Building a PBN w/Cloudflare

Hello awesome PBN builders,

I had a question regarding PBNs and what/if any impact using cloudfare, or other CDNs, would have. Most sources indicate that a good PBN requires careful consideration to avoid any kind of footprint.

I've seen a lot of speculation on all the things that must be considered to avoid leaving those footprints and I fully understand the importance of mitigating risk after you've invested hundreds of hours across many sites. My primary question here is if you end up using Cloudflare for all of your sites, thus using the generated name servers they provide, I can't see any benefit to varying the webhost that you use. If you do a reverse lookup against the nameservers you'll find a bunch of websites from other people that have nothing to do with you so I don't see how Google or anyone else could ever penalize the sites tied to the IP address of Cloudflare.

So, technically, if you are using a private whois and Cloudflare, even though that might be a footprint, I don't see how it could be an actionable one on its own right. I would love to hear feedback on this from you lovely, educated people on whether this assessment is valid

My two suggestions are:
1.Avoid Cloudflare since they have limited # of ip and google can find them easily.Use different hosting account for each site instead.
2.Just take action.You will learn a lot by trial & error.

My guess - for 5 or 10 sites it would be fine - it hides your host.
For more, it would be a footprint. So ideally you need mix - different hosts, cloudflare on some, private who is, fake who is etc.

The more random factors the more natural it looks

It depends on how you want to link to your money sites.

Cloudfare on all 20 sites is okay if you plan on keeping them unattached from each other and linking out to different domains on every single one. It still would be fine if you had the 20 sites linking out to 4 money sites, but still not interlinking between money sites or PBNs.

The point is you have to decide on how much risk you want to take. The lowest risk for a 20 site PBN is 20 different domain registrars, 20 different hosts all with not private, verified WhoIs info. The good thing about cloudfare is a lot of people use it for their legitimate sites, unlike a lot of the cheap shared hosting companies where probably more than half the sites they host are PBNs.

If you are okay with risking it, then the reality is - if you take your time to develop all of the PBNs, properly add content to them (drip feed) and don't interlink them, you could probably get away with cutting some corners for a long time. There's hundreds of millions of websites and only however many manual reviewers. Not enough man power to search through all of them. But if you are going to cut corners make sure you bury the links with other links to make it look less obvious.

It comes down to - how important are the money sites, and how far are you willing to go to earn a dollar?

Ye you can do it. Create new accounts for every 2-3 sites so you get new nameservers

Having some domains using cloudflare shouldn't be a problem providing you can get different nameservers and also host the websites on different hosts. If you use the same host then the IPs will still be a footprint.

Does cloudflare change your domains IP or just the nameserver? I put a couple sites on cloudflare and when I check their IP it is still the same as my host and all my other sites on that host. Maybe I'm missing a step

Thanks everyone for the great feedback. I think there is some important information here that I'll summarize:

• Cloudflare can indeed be used to mask your actual DNS server and IP address, however the pool of Cloudflare address is limited
• For a small network of PBNs you could potentially create 5 different Cloudfare accounts and if each account was dynamically assigned different name servers and IPs you could theoretically spread out your PBNs across them
• All the usual rules of not interlinking the sites or pointing to the same money site for a given IP still apply

I think the key for me was that I was assuming that algorithms that search for PBNs would ignore Cloudflare IPs because that alone would not identify the owner because the address is shared with many other owners. This is an incorrect statement though and if it were true you might as well just host everything from a cheap shared hosting account. After more thought I now better understand that simply masking your network inside a shared IP with other websites would not prevent a bot from at least raising a flag for manual review or for other tests to be conducted on every URL it finds.

Similarly, I wouldn't be surprised if every CDN IP address is already part of a large algorithm that is continually being tested against for this exact kind of activity.

All in all, this discussion has convinced me that using a CDN is not the way to go for a PBN. Hopefully this helps others in the future!

If you don't know how to setup CloudFlare properly, your IPs will leak. We wrote a blog post on the topic last month: Research: two thirds of PBNs on CloudFlare leak real IPs

Nerevar said:

If you don't know how to setup CloudFlare properly, your IPs will leak. We wrote a blog post on the topic last month: Research: two thirds of PBNs on CloudFlare leak real IPs

Click to expand...

Great share. Standard whois utilities were showing the IP address at Cloudflare but that Crimeflare tool does indeed reveal my own server IP.

Cloudflare is good. But don't overdo it. For example, if you have 50 PBNs, use it for 5-10 at most and use real hosts in the rest. If needed, you can use fake DNS (not cloudflare but other ones) in a few to reduce costs. Do not make anything a footprint and it should be safe.