my questions
1) Should I looking domains for PBN with high PR or DA or TF metrics ?
2) Can I use expired domains or should avoid them ?
3) Should I use fake whois or private whois ?
4) How many weekly/monthly links should I place to new domain from PBN?
5) Should I use any other link building strategy with PBN or I can use only PBN links?
6) Should I build Tier 2 links to PBN posts/homepages ?
Thanks
netkam, sorry mate, I accidentally skipped your questions for some reason...
1. I've mentioned it several times in this thread. I don't pay attention to metrics anymore. If you do, you will end up inventing some kind of metric of your own like 'alexthepbndude-trust' lol so I say it's a waste of time. Since we've easily managed to inflate these metrics with noobish GSA blasts, we simply stopped paying attention to them. We all know that PBNs are basically used for link juice laundering. So what you want from a PBN domain is a clean, non spammy, backlink and website profile and at least several hq links from authority websites. If links are hosted on pages with PR, that's a nice bonus (eg: a link from an internal whitehouse.gov PR 5 page).
2. 90% of my network is made up of expired domains. I ocasionally buy non-dropped PR 1+ sites from GoDaddy Auctions. But those are more expensive and sometimes you have to play a very difficult bidding war just for what? For PR? Nahh... Why waste time when expired domains provide decent results? I say go for expired domains.
3. When I first started I used to buy a lot of whois privacy protection from GoDaddy. Namecheap offers it free for the first year. These days I just create a brand new email for every expired domain I get, confirm it with the registrar and simply get name ideas from fakenamegenerator.
4. As many as you need, as long as it works. I try not to post more than once per day, per site. Use common sense. If you want post more articles, create the impression of a bigger newspaper style website which publishes 5-7 articles per day. It shouldn't be a problem if your site looks decent.
5. Due to the effectiveness of PBNs I completely forgot about any other linking methods except PBNs. However, my old sites (or the ones I buy) already have a decent backlink profile so I can easily hide the PBN links. Nevertheless, for newer websites, I would recommend creating accounts on all possible social media websites first, so that at least something shows up when someone is querying your domain in ahrefs.
6. I've done it in the past. It becomes too time consuming when managing a large porfolio of PBN sites. And the tier 2 links to your PBN domains are basically the incoming links to the domains itself, the main criteria of choosing and buying a domain after all.
1. I'm guessing you blocked robots with htaccess? What code did you use?
2. What good qualities do you look for in the backlinks of a domain you want to use for a PBN?
3. Let's say there is a backlink from TechCruch from 2006 where the PR is N/A or 0. If this is still good for a PBN domain, what gives the juice flow? Is it the fact that it is a PR8 authority website? If PR doesn't matter here, would I look at DA and PA of that TechCrunch backlink? Do I check the backlinks of the TechCrunch backlink? lol I am confused about this.
TragikGod,
1. I use SS on some sites. Some other random bots on other sites sites are blocked with htaccess. Around 30% of the network doesn't block anything. I make sure these websites look much better than the rest though.
You can use the following code in your .htaccess
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*rogerbot.* bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*exabot.* bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*mj12bot.* bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*dotbot.* bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*gigabot.* bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*ahrefsbot.* bad_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*sitebot.* bad_bot
<Limit GET POST HEAD>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=bad_bot
</Limit>
However, it has been proven that most link crawlers which belong to companies that are out there to make money spoof their agent and still crawl links. They also do not honor robots.txt when asked to. That's why getting SS is highly recommended. It will block not only the agent, but the sub-net of IPs these are hosted on.
3. If the domain has only 1 backlink from TC then I would probably think twice before buying it and look for other better options. If the link was at least pr 2 I would have purchased it, taking into consideration that TC editors rarely remove broken links from their articles. Ideally, you want as many authority links as possible, so if you have the TC PR n/a page, make sure the domain has at least several more links and you're good to go.
Still confused?
how do you manage all these sites? i'm in the process of buildingg a remote management service for WP sites, would that be something that makes your work easier? (as you can manage all websites from one dashboard)
gatra,
I've hired a VA which keeps a very comprehensive excel spreadsheet. He is using roboform, which stores the WP, ClientArea and cPanel username and password for every PBN domain so that we can have access to the right issue whenever necessary. We are also testing MainWP on a batch of sites in order to ease the pain of manually updating plugins, themes and WP in general. I'll let you know how it goes down the road or if it provides a footprint responsible for a later de-indexation.
Wouldn't installing SpyderSpanker - or any other plugin for that matter - over and over again on 100+ create a juicy little footprint?
SEOExplored, yes, it would, in a way or another. That's why I do not install the plugin on ALL my PBN sites. Diversify mate.
Hi Alex,
I've read almost every comment and post on this thread.
I am about to start ,creation of PBN n/w ,Its truly helpful.I've read lot of blogs post and bhw thread too
Still i have following questions ,if possible kindly point me out.
1)As you said ,You dont care much about PA or DA ,PR stuff like that ...so if i take any aged,clean ,non spamy domain ,but has no backlinks ,but it is clean ,may have some PA/DA/PR ..Will it be useful to invest time into searching for such domain for buying,what places you recommend for searching expired domain other than expired domain ,freshdrop..
2)what are u thoughts on using services like Azure ,Digitalocean ,or similar ? Which domain providers would u recommend (i use Namecheap ,internetbs)?
3)What are u thoughts on domain that are bought for future ..but havent used ? I got few domains which are 1 year old lol just liek that ...just installed WP kept them like that ...
4)Also Using reseller hosting ..Will it be better idea ? rather creating normal client account ..

that way we can create multiple account and manage them too
Debugger,
1. While I don't care about any exact metrics, I DO CARE about backlinks, the more, the merrier I haven't tried the following yet, but some folks around use DomCop, RegisterCompass, TBSolutions for finding expired domains with a decent number of links and unique referring domains. However, we mostly scrape for broken links on authority websites and see which ones are available for registration. It's an extremely tedious process which takes up to 7-8 hours on a daily basis, but my VA handles it right and I'm also happy.
2. I haven't used any of those cloud services for hosting yet, but it's in the to-do list of my VA to test it on a batch of sites, again, for diversification. We currently have several registrar accounts with each of the following companies: NameCheap, GoDaddy, Name and several of the local registrars like 1stdomains CO NZ
3. I would recommend at least installing WordPress, throwing in several posts and letting them index and age naturally.
4. The problem with reseller hosting is the exact same NS for every account you create. That's why most people go with individual shared accounts and as many different hosting companies as possible. Again, diversification.
What hosting do you use for these sites?
macdonjo3,
My VA has a huge list of hosting companies. Some disappear down the road. Other pop-up. He makes sure to keep the spreadsheet updated and is contantly looking for new targets on big hosting forums like WHT. He also is fond of negotiating yearly pricing with bigger hosting companies so that when buying for 12 months or more, monthly pricing drops below $1 USD.