AMA about PBNs (setup, footprints, things to avoid, et al.)

Link building for PBNs, do you do anything different? Let’s say I built a PBN on an expired domain but I want to increase the metrics. Do I simply buy PBN links from BHW to point at my PBNs? Any tips or anything I should know?
 
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SureShot said:
Link building for PBNs, do you do anything different? Let’s say I built a PBN on an expired domain but I want to increase the metrics. Do I simply buy PBN links from BHW to point at my PBNs? Any tips or anything I should know?
Click to expand...

PBN stacking is a bit risky (i.e. footprints), unless you control both the tier1 and tier2 PBN domains. Having said that, it can work really well if done right, especially for ORM, rank&rent (local) or parasites.

But generally speaking, I'd suggest cheaper link insertions, guest posts or sape before tier2 PBNs.
 
Thanks for that.

When buying PBN domains, is it worth looking at the Majestic primary and secondary topic?

Let's say our money site is financial services.

I have noticed that some domains are not really related to financial services at all, but for whatever reason they have a bunch of for example incoming financial services backlinks. In this case Majestic categorises them as primary Financial Services, but a human would categorise the site as say computers, or pets or whatever.

Is Google more like a human, or Majestic when considering topical relevance for any outgoing links from this site?

What I am really actually wondering, is if I am looking at buying a domain for my PBN, do I want the actual topic of the site to match my niche, or the weight of the incoming links to match the niche?
For example, for my financial services money site, when looking to buy a PBN site to develop, do I want to buy the domain with pet content that has a bunch of financial services backlinks (majestic primary financial services), or a domain with actual financial services content but that has a bunch of incoming links categorised as pet (majestic primary pet)?

Further to the above, if I bought both the pet site with financial links and the financial services site with pet links, does it change where I link to on my financial services money site?

eg1. If PBN domain is actually about financial services but has incoming pet backlinks, is this a good candidate for a PBN root domain link to my money site root domain, or better to a page I make about pets + finance?

eg2. If PBN domain about pets with fin services backlinks, am I best to link from an inner PBN page about financial services to my money site root, or an inner about pets + finance?
 
trebhin said:
Thanks for that.

When buying PBN domains, is it worth looking at the Majestic primary and secondary topic?

Let's say our money site is financial services.

I have noticed that some domains are not really related to financial services at all, but for whatever reason they have a bunch of for example incoming financial services backlinks. In this case Majestic categorises them as primary Financial Services, but a human would categorise the site as say computers, or pets or whatever.

Is Google more like a human, or Majestic when considering topical relevance for any outgoing links from this site?

What I am really actually wondering, is if I am looking at buying a domain for my PBN, do I want the actual topic of the site to match my niche, or the weight of the incoming links to match the niche?
For example, for my financial services money site, when looking to buy a PBN site to develop, do I want to buy the domain with pet content that has a bunch of financial services backlinks (majestic primary financial services), or a domain with actual financial services content but that has a bunch of incoming links categorised as pet (majestic primary pet)?

Further to the above, if I bought both the pet site with financial links and the financial services site with pet links, does it change where I link to on my financial services money site?

eg1. If PBN domain is actually about financial services but has incoming pet backlinks, is this a good candidate for a PBN root domain link to my money site root domain, or better to a page I make about pets + finance?

eg2. If PBN domain about pets with fin services backlinks, am I best to link from an inner PBN page about financial services to my money site root, or an inner about pets + finance?
Click to expand...

Great question.

To be honest, majestic's topical trust flow metric is skewed (as you already pointed out) - I wouldn't rely on it too much. It's easier to use Wayback to check what type of content was hosted on the domain in the past.

General speaking, we always look for strong link profiles over thematic relevance. Getting both would be ideal - but it's not always possible.

The good thing is that you can get creative with your content to work around thematic complications. Got a pet PBN but you want to link to a finance money site? Great, write about how pet insurance can relieve financial stress for low income families.

Thematic relevance can be created, while the link profile itself is hard to change.

And always link out from your strongest pages.

1. If your homepage has the most link equity, link out to your site from that. Create internal links from any inner pages that also have links to your homepage using kw rich anchors.

2. If an inner page hast most of the link equity, link out from that and sticky it on the homepage. Also create internal links from the inner page to the homepage and vice versa.

Just build good internal link funnels and you'll be fine.
 
Hi @janist, thank you very much for the time and effort you have spent here. It is very much appreciated, especially by the newbies ;)

though it took me 3-4 hrs, I enjoyed reading through the entire thread and may even read it over again in the future to further cement all the valuable tidbits being provided. Lots of notes were taken as well!

For now, I just have 2 questions (may have more in the future):

  • Once you have hit the 10k ideal word count for a given PBN, is it acceptable to simply stop the bimonthly posting of new content, or do you think this could hurt link equity?
  • Have you ever come across backlinking being done directly with images from money sites? I get that contextual links are the way to go, but would you ever consider trying to acquire link juice using images? See the example below for more context on what I mean...
    • Say there is an image at ms.com/article1/image.png; pbn1.com (homepage) has a contextual backlink pointing to ms.com (homepage), and pbn1.com/article-xyz has an article where one of the featured images has the src attribute “src=’ms.com/article1/image.png’”; what would be your take on this setup?
    • Do you think this would be cause for suspicion amongst manual reviewers, or is it hard to say? Would this be considered OBL=2?
    • Generally speaking, what is your take on backlinking with images using the strategy highlighted above? Do you see this at all being useful?

Thanks in advance. Cheers!
 
What’s your thoughts on internal linking for indexing? I’ve noticed my homepage just got indexed, but none of the inner pages. I was thinking of making a blog post and have some internal links. For example, it would say “For articles about technology check out Mysite.com/technology, to get a hold of us check out mysite.com/about-us and so on. Would this help get indexed? Does it even matter?
 
AtticusFinch said:
Hi @janist, thank you very much for the time and effort you have spent here. It is very much appreciated, especially by the newbies ;)

though it took me 3-4 hrs, I enjoyed reading through the entire thread and may even read it over again in the future to further cement all the valuable tidbits being provided. Lots of notes were taken as well!

For now, I just have 2 questions (may have more in the future):

  • Once you have hit the 10k ideal word count for a given PBN, is it acceptable to simply stop the bimonthly posting of new content, or do you think this could hurt link equity?
  • Have you ever come across backlinking being done directly with images from money sites? I get that contextual links are the way to go, but would you ever consider trying to acquire link juice using images? See the example below for more context on what I mean...
    • Say there is an image at ms.com/article1/image.png; pbn1.com (homepage) has a contextual backlink pointing to ms.com (homepage), and pbn1.com/article-xyz has an article where one of the featured images has the src attribute “src=’ms.com/article1/image.png’”; what would be your take on this setup?
    • Do you think this would be cause for suspicion amongst manual reviewers, or is it hard to say? Would this be considered OBL=2?
    • Generally speaking, what is your take on backlinking with images using the strategy highlighted above? Do you see this at all being useful?

Thanks in advance. Cheers!
Click to expand...

Thanks for the kind words.

Re. your question: 10k is not a set-in-stone amount that you absolutely need to have. A PBN can work with just 3k words or even less. Having said that, the more content your can build around a niche PBN, the higher the chances it passes a manual review (if it ever comes to that).

Never really tried image links. I know it works for Infographics, but most of the time the graphic is accompanied by a branded source link. Worth a test, though.

SureShot said:
What’s your thoughts on internal linking for indexing? I’ve noticed my homepage just got indexed, but none of the inner pages. I was thinking of making a blog post and have some internal links. For example, it would say “For articles about technology check out Mysite.com/technology, to get a hold of us check out mysite.com/about-us and so on. Would this help get indexed? Does it even matter?
Click to expand...

Sure, not only is internal linking essential to pass the link equity around, it's also a natural occurence for real sites. So definitely utilize it.

I wouldn't worry too much about indexing, most of our PBNs (incl. inner pages) indexed within a reasonable amount of time. If there's nothing significantly wrong with the domains or your internal SEO settings, it will index completely in a week or so.
 
If I have a legitimate business, and I buy a domain that has synergy for my business, say an information site for my niche, is it OK to register it in my real name, host on same plan, build it as a site, and then link to my primary business site. Like do I really need to hide it?

I intuitively feel like it should be ok to have a couple of real sites that are related to each other and publicly and openly link between them as often as is natural. Eg i have a pet accessories site, and a real informational site about dogs.

IF that is true though, so long as the sites are all genuinely useful, is there a limit? Can I also have a podcast about pets and interlink that too?
 
trebhin said:
If I have a legitimate business, and I buy a domain that has synergy for my business, say an information site for my niche, is it OK to register it in my real name, host on same plan, build it as a site, and then link to my primary business site. Like do I really need to hide it?

I intuitively feel like it should be ok to have a couple of real sites that are related to each other and publicly and openly link between them as often as is natural. Eg i have a pet accessories site, and a real informational site about dogs.

IF that is true though, so long as the sites are all genuinely useful, is there a limit? Can I also have a podcast about pets and interlink that too?
Click to expand...

Well, that's a PBN, unless you build a brand around all sites (that they share.

But if the informational site is just for cross-linking to your other sites, it's a PBN.

And to our demise, Google doesn't really care about what we consider 'natural'. If they want to f*ck with you, they will.

So no, I wouldn't host it on the same server / plan just to be completley safe. Registering under your name is no problem, though. Use private WhoIs.
 
k2h2 said:
Suggest some good themes for PBNs?
Click to expand...

You don't need many, tbh.

For a base stack, i'd suggest you invest into all or at least two of the combos below:
  • Astra Pro + Elementor Pro (or Oxygen)
  • Generatepress + GenerateBlocks (Alternative: Kadence + Kadenceblocks)
  • Divi

Tons of prebuilt templates that you can adjust accordingly.

Some of them are lifetime subs, while others renew manually. But if you plan to build a good chunk of PBNs, they are a no brainer. Also no footprints, as these combos are used by 50k+ sites all over the web.

We also have quite a few of the bestsellers from themeforest (Avada, Enfold, Newspaper, ReHub, etc.) but we haven't used them in the past few months for new builds.
 
Has the value or importance of PBNs reduced in 2021 ?
 
Love when this threads suddenly pop into the home page.
Bookmarked for a latter read.
THX for sharing op
 
What do you think of buying expired domains, and simply resurrecting the old content from wayback and then adding a couple of new articles over the top?
 
So you suggest using a private WhoIs for all sites across a PBN, but what about the public information displayed in the "Contact Us" section of each of these sites? If the info is the same here for each site, wouldn't that be a footprint?

So our WhoIs info can be the same, but I suppose our "Contact Us" info should be unique?
 
trebhin said:
What do you think of buying expired domains, and simply resurrecting the old content from wayback and then adding a couple of new articles over the top?
Click to expand...

This has been covered in detail in the first pages of the thread. We use fresh content all the way, nothing form wayback.

AtticusFinch said:
So you suggest using a private WhoIs for all sites across a PBN, but what about the public information displayed in the "Contact Us" section of each of these sites? If the info is the same here for each site, wouldn't that be a footprint?

So our WhoIs info can be the same, but I suppose our "Contact Us" info should be unique?
Click to expand...

Yes, just create a contact us page with a few unique text snippets. No need to include any of your real details. The probability of someone visiting your contact page on a PBN is almost nil anyway.
 
Thanks Janist for your most excellent thread. I'm a lurker but signed up because I'm working on this and have questions.

#1 - If a site in my PBN has 1 outbound link from 1 internal page to 1 related page on my money site, and zero other external links, is that ideal? I'm asking because some say I should also have outbound links to authority sources to make the outbound link profile seem more legit. Opinion?

#2 - If a site in my PBN has a few pages that get decent traffic but only 1 links to my money site would it be OK to add an affiliate link on the other pages (affiliate network like shareasale etc) or should that type of link be left off PBN sites.

Thanks in advance
 
jakeriley said:
Thanks Janist for your most excellent thread. I'm a lurker but signed up because I'm working on this and have questions.

#1 - If a site in my PBN has 1 outbound link from 1 internal page to 1 related page on my money site, and zero other external links, is that ideal? I'm asking because some say I should also have outbound links to authority sources to make the outbound link profile seem more legit. Opinion?

#2 - If a site in my PBN has a few pages that get decent traffic but only 1 links to my money site would it be OK to add an affiliate link on the other pages (affiliate network like shareasale etc) or should that type of link be left off PBN sites.

Thanks in advance
Click to expand...

#1 If that site has most of the links pointed at it, yes. Of course you can add other outbound links, but keep it tight. On pages that have the most/strongest links, i'd keep OBL low.

#2 Then i'd turn that site into a complete money site, not a PBN. Keep them separate.
 
seowarrior008 said:
Nice share! thanks for so much valuable information.

I am wondering where you host PBN? one domain in one cheap shared server?
Do u spread register all domains in different registrars? or just one?

When u gain one domain, do you set up the website, post content, and insert links straight away??
or have to wait some time to insert the link? then how long should wait?

Sorry for so many questions and appreciate your time!

Cheers
Click to expand...
 
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