PBN Q&A: Ask me anything about how I build, manage (and rank with) PBNs

[theauthorityblog]

Call me cynical, but: what's with all these new members posting their "ask me anything" threads?

It's not as though they've 'been around the block'.

I think you are probably referring to my thread from a few days ago.

First things first: I do not have any affiliations with alexthepbndude. But may be a good thing for both of us to get acquainted

Is there any problem with "new members" trying to share any information as long as no product / services or either implicitly or explicitly promoted?

The discussion are in the open and help senior members who are possibly more knowledgeable chime in when needed. Also a great help for people who are looking for information seniors are not sharing.

 

[nonai]

how do you pick anchor texts?
Here is my dilemma. If I don't do exact anchor texts, and pick generic ones like "click here to read more" then site won't rank. If I do pick exact anchor text, site gets penalized for being overoptimized. So I dont know what to do.
For example, let's say your keyword is "cosmetic dentist los angeles"
you have 20 sites in your PBN. what anchor texts do you pick for each one?

 

[DX-GENERATION]

Some expired domains are deindexed because they have been dropped and Google has no reason to keep displaying them in the index. Some are deindexed because they have been penalized.

PBNs get deindexed when Google discovers the network, usually through footprints left carelessly or unknowingly.

can you explain more !!!! about these footprints plzzz!!!! any example ??? !!!

 

[farkasb]

You have to install and use this plugin on all your PBN sites: http://spyderspanker.com/

Thanks, but I don't use wordpress. Do you happen to know what it does in the background? Does it use htaccess for blocking?

 

[charlesmacneil55]

Would you ever rank 5-10 sites in the SAME niche with a PBN of your size? If so, how would you do it?

 

[SteveWaller]

Here's a question for you (I already have my own answer but I'd be interested to hear yours):

Say a domain has just one decent quality backlink from a PR3 .GOV/.EDU page which is a genuine editorial link (not comment spam) with fairly low OBL (say less than 30-40), but the DA/PA/TF/CF are all low. If you could pick this domain up for reg fee and use it as part of your PBN, would you? Or do you insist on certain metrics? And why?

 

[charlesmacneil55]

Three more questions:

1.) How quickly do you build your links? WHen I place a post, I put 2-3 links in it. I do it about once day. Just wondering how fast you do it.
2.) I had a PBN once and ranked a site in a few months but it received an Un-natural links message in WMT (I set up WMT retroactively and saw it). What causes this and how can I prevent it?
3.) Ugh I forgot the 3rd question.

 

[mrdonman]

1. What are your metrics when finding the expired domains.
2. Do you use any tool to manage your PBN's
3. What anchor texts do you use to link out from PBN to money site. If you just use generic anchor texts and naked/raw urls can you rank your site without exact match keyword?

 

[charlesmacneil55]

I remember my 3rd question now!

Have you ever cleared the contents of a deindexed PBN, and asked for a reconsideration request?

 

[futurestunner]

Just one question and i'd like to get answer for this.

What are the metrics of these domain.
PA
DA
TF
CF
type and niche of Links point to site ?
Moz/Yahoo listed?

 

[Gyuman82]

I think you are probably referring to my thread from a few days ago.

First things first: I do not have any affiliations with alexthepbndude. But may be a good thing for both of us to get acquainted

Is there any problem with "new members" trying to share any information as long as no product / services or either implicitly or explicitly promoted?

The discussion are in the open and help senior members who are possibly more knowledgeable chime in when needed. Also a great help for people who are looking for information seniors are not sharing.

There is plenty wrong with new members making an AMA thread.

It isn't as if the new member posted some great tutorial, he posted a "Ask Me Anything" thread, implying that he is some sort of expert (which may or may not be true).

It would be similar to me going to some medical forum and saying "Hi my name is Dr. Doofus, I am a heart/brain surgeon. I just joined here and have no credibility, but let me answer all your questions about heart and brain surgery techniques that you can use on your patients".

If you are willing to take business advice from an anonymous source on the internet that just joined the forum a few days ago, well I guess to each's own.

 

[tony_d]

If you are willing to take business advice from an anonymous source on the internet that just joined the forum a few days ago, well I guess to each's own.

This.

I think in a recent rant I posted I included a phrase to the effect of: the single hardest thing about 'internet marketing' is knowing the difference between BS when you read it, and good advice/information.

 

[charlesmacneil55]

I think this guy is trying to do us a kind gesture.

Why do we have to sit here and rip him apart?

Why not just listen and make our own judgements.

Here is someone who is simply offering some value, and people have to hate on him.

 

[wriper]

Hey man i have question,

Do you link to micro niche or larger "niche" websites?

If micro niche lets say i start with 10 Blogs in network and l do them in same niche and then link them to my money site. Can i use same 10 blogs for other money sites if you consider they are on same hosting like previous? Is it risky?

Or is it better to link from 10 blogs to only one bigger website ?

Do you have your money sites under same hosting?

 

[MrBeastsOnToast]

Q: When are you going to try and sell us something?

 

[alexodysglobal]

How much time does it take to go from PR0 to PR6? How to boost it?

I'm not really sure what PR are you talking about (money site or PBN domain), but these days I simply don't care about PR as a metric that someone should be too worried about. Even DA/PA/TF/CT/etc metrics don't matter to me anymore when searching for PBN websites. All I care is clean, non-spammy domain profiles with authority links. Now, it's a good bonus if pages hosting those links have a decent PR. Anything else doesn't really matter to me.

Once again, I see my PBN as a list of targets for contextual links.

PR is not that relevant anymore.

 

[alexodysglobal]

I've read that G is now also hunting down cheap hosts - not just SEO hosts - the $1/month type hosts, manually looking at all the sites on the same server, and finding the footprints. Any thoughts on this? Registering domains with fake whois can be a bit risky - does private whois really provide adequate protection for a pbn - I know of several big network owners who use it without any problems (so far).

Thanks for your question, but I've mentioned it before. Don't really go for cheap $1 USD/mo hosts. Try to find decent quality hosting companies that have special offers and coupons which may bring the costs down to almost $1 USD/mo, especially when subscribing for a yearly plan.

Few people know, but you can actually negotiate the resources you need for a PBN site (do your homework first) with the sales reps of smaller hosting companies, therefore bringing the monthly price down.

I am aware Google is hunting down everything that can be used to power a PBN, but you can always stay a little bit ahead of the game by chatting with the hosting company and asking them more about the server your site is going to be hosted on. I haven't been doing this in the past, from the very beginning and suffered quite a few losses, but nowadays I'm trying to be more attentive. I keep a spreadsheet and know every single IP for every hosted PBN domain. I may ask my VA to check what other sites are hosted on that IP from time to time in order to make sure other internet marketers aren't abusing it with their own PBN. If we notice this, we may open a support ticket and ask to move our PBN website to a different server or just change the hosting company.

 

[alexodysglobal]

1. If you have to forget everything about PBNs, but you have to keep one piece of knowledge what would it be?

2. How do you manage a few hundred blogs?

1. One hundred percent control over your links.

2. We have recently started to use MainWP on a small portion of websites to see how it works. We use it for bulk updates and back-ups. Other than that, we just keep a spreadsheet. For posting to our PBN network, we have dumped Article Marketing Robot in favor of Softnoia Blog Creator (it has a module where you can your own WordPress accounts/sites and post). Works great.

 

[alexodysglobal]

How exactly do you keep blocking ahrefs, majecticseo etc.. ?

We own a copy of Spyder Spanker. We also manually block link crawlers via .htaccess and robots.txt on some sites. We also randomly choose higher quality sites where we don't block bots at all. Diversification is the key.

Always being a little bit paranoid makes sense in this game.

 

[alexodysglobal]

First of all thanks for sharing your knowledge in this interesting topic. I am pretty sure that this thread will become one of the best in this forum.

My questions are:

1. What is the lowest amount of money that you need to build a PBN for beginners like me? I've read many posts and threads about building a PBN from $50 - $250, considering these numbers as a low budget PBN.

2.Have you thought about writing a step-by-step tutorial for beginners?

Thanks!

1. I've done the math in a previous post in this thread and came up with a budget of $1680 USD for the first month for a PBN of 100 websites on expired domains. Now this may differ, especially if you decide to save long term and buy yearly hosting. Other that that, ideally, you would pay around $100 per month in hosting fees since you really want different servers, IPs and DNS for every single domain, if possible.

2. I thought about writing one and posting it for free on BHW, but decided to go the Q&A route, so fire up your questions if you have more