To have the maximum effects, though, you have to treat each blog as a real blog. So, content must be of high quality. In this case, the costs would be:

 Scalability is everything so you may add more robust and more expensive blogs to your initially small network. The costs could increase gradually following the ROI you see. For business owners, one scalable PBN will do. For agencies, they need scalable vertical PBNs (1 scalable PNB per niche to host multiple clients in the niche).

How to Build it

Planning is fundamental when preparing a private blog network. The spending is high, so the expectations; Only feasible goals will work. Careful planning of the blog network structure, hosting, and link diversity will determine if the investment yielded any ROI. Mistakes in planning will have costly consequences down the line. Depending on the competition you have to decide how big the network will be.

 Scalability is everything so you may add more robust and more expensive blogs to your initially small network. The costs could increase gradually following the ROI you see. For business owners, one scalable PBN will do. For agencies, they need scalable vertical PBNs (1 scalable PNB per niche to host multiple clients in the niche).

How Many Sites

You only need a few sites to target a local niche, but a lot more if you target many client sites. Two factors come into play with client sites. You don’t want to leave footprints, and you won’t see a difference with a few sites in the PBN. You may also need to create niche PBNs or individual PBNs for each client site. For example, there are eCommerce sites with dozens of product categories or landing pages. To rank each page, you need plenty of strong and diverse links. All these options cost money, of course.

How Many Links

It depends on how competitive the search terms you wish to rank for and the level of on-page optimization and content of the money site. My recommendation if you are in a low competition niche: start with 10 PBN links (10 blogs) and scale up if you hit a ceiling and you don’t see traffic increase to your money website.

PBN Hosting

The easiest thing to set up and host your content is a WordPress site. With a 61% market share and 500+ WordPress sites built every day, it’s not a bad idea to use the same CMS for the entire network. This way you can manage all sites remotely. With the help of plugins, you can clone a WP setup without repeating the process for each domain. WordPress plugins also offer a central management console that allows remote posting/editing content, updating plugins, and more. It is recommended that you randomize the WP themes, so they look unrelated one to the other. It would also be best to disable comments. Randomize the domain names. Use many registrars to dilute registration patterns. Randomize registration dates. Hide ownership (Whois enabled). Avoid explicitly commercial site-wide links. Use the registrar’s DNS. Randomize the plugins. Put some fake contact details (the same as you have in Whois if you did that step), so a manual reviewer can see that they are dealing with a real person.

You have to carefully choose your PBN hosting as the devil is in the details. Imagine you bump into support or performance problems with your host, and you have to migrate more than 100 domains. Got the picture?

No PBN Footprints

Hosting will determine if your PBN stays up for years or drops off the Google index within months. The most evident PBN hosting in regards to the scope of the sites hosted is any service that advertises itself as SEO hosting (this is what you need to avoid). Costs play a role as you will read below, and most probably, you will be sharing the same addresses with other SEOs. That’s a big scary footprint! Google has fixed eyes on SEO hosting for years now, looking at it as a hornets’ nest. Even if your PBN is the best network on the planet, other people can drag you down the cliff.

Any technology you choose, you have to try to eliminate any footprint. If your PBN is exposed, then you lose all your investment and compromise the sites that receive backlinks from the PBN. Additionally, you have to blog link spider bots in robots.txt from accessing your link profile (there are over 150 spider bots) at the web server level and not at the site level. Selling links will compromise your PBNs as people make mistakes or are vocal about their backlink sources. Having no link diversity could expose your PBN to showing a link pattern from particular sources.

Each site should sit on a unique Class C (Subnet) IP (AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD). Every PBN host will sell you unique Class C IPs, but in reality, they will give you a Class C IP for each site in your network, but on the same IP, there will be dozens or hundreds of other clients. Note that these are not normal clients but SEOs running PBNs (bad neighborhood, penalties, de-indexation). So, some hosts came up with a solution to this problem by offering dynamic IPs instead of static and proudly advertising them. Well, my gut feeling says that’s not right, and here’s an article from seroundtable.com that explains why dynamic IPs are bad for SEO. Google bots cannot parse with one-pass pages on sites with dynamic IPs and have to repeat the parsing many times, taking even up to 3 months; in the meantime, any backlinks to the network will be credited to the host. Nice!

Prefer a Virtual Private Server (VPS) of Cloud Hosting. Prices are low (from $2.70/month) in VPS, the cloud is ridiculously cheap (performance pay), and uptime is great. With VPS and Cloud Hosting, it takes a while to set up things, but the benefits are many (speed, storage, reliability, scalability).

If you want to use traffic statistics, sign up for different solutions and randomize them in the PBN.



 

Buy PBN Domains

My take here is different than what most agree upon. I believe that it’s best to start with a tabula rasa and use domains that have not been registered before (new ones). I know about link juice and domain authority, even niche relevancy, but the thing is, when you register a domain that has expired or has been in the market for quite some time, there’s not enough link juice anymore. As soon as Google finds out that the domain is out of use, the clock is ticking. Of course, if one got thousands of dollars to spend, he could buy out domains that have been sitting with their content but are not of much use to their owners. I have some myself, I know. But this is only a small fraction of the market. Here are the options:

Expired domains regardless of their content

There are marketplaces and forums offering lists of domains that expire now and high authority domains for sale that’ve been sitting offline for a while. If you can’t source relevant domains, then you need to change their content (the link juice goes down the drain). If you find relevant domains, you need to snatch them the moment they expire because if they’re offline, they lose some of their link equity. The cost of buying expired domains starts from zero to a couple of dozens of dollars. Most of the domains in the expired lists have zero value. As I’ve explained above, there’s no point going for the expensive domains as you’re building a PBN (possibly with a short-term future), and not looking to build your commercial domain. Note: loss of link juice, reasonable costs, risk having hit already by penalties.

Domains in auction or off the market (you need to make an offer to the owner).

It is natural to assume that the costs here are elevated in comparison to the first option. The advantage is that these domains are uninterruptedly online, so Google sees only its content changes. Note: loss of link juice, elevated costs, risk having hit already by penalties.

Expired relevant domains

You won’t avoid loss of link equity, and risk having been hit already by penalties, but costs will be reasonable. The advantages are in what’s left from their niche relevancy, and that’s only for Google to judge.

Online relevant domains

You stay in their usual niche, only changing the articles. You keep the link equity and have content relevancy, but costs are high, and there are risks that they already have a penalty.

Fresh domains

You have to build the relevancy, wait some time for their content to mature, and you have to build link equity. The advantages here are the low cost plus you can shape them to your liking (no bad history, no redirects, no penalties, no content changing). I believe this solution to be the best of all and it doesn’t have to be lengthy in time (waiting for the domains and content to mature).

Ready PBNs

This solution can be good or bad. I would have many reservations about buying a ready PBN because of its previous use and bad history. The advantages here are: you don’t waste time finding domains; you don’t have to install websites; if the niche is the same, you may not need to create content; you change the link destinations; you get faster results if everything is OK. The disadvantages could be catastrophic: the PBN could be already flagged as a link farm (why does the owner want to sell it?); the cost might be higher than building it yourself, but you have to factor in the time you need to launch a PBN; if the niche is different then you lose domain authority by changing the content, and the results might take longer or be of a lesser scale than expected.

PBN Content

A PBN with unique, niche-targeted content sends more link juice. If the content is mechanically generated, i.e. spun articles, it may do more harm than good. It will not rank, and the backlinks will be spam.

Changing the site topic when buying a PBN domain will not transfer all the link juice that the site used to have and certainly not the traffic (high bounce rates), so it’s not worth spending on expensive sites. Medium to low-priced sites work best for all intents and purposes.

For a high-quality PBN, you need the best content. There are marketplaces where you can find writers (iNeedArticles.com, iWriter.com, Textbroker.com, Hirewriters.com, Freelancer.com, Fiverr.com). Average quality articles cost $5-$10. Keep in mind for what it’s worth, that those writers don’t sit down and write unique content for you. They do research, find some articles twist them to meet your needs, and pass the Copyscape duplicate content checks.

Having unique content (at least such that passes the checks) is fundamental. Google will not consider any content that has many similarities (copy and paste essentially) with other online articles. So a good start is to pay for unique articles.

The articles should be relevant to the niche with max two backlinks, written in natural language. I suggest a length of more than 500 words. Upload up to 10 articles per site, so if you have 20 sites in the PBN, you need 200 articles. Others will suggest fewer articles and shorter content, but that’s my take.

You could also hire a VA from Asian countries and pay them a monthly salary. Expect though that they will deliver articles in broken English. People will sell you a lot of hype and leave you worried if you are going to make any progress with the delivered articles. But I understand that sometimes in life you have to make compromises. In SEO, it doesn’t work this way. You get what you pay.

Upload some fake details (the same as you have in Whois if you did that step) in the contact and about pages to pass manual reviews or use the Registrar’s Privacy feature (Namecheap offers reliable and fast hosting with privacy features). Also, upload a Privacy policy page.

PBN Links

✓ PBN links are outbound links from the Private Blog Network pointing at the target (money) websites. Choosing anchor texts is a demanding task as the number of sites in the network can exceed the links earned/acquired in other ways. That said, if you opt for a few keyword variations, you are over-optimizing your anchor text, plus you are leaving footprints. Online PBN management tools help diversify anchor texts in the PBN and also build backlinks to make the PBN stronger. The quality of links you need for the PBN is lower (Tier 2) than those pointing to your main site (Tier 1) for obvious reasons. Relevant backlinks to the PBN articles will raise the link juice flowing to the main site.

✓ Stick to the rule that each blog links to one money site only. If you mix things, you leave footprints that expose your PBN. Use contextual links, no footer links, no sidebar linking, and no site-wide linking. Add some link diversity by linking to relevant high-authority sites (Wikipedia) in your articles.

✓ Tier 2 Backlinks: These are backlinks you build to the PBN. The best quality of a backlink is when it originates from the same language and in the same niche. Imagine a German website selling dog food linking to your plastic surgeon article. Wrong language and wrong niche. The value of the link is meager.

✓ To not appear as a link farm, it’s best to leave some articles without outbound links. If your money site is new with no backlinks, it’s not wise to start loading with PBN links. Do some link building with different anchor text and start linking to the money site after you have some PBN content indexed and gradually drip feed backlinks.

✓ Do not force the article indexing (pinging). Instead, build a sitemap.xml file but not submit it to Google, let the Googlebot find it. You shouldn’t connect any of the blogs to your Search Console account or install Google Analytics.

✓ Another way to build PBN links is to buy directly from a PBN manager or a broker. These are not Private Blog Networks, though, but Public Blog Networks. In the same way, they sell links to you, they will do it for every client (footprint alert) and possibly some Google insiders.

Private Blog Network Service

PBN services automate mundane, time-consuming tasks. Imagine a PBN with 20 or 100 sites and the maintenance work it needs. Manually logging in and posting to 100 blogs is a nightmare. Here is where the services come in. They can migrate your sites and differentiate/dilute the IPs. They offer a dashboard for reports, automatically updating plugins and setups. They provide solutions to optimize anchor texts, monitor keyword rankings, bulk edit links without touching the content, monitor the network for DNS or SEO issues (penalties, de-indexation), and more. You can always hire a VA to do the tasks, but I challenge you it will cost more and will not have the consistency of bulk automated solutions.

Online tools take care of the content tasks, for example, you can plug in your blogs to an online dashboard, and it takes care of the posting schedule, link diversity, uptime, tier system, etc.


EN - Main Form

Risks with PBNs

1. PBNs are black-hat. It is a massive search results manipulation. Everything that’s scaled up ends up attracting attention and reaction (turning into black-hat). Google de-indexed Public Blog Networks at the end of 2014 and many SEOs left the technique. When the PBN leaves a footprint, Google or a competitor can submit a spam report to Google and have it deindexed along with the sites that receive backlinks from the PBN. Google may say that they devalue PBN backlinks, but this is not the case for manually reviewed link profiles.

2. Low-quality PBNs (content-wise and link-wise) can also trigger a penalty which results in deindexation for the PBN network, and spam penalty for the client sites. Churn and burn is the way affiliate marketers do, hit the websites hard, look for fast results, and have a short lifespan.

3. Having no link diversity in your articles could expose your PBN showing a link pattern from particular sources.

4. Sharing IPs with other SEOs will eventually expose all people’s PBNs (bad neighborhoods).

5. Buying preregistered domains could transfer any penalties not yet resolved. Often more reasons make people abandon their domains. Check the website history and if the website’s pages are indexed. If no pages are indexed, then the site has quality issues. Remember, nobody abandons a website for no reason.

6. Domain redirects expired domains, offline domains, niche, and content changes always result in some loss of link equity.

7. Don’t monetize the PBN. You are leaving a footprint, plus you would need separate accounts for each blog.

8. Don’t use tools like Artisteer. These tools embed comments in the code and if your entire PBN is built with Artisteer, imagine what a footprint you are leaving out there.

9. Run health checks. Every few weeks, check if the domains are indexed, and what traffic they have. If you notice any problem, investigate and if the domain is burned, take it down and use the content on a new domain.

10. Don’t use Google Analytics, and if it’s necessary to use traffic stats randomize the solutions by signing up to different companies.

11. Nothing is invisible. To the careful eye, your PBN is always exposed. If Google does not pay attention, someone using a link crawler can easily discover the hidden PBN links. You can’t hide the backlinks since you’ve made them public. And public as they are, they can pinpoint the source. After that, it’s only a matter of time to start figuring out the patterns and discover the link scheme. You can do nothing about it. That kind of risk is not going away.

How do I evaluate the quality of a private blog network?

 

  1. Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA): Examine the domains within the PBN’s DA and PA. Higher rankings often denote more authority and may offer more beneficial backlinks.ter authority and can potentially provide more valuable backlinks.

  2. Relevance: Make sure the PBN’s domains relate to the topic of your website. Backlinks coming from unrelated websites might not be as helpful for SEO.

  3. Content Quality: Examine the content of the PBN’s. Original, high-quality content suggests a network that is more reliable and credible.

  4. Link Profile: Examine each domain’s backlink profile within the PBN. Look for organic, varied link profiles that have a good balance between follow and nofollow links as well as a variety of anchor text.

  5. Hosting Diversity: Verify whether the PBN’s domains are hosted by several hosting companies and on various IP addresses. Search engines can be avoided by hosting diversity.

  6. Domain Age: Think about how old the PBN’s domains are. It’s possible that more established domains are more reliable and authoritative.

  7. Indexing Status: Check if search engines have indexed the domains that are part of the PBN. There is no SEO value to your website if the domain is not indexed.

  8. Footprints: Search for any traces, patterns —such as comparable design templates, IP addresses, or WHOIS details— that might point to a network of related websites. Steer clear of PBNs with noticeable footprints to lower your chance of getting penalized.

  9. Outbound Links: Check how many and what kind of outbound links are coming from the PBN’s domains. Links pointing to low-quality websites or an excessive number of outbound links could be signs of spam e.g. link farms.

  10. History: Examine the domains’ past history, paying close attention to any penalties or questionable SEO techniques. To reduce risks, stay away from domains that show a  problematic history.

  11. Community Feedback: Ask reliable SEO communities or forums for their opinions on the PBN. The opinions and experiences of other users can offer insightful details on its quality.

Are there any tools for managing a private blog network?

Automation and Management

  • PBN Management Platforms: A few providers provide specialized platforms with capabilities like content scheduling, link monitoring, domain management, and more for managing PBNs. PBN Lab, Easy Blog Networks, and DomReactor are a few examples.
  • Task Automation Tools: Zapier or IFTTT automate repetitive operations related to content distribution, social media posting, and link development within your PBN.

Security and Monitoring

  • Website Security Plugins: Wordfence or Sucuri can secure your PBN websites against malware, hacking attempts, and other security risks.
  • Uptime Monitoring Services: Pingdom or UptimeRobot can keep an eye on the functionality and uptime of your PBN websites and notify you of any problems.

Analytics

  • Web Analytics: Google Analytics or Matomo monitor the success of your SEO efforts by tracking traffic and user behavior on your PBN websites.

SEO Analysis

  • Link Analysis Tools: Ahrefs, Moz, or Majestic monitor the caliber of incoming links and analyze the backlink profiles of your PBN websites.
  • Keyword Research Tools: SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, or Ubersuggest identify relevant keywords to target with your PBN content.

Domain Management

  • Domain Registrars: GoDaddy, Namecheap, or Google Domains allow you to register and manage domain names for your PBN.
  • Domain Auctions: on Flippa, Sedo, or GoDaddy Auctions you can find expired or auctioned domains for your PBN.

You need excellent, expired domains with high authority and clean backlink profiles as the core in your PBN.

Characteristics of an Excellent Expired Domain
- Age of Domain: The older, usually the more authoritative
- Domain Authority: Check authority by using Moz or Ahrefs tool.
- Clean Backlink Profile: It should have backlinks from authority sources. Never pick a domain with spammy links or links from penalized websites.
- Niche Relevance: Preferably, the expired domain should be from the niche of your money site.

Where to Find Expired Domains
Buy domains directly from the auction sites like GoDaddy Auctions, NameJet, and DropCatch.
You can likewise use expireddomains.net to find many different types of expired domains.
For that, the Wayback Machine can be useful to see what was earlier present on the domain.

Each PBN site must be genuinely distinctive to be considered independent. That would mean having a different IP address for each site and preferably be hosted by different providers.

Hosting Best Practices:
Different Ips for different sites. This will help you avoid footprints, while the different hosting providers for every PBN site or go for specialized PBN hosting services.

Avoid Cheap Bulk Hosting: Whatever happens, do not host all your PBN sites on the same cheap shared hosting plan.

Consider Cloud Hosting: Services like Cloudflare mask the real server location and thus add another layer of protection.

Protect WHOIS: Protect WHOIS on registering domains to protect ownership details and avoid linking them all back to you.

With domains and hosting in place, the next step will be the setup of the actual websites.

Design and Content:
- Unique Themes: Each site needs to be different in theme and look. Avoid using the same WordPress theme across all the sites.
- Unique Content: The content needs to be unique for each site, relating to the history or niche of the domain. Do not use spun or duplicate content.
- Proper About, Contact, and Privacy Pages: Make these sites look legitimate with an About Us page, a Contact page, and a Privacy Policy.
- Posting Frequency: Don't just blast the content all at once. It needs to be introduced over time so it looks organic and natural. Linking Out: Do not just link out to your money site. Provide outbound links to other authoritative sites within the niche to dilute the footprint. The important factors of SEO in PBN Sites
- On-page SEO: Each site needs to be SEO-friendly with correct title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags.
- Presence on Social Media: Consider setting up social media profiles for each PBN site in order to increase credibility.

The whole idea behind the PBN is to pipe link equity to your money site, but you have to be really careful in the way that you work these links so that you do not get caught.

Best Practices for Linking:
- Anchor Text Variation: Use branded, generic, and long-tail anchor text variations, rather than linking to your money site using the same anchor text over and over.
- Links Diversification: Not every post should link to your money site. Add internal links, links to other websites, etc.
- Frequency of Links: One important thing to note is not linking every other article to your money site. Space links out over time.
- Relevant Context: The link should be embedded in relevant and useful content, appearing in nature.

It requires further maintenance and monitoring over a longer period to keep it acting effectively and not disclosed by Google.

Ongoing Tasks:
- Content Updates: Keep each site fresh with new content and updated content.
- Backlink Monitoring: Monitor backlinks coming to your PBN sites. Disavow links that are harmful or spammy.
- Site Health: Ensure all your PBN sites are up and secure. Monitor downtime with tools like UptimeRobot.
- Pattern Audits: Periodically audit your PBN in order to ensure that there are no identifiable patterns that could trigger Google's algorithm.

Scaling the Network:
While your main site is growing, you may need to scale your PBN by adding more domains. That's okay; just make sure the new domains are of high quality and that there's diversity in hosting, content, and link strategy.

The trick behind building a PBN is to avoid detectable patterns that hint at Google that the sites are connected with each other.

Footprint Avoidance Techniques:
- Variety in Hosting: Each domain will be hosted with a different hosting firm.
- Nameservers: If possible, it is best if the same nameservers are not used on many other websites on the PBN.
- WHOIS Privacy: One must have the WHOIS information hidden or varying on different sites.
- Diversified Content: Make sure every website is different in its style, tone, and even kind of content. Avoid using spun content.

PBNs violate the Webmaster Guidelines of Google, and upon getting caught, it may result in a severe penalty against your money site. You should consider the risks carefully against the rewards. There are also potential legal issues regarding the use of expired domains if those domains were previously tied to registered trademarks or other intellectual property.

Tools for Managing a PBN:
- Majestic / Ahrefs / SEMrush: For monitoring of backlinks and domain authority.
- Internet Archive's WayBackMachine.org: check history of expired domains.
- SEO Tools: Screaming Frog-like solutions for on-page SEO analysis in PBN sites.
- VPN/Proxy Services: This will enable one to manage multiple sites from different IP addresses in their work.