Turning domains into PBNs vs 301'ing them?

[Sam Green]

Say I have a high authority dropped domain in my niche what's the better strategy for it. Do I spend the money/time to turn it into a legitimate looking website or just 301 everything?

Could I combine the two methods together? Meaning could I buy multiple dropped domains and chain them together to boost my pbn site? Can 301 redirects be chained? For example:

301 site -> 301 site -> 301 site -> PBN -> Money Site

 

[Banditoseo]

1. The consensus seems to be that a full PBN is the most potent strategy.
2. A proper PBN is expensive and time-consuming. A lot of people believe the 301 offers a better bang-for-the-buck, and some have testing to back it up.
3. Chaining together 301s has pros and cons.
   • A lot of people believe that the number of 301 domains operates as a spam signal. If true, then a chain of 301s might be safer.
   • 301s typically pass anchor text. If those domains aren't related, then the final step of the chain might look really weird to Google, like an obvious domain forwarding scheme. I think this is unlikely, but it's a risk.
     
   • There's a "decay" in pagerank/equity/juice/whatever for each step of a 301. We know that decay is minimal in the first step, but 2nd step? 3rd? It's an open question. A domain 301 to a domain 301 to a domain 301 is abnormal and indicates to Google, at the very minimum, that a webmaster is not following best-practices on the technical side and/or that the current website operator lacks access to the prior domains and their control panels. There are sound reasons why Google might simply drop a chain of domain 301s from the link graph.

You'll never know until you test it. IMHO, a 301 to a PBN is worth far less than a 301 to the money site.

 

[Sam Green]

@Banditoseo
Your reply was very well researched and you made some amazing points. I found a post that backed up what you were saying about each step of the 301 chain dropping link juice. So I was thinking of maybe trying something else instead. Since chains are bad for seo what about 301'ing each domain to a different page on the money site (or pbn site?) and then having something on the page semi-related to the 301'd domain.

for example say my niche is... idk... "FITNESS" for instance and i manage to find 3 high authority domains.

domain `A` is in the Fitness niche so i just find it on archive.org and recreate it

domain `B` is for a movie blog site so i make a page on my fitness site about the best movies to watch while excersing.

domain `C` is a music curation site so i make a page on my fitness site about music to lissen to while jogging

my thinking would be that this would be less suspicious to google? maybe?

 

[Nargil]

1. The consensus seems to be that a full PBN is the most potent strategy.
2. A proper PBN is expensive and time-consuming. A lot of people believe the 301 offers a better bang-for-the-buck, and some have testing to back it up.
3. Chaining together 301s has pros and cons.
   • A lot of people believe that the number of 301 domains operates as a spam signal. If true, then a chain of 301s might be safer.
   • 301s typically pass anchor text. If those domains aren't related, then the final step of the chain might look really weird to Google, like an obvious domain forwarding scheme. I think this is unlikely, but it's a risk.
     
   • There's a "decay" in pagerank/equity/juice/whatever for each step of a 301. We know that decay is minimal in the first step, but 2nd step? 3rd? It's an open question. A domain 301 to a domain 301 to a domain 301 is abnormal and indicates to Google, at the very minimum, that a webmaster is not following best-practices on the technical side and/or that the current website operator lacks access to the prior domains and their control panels. There are sound reasons why Google might simply drop a chain of domain 301s from the link graph.

You'll never know until you test it. IMHO, a 301 to a PBN is worth far less than a 301 to the money site.

Very good answer indeed. Finally some quality here.

Doing just one 301 is in my opinion a pretty bad idea, especially with an authority site. Doing multiple is just straightaway bad.

Always go for PBN. 301 redirects are pretty hard to do properly and even then they take weeks and even months to take effect. And way too often, there isn't any effect at all, even if you do everything right. So PBN all the way.

 

[nutsdealer]

If you just have a single domain, redirecting it would be better. If you have several then you could use as PBN.

 

[ttmschine]

The answer is to use your brain.

If you have some super duper domain - suppose CNN.com forgot to re-register and you could get it for $10 - would you sit there with your thumb up your brain thinking "D'oh, dis is not in my niche so I will leave it alone since it's news and I am in the ripping people off to get rich quick niche".

Or would you think "that's so amazing a domain with such amazing metrics I'm having it"?

If the answer is B then you don't need to stick yourself to domains from "your niche", you can pick them from ANY niche, since what you're interested in power, not dumbfuckery like "niches".**

Then if you get some super domain that has some utterly shit keywords in the domain and you couldn't seriously make a meaningful website on it as part of a PBN - 301 it to your money site, or through some kind of proxy.

If you can make a PBN on it that looks legit - do that.

**Google is a dumb machine, it might know that words like "blue" or "green" or "red" are colours, but it has no clue what that means, they may be related in a database called "colours" but it has never seen redor green or blue or purple or any other colour.

It's the same with ALL other words - it has no real clue what they mean.

Since it doesn't know the meaning of individual words, it has no chance with the nuances of language if you stick just a handful of words together, and if it doesn't understand the words, or the meaning of a string of words - then it can't have the faintest clue what is or isn't right in any kind of niche.

Therefore niches are bollocks, it's power of links that matter - if you have a website about smoking fish fillets and you're selling fish smoke huses - a link from the BBC is always going to outrank a link from grandma smith who has a blog about smoked kippers because that's her favourite food.

The latter is totally on niche but is worthless bollocks, the former is not on niche at all but is 1000000 times more important a link.

Niche links are outdated non-thinking bollocks UNLESS they are niche links from AUTHORITY websites as per the hilltop algorithm measurement process.
So in summary, just use your brain and stop asking fr spoon feeding for very little thing that you want to know - and if you aren't sure - test your ideas and see what works best, then keep doing that.

FFS it isn't rocket surgery.

 

[Banditoseo]

@Banditoseo
Your reply was very well researched and you made some amazing points. I found a post that backed up what you were saying about each step of the 301 chain dropping link juice. So I was thinking of maybe trying something else instead. Since chains are bad for seo what about 301'ing each domain to a different page on the money site (or pbn site?) and then having something on the page semi-related to the 301'd domain.

for example say my niche is... idk... "FITNESS" for instance and i manage to find 3 high authority domains.

domain `A` is in the Fitness niche so i just find it on archive.org and recreate it

domain `B` is for a movie blog site so i make a page on my fitness site about the best movies to watch while excersing.

domain `C` is a music curation site so i make a page on my fitness site about music to lissen to while jogging

my thinking would be that this would be less suspicious to google? maybe?

Read both of these:

• https://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects
  
• https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

There's a couple points to draw from them.

1. Google has trouble implementing 3xx redirects. It was only a few months ago that they eliminated the "decay" from a http -> https conversion, a conversion they themselves encouraged. Thus, every time you touch a 3xx, you're potentially creating a problem. This is why White Hat SEOs and legitimate webmasters are terrified of them.
2. Google treats some 3xx redirects, like a bulk redirect to a new domain homepage, as a soft 404, and ignores them. I bet >95% of the people complaining about "redirects not working" are having that exact problem.
3. Google likes to mislead people. This includes cryptically claiming, via tweet, that 30x directs don't lose PageRank anymore. But follow that thread a little farther to here: https://twitter.com/methode/status/757968795222872069 He clarifies that there's no dampening for PageRank, the antiquated formula that is barely used anymore within Google, and which Google had publicly killed a few months earlier. Everything else has some "dampening."

Putting this all together, I think A is your best option there. Good odds that both B and C end up treated as a soft 404 (and a mild spam factor) unless you can do a good job convincing the algorithm (by way of looking at prior anchor text, etc) that your new page is most likely a new home for that pre-existing website, rather than an attempt to harvest link equity/juice.