Advice on building a PBN

christianbed · Jun 10, 2014

Ok, I'm trying to settle a debate on a few things, so I'm opening it to the collective wisdom of BHW, but I want to hear from members who have first-hand experience, rather than hearing what someone read on some guy's blog. ;-)

1) Expired domains vs new domains - is it really true that expired domains outperform new domains? My feeling is that it is almost impossible to find decent domains related to some niches (ex: oral surgeons, SEO, etc) that have a good TF/CF ratio. So, one is either left with the option of buying a decent, non-niche-related domain OR just buying a new domain. Yes, I know that you can get some decent stuff for over $1k/domain, but I am not sure it will necessarily outperform a new domain after a couple months. My feeling is that the new domain will take longer to rank, but may be on par with the expired domain within a few months if it is fed with decent content.

2) 301 or build a blog - Let's say you buy an expired domain related to your niche. Would you rather 301 it or build a blog on it, and why? Now, let's say it is an expired domain NOT related to the niche; like it used to be a site that built LED's and you want to use it for a site about oral surgery. Is it better to just copy/paste the old deindexed content on the site and plug a link on the homepage, or start over again with new content related to oral surgery.

3) How many hosting accounts are needed? I've heard it all...each domain with a new host to just put all on the same host. I know some guys use a CDN like Cloudflare to mask the IP.

I know the questions are a bit general, but I'm trying to get some informative answers rather than sarcasm/snark because I suspect there is a lot of misinformation out there from people who don't actually work with PBN's on a daily basis.

SteveWaller · Jun 10, 2014

christianbed said:
Ok, I'm trying to settle a debate on a few things, so I'm opening it to the collective wisdom of BHW, but I want to hear from members who have first-hand experience, rather than hearing what someone read on some guy's blog. ;-)

1) Expired domains vs new domains - is it really true that expired domains outperform new domains? My feeling is that it is almost impossible to find decent domains related to some niches (ex: oral surgeons, SEO, etc) that have a good TF/CF ratio. So, one is either left with the option of buying a decent, non-niche-related domain OR just buying a new domain. Yes, I know that you can get some decent stuff for over $1k/domain, but I am not sure it will necessarily outperform a new domain after a couple months. My feeling is that the new domain will take longer to rank, but may be on par with the expired domain within a few months if it is fed with decent content.

2) 301 or build a blog - Let's say you buy an expired domain related to your niche. Would you rather 301 it or build a blog on it, and why? Now, let's say it is an expired domain NOT related to the niche; like it used to be a site that built LED's and you want to use it for a site about oral surgery. Is it better to just copy/paste the old deindexed content on the site and plug a link on the homepage, or start over again with new content related to oral surgery.

3) How many hosting accounts are needed? I've heard it all...each domain with a new host to just put all on the same host. I know some guys use a CDN like Cloudflare to mask the IP.

I know the questions are a bit general, but I'm trying to get some informative answers rather than sarcasm/snark because I suspect there is a lot of misinformation out there from people who don't actually work with PBN's on a daily basis.

In my humble opinion...

1) Brand new domains might have the upper hand on relevancy but they have zero authority so are you really going to sit there and build authority to all of them individually before pointing links back to your money site? Adding content alone will not achieve the result you want. I would say that it is much more effective to buy expired domains regardless of niche and retheme them to match your niche. This way you can instantly access the juice from the high quality links these domains have.

2) Build a blog - yes it takes longer and costs more but you can then control anchor text. By 301ing, your money sites will end up with all sorts of random, off topic, anchor text and I'd say it's much much easier to penalise from Google's viewpoint. When building out a blog, add content that is relevant to your money site - don't bother with the old content.

3) I tend to have new hosting accounts per domain per project. So I put multiple domains on each host but they point to different money sites.

Again, these are my opinions based on my experience of building out over 100 domains and ranking sites with them.

christianbed · Jun 10, 2014

Thanks for sharing your experience...good stuff...this confirmed a lot of what I was thinking regarding the use of expired domains.

I also suppose that G can probably still snoop behind a CDN, it is worth the extra trouble to do different hosting accounts, as you said.

Appreciate the feedback mate!

peepin2me · Jun 10, 2014

Does anyone have a list of low cost web hosts to host PBN blogs?

sprgroup · Jun 21, 2014

peepin2me said:
Does anyone have a list of low cost web hosts to host PBN blogs?

Try Netfirms, they have a pretty cheap starter hosting plan, you can find coupon codes online as well.

Their domain management tools and hosting platform are pretty good as well. Just a heads up though, they don't use cPanel, but their control panel is very similar and just as convenient and easy to use.

Good luck!

fullyniche · Jun 21, 2014

Great experience. Thanks for taking time to share for us. Cheers bro !

Ivaylo · Jun 21, 2014

If you don't want to have different hosting accounts for each domain in your PBN, you can try this service. https://cloakhosting.com/
They do the work for you, renting out space from different hosting providers and putting it under one roof. They're not like most SEO hostings, which have a predefined set of IPs, which can be blocked by Google.

Nick Flame · Jun 21, 2014

christianbed said:
1) Expired domains vs new domains - is it really true that expired domains outperform new domains? My feeling is that it is almost impossible to find decent domains related to some niches (ex: oral surgeons, SEO, etc) that have a good TF/CF ratio. So, one is either left with the option of buying a decent, non-niche-related domain OR just buying a new domain. Yes, I know that you can get some decent stuff for over $1k/domain, but I am not sure it will necessarily outperform a new domain after a couple months. My feeling is that the new domain will take longer to rank, but may be on par with the expired domain within a few months if it is fed with decent content.

There is no doubt that an expired domain outperforms a new domain. Even after you add content to a new domain (which you should do with the expired domain anyway) after a couple of months you will not have any authority links, as adding content does not guarantee any links. The advantage of the expired domain - if chosen wisely - is that it already has high quality links that are very hard to replicate. Content can be added easily. By the way, i assume that you mean for building your PBN, not for your money site.

christianbed said:
2) 301 or build a blog[/B] - Let's say you buy an expired domain related to your niche. Would you rather 301 it or build a blog on it, and why? Now, let's say it is an expired domain NOT related to the niche; like it used to be a site that built LED's and you want to use it for a site about oral surgery. Is it better to just copy/paste the old deindexed content on the site and plug a link on the homepage, or start over again with new content related to oral surgery.

301 usually passes a fraction of the original link juice of the domain, so building a blog is usually preferred. Building a blog also lets you play with the anchor text, in -content links, and perhaps post more links on that PBN blog in the future.

If it's a non related expired domain, place your new content related to oral surgery on it. Copy/pasting the old deindexed content is a bad idea, and it's also copyright infringement

christianbed said:
3) How many hosting accounts are needed?[/B] I've heard it all...each domain with a new host to just put all on the same host. I know some guys use a CDN like Cloudflare to mask the IP.

I posted a detailed guide on bhw on how you can build a 15 domain PBN - each website on its own IP for under $275, including hosting and everything. You can check it out here.

It's not ideal, there are still a couple of hiccups here and there, but for a low budget it's a good way too start.

If you have the money, the world is your oyster. Take a new hosting for each domain if you really want to be risk free, but that's probably overkill.

miop38 · Jul 4, 2014

SteveWaller said:
In my humble opinion...

1) Brand new domains might have the upper hand on relevancy but they have zero authority so are you really going to sit there and build authority to all of them individually before pointing links back to your money site? Adding content alone will not achieve the result you want. I would say that it is much more effective to buy expired domains regardless of niche and retheme them to match your niche. This way you can instantly access the juice from the high quality links these domains have.

2) Build a blog - yes it takes longer and costs more but you can then control anchor text. By 301ing, your money sites will end up with all sorts of random, off topic, anchor text and I'd say it's much much easier to penalise from Google's viewpoint. When building out a blog, add content that is relevant to your money site - don't bother with the old content.

3) I tend to have new hosting accounts per domain per project. So I put multiple domains on each host but they point to different money sites.

Again, these are my opinions based on my experience of building out over 100 domains and ranking sites with them.[/QUOTE

I definitely agree with you and I am building my own network and what I have been learning and experiencing agrees with you!
cheers

In between I cant PM you but would love to try your domain crawler. please let me know how to proceed

thanks

Advice on building a PBN

christianbed

Elite Member

SteveWaller

Regular Member

christianbed

Elite Member

peepin2me

Regular Member

sprgroup

Newbie

fullyniche

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Ivaylo

Junior Member

Nick Flame

Supreme Member

miop38

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