What are PBN backlinks in Google SEO? How to build quality PBN links?

A private blog network (PBN) is a strategy to boost the search engine rankings of a main website by creating multiple blog sites.

What is a PBN?

A private blog network (PBN) is a collection of websites designed to boost their organic search visibility by linking to other websites. The logic of this network is that these “feeder” websites will pass link weight back to the main website, thereby enhancing its authority and, in turn, improving the ranking ability of that website.

Using a private blog network (PBN) is considered to be manipulating search engine algorithms. Therefore, Google considers this behavior a linking strategy that violates its webmaster guidelines, making it a black hat SEO method.

How does a PBN work?

PBNs make it look like a website has “earned” links from other websites through its own strength. This is the main reason why backlinks are an important factor in Google rankings: every link to your website is a vote of confidence in your content, indicating to Google that people like and trust your content.

By having other sites in your PBN link to your “profitable” site, you can artificially increase these votes of confidence, hoping that Google will see them as real and thus boost your site’s ranking.

Expressed as a short and representative equation, a PBN link campaign might look like this:

• Bought expired domain #1 + 5 links to main site.
• Bought expired domain #2 + 5 links to main site.
• Bought expired domain #3 + 5 links to main site.
• = +15 new authoritative links to main site, which improve rankings and potentially bring new traffic.

Google is constantly working to improve its algorithm to combat unnatural links. However, the black hat community has provided ample evidence that private blog networks (PBNs) are still effective for many websites.

That’s why PBN creators go to great lengths to hide any possible “traces” that could link the sites in their network to their profitable sites, giving Google a head start.

Why do people use PBNs?

It’s risky, costly, and time-consuming to effectively build a private blog network (PBN). Despite this, however, there are two main reasons why people continue to employ this link building strategy:

1. Link building is hard.

In an ideal world, everyone would naturally earn backlinks through white hat methods such as blog outreach. Unfortunately, however, these strategies don’t always work as well as we’d like.

No matter how hard you work to create quality, link-friendly content, you’re still ultimately dependent on other website owners to provide you with backlinks. Therefore, results are not always guaranteed.

You could spend days on outreach, send hundreds of emails, and still not get any new backlinks.

2. Anchor text can be manipulated

Another reason people choose to use PBNs is to control the anchor text of the backlink. This is quite important because the anchor text helps Google understand the relevant content of the linked page. This allows Google to rank the corresponding page for the appropriate keywords.

For example, let’s say we want to improve our website ranking for the keyword “best protein powder”. Which of the following examples of backlink anchor text do you think will be the most effective?

• Top protein powder special offers
• Click here
• Unicorn toys

Obviously, the first answer is correct. It shows that the topic of the linked page is protein powder. The second example does not clearly convey the topic of the website, and the third example is irrelevant to the topic, so Google is likely to ignore the link.

For this reason, many SEO experts tend to seek backlinks with keyword-rich anchor texts because they believe that this will help them rank higher on Google for the target search terms.

Normally, it is impossible to control the anchor text of links established through outreach because it is determined by the website owner. However, using PBNs (Private Blog Networks) can achieve this.

What are the risks of using PBNs?

Using PBNs goes against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, which suggests that such a practice comes with some significant risks.

Here are some.

PBN links can be ignored

Google will work hard to ignore links that are suspected of being unnatural. If the system detects that your links are PBN links, they will be completely ignored. Therefore, they will not have any positive or negative impact on your rankings.

This doesn’t sound too bad. But remember, building a PBN takes both time and money. All the time, money, and energy you invest will be meaningless if Google ignores it.

PBN links may result in penalties

While Google generally doesn’t take unnatural links seriously, it doesn’t rule out taking additional steps. Sometimes, Google penalizes sites that are deemed to be deliberately manipulating their rankings.

It can achieve this goal in two ways:

1. By imposing manual penalties
2. Sudden neglect of your PBN link.

Manual penalties are imposed by Google’s human auditors. If you receive a manual penalty, you will receive a warning message in the Google Search Console that states “Your site has unnatural links.”

As a result, your site or part of it may be demoted on Google or even removed from the index entirely. The only way to reverse this situation is to fix your backlink profile, submit a reconsideration request, and hope that Google will give you a chance to correct it.

In addition, Google’s algorithm is getting smarter by the day. One day in the future, you may unexpectedly lose the unfair advantage you gained through PBN.

How to Identify a Private Blog Network (PBN)

As search engines continue to improve their techniques for detecting fake SEO operations, black hat SEO strategists are becoming more flexible and sophisticated. It is especially important to do adequate research when interacting with other websites and acquiring and providing backlinks. Here are some criteria to determine whether a website is a PBN:

• Link profile: Link profile refers to the link composition of a website or page. If multiple websites have the same backlink profile, this can be a red flag.
• Hosting: All websites from the same IP may raise concerns.
• Website design: Maintaining multiple websites requires a lot of effort, so those that lack diversity or uniqueness may imitate the design, navigation or color scheme of other websites.
• Lack of new content: If a website has no new external links, has limited new content, or contains only a few third-party links, it may mean that the website is not credible and is only used for surface display or linking. In addition, duplication or recycling of articles, images, and even video content is also a negative sign.
• Website ownership: Use WHOIS query tools and databases to obtain the website’s contact and ownership information to check if this information is hidden or if related blogs are linked to each other.

It is important to emphasize that people who manage or operate multiple websites and link or share content with each other are not necessarily participating in a PBN program. If the individual websites operate independently, provide high-quality and reliable content, and are supported by valuable links (as they are expected to do), then these practices should not be considered bad behavior. When the way links point to internal pages is too mechanical, or when multiple links appear in the footer, SEO practices may be questionable.

What to look out for when building a PBN SEO?

In 2020, it is still possible to successfully run a private blog network and improve its rankings. More importantly, today’s SEO experts can get quality PBN hosting services that effectively avoid Google penalties.

1. Conduct in-depth research on the PBN field

As expected, building a PBN (Private Blog Network) requires the use of expired domains, but not just any expired domains will do – you need to choose expired domains that have a good backlink configuration and a high reputation in search engines. In addition, there are tools that can help you dig into these expired domains to determine which ones are suitable for building a PBN.

For PBN construction, registering a domain name is not just about visiting a domain registrar and purchasing the domain of your choice.

You need to be aware that your digital footprint can be tracked, as such activities are easy to detect. It is recommended to use a domain registrar that can ensure that there is no footprint, such as SeekaHost.

2. Proper implementation of PBN hosting

One of the key steps to successfully operating a PBN is to choose the right hosting provider, which is crucial for a website, and even more so for a PBN. The reason is that Google should not know that you are the owner of these domains.

In other words, your website does not need to be exposed to the view of crawlers, and it is recommended that your hosting strategy should focus on hosts that have professional experience in PBN hosting, so that you can worry about no problems.

Most importantly, you need an expert who can safely manage PBN to keep your website ranking. Fernando Raymond, CEO of SeekaHost, is a well-known PBN expert who has been active in the SEO field for many years.

3. Create high-quality content for PBN

If you want to really make progress, the era of filling PBN with similar content is over. You need to focus on the quality of the content of PBN to avoid attracting Google’s attention. In addition, Google also prefers high-quality content.

Therefore, it is very important to invest in high-quality content for PBN. Unfortunately, many SEOs don’t think so, and they are completely wrong! PBN must appear credible in search engine crawlers and manual audits, so be sure to spend some time creating quality content.

Also, remember that modern content creation relies not only on text, but also on quality images and multimedia content, as both readers and search engines prefer such content.

4. Don’t overdo it

The link building process should be natural, as randomly adding links here and there won’t do anything to help your website.

In order to boost your profitable website’s ranking, it’s important that your links look natural. It’s recommended that you insert links directly from brand new blog posts, and don’t add more than 1-2 links from the same post to your main website per blog. Avoid using the same anchor text for links in every blog, unless you are using a brand name, and it’s recommended to always include keywords in the anchor text.

5. Don’t use the same plugins or SEO tools

Just like with plugins, don’t use the same Google Analytics account for your PBN, as this will leave a noticeable footprint. You don’t need to use the same set of plugins for your entire PBN.

You’ll also need to configure different CMS settings for your PBN, including using different time zones and time and date formats.

If you’re wondering how many sites you should have in your PBN, it really depends on your industry: for local businesses, it’s about 5 sites, while for larger, more competitive industries, at least 10 sites, as competition is usually more intense in these cases, so more domains are needed.

Best Practices for Personal Blog Networks (PBNs)

The best practice (and our advice) for PBNs is to avoid them altogether. They are risky, unethical, and can be costly.

In addition, if you don’t know what you are doing—that is, if you don’t take effective steps to hide your “footprints” from Google—you may not see an improvement in your rankings at all.

With that in mind, here are some other best practices you should know:

1. Perform thorough due diligence

If you are planning to work with a link building company, be sure to do a thorough due diligence. Some companies may try to sell you PBN links and disguise them as “real” links created through white hat methods.

The best way to avoid this is to request a sample of the links the agency has built for other clients ahead of time and do a field check.

You can usually tell if a PBN is a PBN by evaluating the site the link is pointing to. This site will have little to no organic traffic, the link will be placed in an unnatural way, the anchor text will be exactly the same as the target, and it will generally not look like a site that users would actively visit or read.

You can view a site’s estimated organic traffic in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:

You also need to do your due diligence when buying a site. The seller should state in the site listing that they use a PBN, but this isn’t always the case.

Fortunately, you can view a site’s referring domains report in Site Explorer. In this report, you can choose to sort the results by “organic traffic” from low to high.

Referring domains with very little organic traffic may mean that the site was created with the intent of linking to other sites.

You can view referring IPs in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and look for sites that share the same IP address or are on the same subnet. Typically, cheaper PBNs use shared hosting.

Unfortunately, you can’t always spot PBN links, as many PBN owners don’t allow Ahrefs to crawl their sites and index links.

2. Disavow PBN links

If you suspect that some of the links pointing to your domain are from PBNs, you can use Google’s Disavow Links tool to request that those links be ignored.

However, you need to be very careful with this feature, as improper use can hurt your organic rankings. We do not recommend disavowing suspicious PBN links unless:

You have received a manual penalty notice for “unnatural links” in Google Search Console.

You are aware that you use PBN links and want to protect your site from penalties and future algorithm updates – even if this may result in a drop in traffic in the short term.

The last point is very important. Even if you are aware of the existence of PBN links on your site, disavowing the existence of these links may still result in a drop in traffic.

This is because Google may not have yet identified these links as PBN links, so they may help improve your rankings. So make sure you understand this before disavowing anything.

3. Perform link outreach

Link outreach is a safer way to build a private blog network (PBN). The process involves creating high-quality, link-worthy content, finding websites that might be willing to link to that content, and finally promoting it to those websites and requesting links.

This is challenging, but it is almost the only way to create high-quality, white-hat backlinks for your website.

How to protect your website from PBN attacks?

No reputable SEO consultant will recommend using a private blog network to get links or drive traffic to your website. Unfortunately, you can get your website involved in a PBN without knowing it, especially if you outsource your link building work to others. Purchasing links on platforms like Fiverr or through other services can put your website at serious risk. If someone tries to convince you to do a link exchange (i.e., swapping links), stay away immediately.

It is critical to strictly monitor your link building activities. Be aware of what Google considers link spamming and make sure the people responsible for building links for your website strictly follow these guidelines. Any trustworthy link builder should agree to be transparent when pursuing links.

It will take some effort on your part, but remember: just because you don’t know what’s going on doesn’t mean you can get away with the consequences.

Are PBNs worth investing in?

You may have overlooked this question and wondered if PBNs are an SEO strategy worth investing in. This question is complex and requires careful analysis of all aspects. However, for most optimizers, PBNs are not worth the time and money. You should focus on more sustainable strategies such as content creation, building relationships with publishers, and expanding link building.

In other words, you can take advantage of PBN elements or use them wisely to enhance your campaigns, as long as you are careful and create high-quality content in the process.

If you want to learn more about our SEO services or are ready to improve your current SEO efforts, feel free to contact us! We will provide you with a free link building consultation at SEO.co to help you master the methods of improving your ranking in the search engines.

Concluding Thoughts on Building PBN

You may be frustrated with competitors who use low-quality link building techniques such as PBNs. You may choose to report them through spam. However, even if you don’t, remember that their unfair tactics will eventually be punished.

While your competitors are using PBNs to acquire links, your company can follow best practices and build a stronger and more durable link building strategy that avoids being penalized by search engines. This will give your site an advantage if competitors are discovered and receive a demotion, deindexation, or other penalty.

Overall, private blog networks are a high-risk and not recommended way to build links. Links should only be used if they truly provide value to users, and anything less than that can result in reduced visibility on search engine results pages and even manual penalties.

Protecting you and your company from losing money, resources, and time allows you to focus on more efficient link building strategies that can easily yield results.