[GUIDE] Ultimate PBN Guide v2.0

janist · 2026-10-26T14:27:10+0000

The Ultimate PBN Guide — v2.0 Edition

So,

back in 2021 we wrote the Ultimate PBN Guide. A lot of you used it to build your first networks.

Five years later, a big part of it is outdated. Not the fundamentals — links still work, domains still bring the power, footprints still get networks killed. But the way you build, host and run a PBN has completely changed.

WordPress isn't a necessity anymore. Cloudflare went from "skip it" to "use it". Building a unique site went from a day of fiddling with Elementor to a few minutes with Claude Opus 5.5. And content and internal linking? One prompt.

To give you an idea: this year we redesigned all of our PBNs — 100+ sites — in 4 days. New templates, custom fonts, new layouts, new images. Opus 5.5 for the code and copy, OpenAI and Gemini for the images. Two years ago that would have been a quarter's worth of work for a small team.

This is the updated guide. Same structure as the original, every section rewritten for 2026.

Grab some coffee. This is gonna be even longer.

Glossary
What is a PBN and why is everyone (still) raving about them?
Risks and costs of a PBN in 2026
The 2026 stack: WordPress is optional now
Where to find PBN domains (now with AI agents)
PBN domain analysis
PBN footprints (to avoid) — all 15, updated
PBN setup by stack
How to link out from your PBN
FAQ

Glossary

PBN — Private Blog Network
RD — Referring Domains
DR / DA — Domain Rating (Ahrefs) / Domain Authority (Moz)
OBL — Outgoing Backlinks
Money Site — your main website
Droplet — a server on a cloud host (DigitalOcean's name for it; Vultr, Linode, Hetzner etc. have their own)
ASN — Autonomous System Number: the network that owns an IP block. Every DigitalOcean IP belongs to the same ASN, no matter the C-class.
Static site / SSG — a site pre-built into plain HTML files (Astro, Next.js static export). No PHP, no database.
Shared edge hosting — platforms like Vercel, Cloudflare Workers or AWS CloudFront that serve millions of sites from the same shared IPs.
Origin — the real server behind a proxy like Cloudflare.
T2 — tier 2 links: links pointing to your PBN sites.

What is a PBN and why is everyone (still) raving about them?

PBN is short for "Private Blog Network".
As the name suggests, it's a network of expired domains with strong link profiles and clean histories that you use to funnel link equity to your money site. Done right, it improves your rankings over time.

Typical PBN structure:

Source: seolutions.biz

Why does that work?

Google uses links as one of their key ranking factors. It all started with a little algorithm called PageRank, which valued a page by looking at who links to it. You can still read about it in the original paper: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

Source: Stanford InfoLab

And in 2024 the leaked Google Search API documentation listed several PageRank-style attributes. Read Hobo's guides, he broke down the leaks in incredible detail > Big shoutout: https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/the-defi...ding-after-the-google-content-warehouse-leak/

Takeaway: Links are still in the core of the algorithm. What's new in 2026: links don't just move you up the classic blue links anymore. AI Overviews, ChatGPT search and Perplexity all lean heavily on pages that already rank. Rank better, get cited more. Links feed both.

So on that front nothing changed.

Google still loves links - especially contextual links: in-content links from sites with great link profiles. Guest posts, editorials, link insertions and, you guessed it, PBNs.

BUT, and it's a big but.

PBNs still have risks. They are not for everyone.

So let's get into those.

Risks and costs of a PBN

The risks

Google is still highly against any kind of grey'ish link building. Their spam policies call links meant to manipulate rankings "link spam" - so by definition, any link building you do is against their guidelines.

But this is BlackHatWorld, not Google Search Central. So who gives a sh*t?

We love building links. We always have.

We just need to be extra careful — and in modern times, there's more to be careful about:

SpamBrain, Google's AI spam detection, is much better at spotting networks than in 2021.
Since March 2024 there are two spam policies aimed straight at lazy PBNs: expired domain abuse (buying an expired domain mainly to rank low-value content on its old reputation) and scaled content abuse (mass-producing pages with little value — AI or not).
However, penalties are rarely a single manual action anymore. More often the links just quietly stop counting. You won't get an email. Your PBN just stops passing equity.

You can't just buy a random domain, host it wherever, slap on a free theme and link to all your sites anymore. That worked back in 2014.

So, to keep your PBN safe, you want to avoid the proverbial footprints at all costs.

The good news: in 2026 that's much easier than it used to be.

The costs — then vs. now

Back in 2021 we estimated a small 10-site network like this. Here's how it looks today:

Item (10 sites)	2021	2026
Domains (RD20+, com/net/org, incl. registration)	$450 minimum, $1,000–3,000 for good ones	Possibly around $600+. Good domains haven't gotten cheaper.
Hosting	$60+/month (10 droplets incl. backups)	$0–20/month on shared edge hosting, or ~$40–60/month for 10 droplets
Setup (theme customization, plugins, htaccess, redirects)	$300–500	An AI subscription and a few hours of your time (Claude ideally)
Content (1,500–2,000 words per site)	$250 minimum	A few dollars in AI usage + human review time
Premium themes + Elementor Pro	~$500	$0 — every site is custom-built

In 2021 you paid at least $100–150 per site, and $500–2,000 for really good domains. Today almost all of your money goes into the domains, a bit of hosting and the AI of your choice (we recommend Claude). Building and running the sites costs a fraction of what it did.

The 2026 stack: WordPress is optional now

In 2021 every PBN was WordPress + a theme builder (Elementor) or a custom theme.

That's no longer a necessity.

For new networks we build our PBNs solely on Astro (our default) or Next.js, with Claude Opus 5.5 doing all the heavy lifting.

Source: seolutions.biz

Advantages over WordPress

Nothing to hack. The sites are plain static files: no PHP, no database, no plugins, no login page. On WordPress, outdated plugins and themes are the usual way sites get hijacked and filled with injected spam links. On a static build that can't happen.
No shared footprints. WordPress pages give themselves away through /wp-content/, /wp-json, xmlrpc.php, generator tags and shared themes or CSS classes. Static builds have none of those. Each site gets its own design, CSS class names, SVGs, file hashes and legal text — and you can check that mechanically across the whole network with a simple comparison prompt, something you can't really do with a WordPress network at scale.
Speed. Astro / Next sites are blazing fast. Core Web Vitals are better and there's virtually no server load.
Cost and upkeep. No servers to patch, update or back up. No themes to maintain, no plugins to check.
Control from one place. Network-wide changes like pinned posts, post removals, 301s and link changes are scripted and kept in separate git repos. Every change is reviewable and can be rolled back, and two people can work on the network without stepping on each other.

The downsides. There's no admin panel, so every edit goes through the repo, a build and a deploy. Comments and server-side forms are gone too. For a PBN, we don't miss either.

We personally use Astro now for every new AND old PBN we have. A PBN site is a content site - it doesn't need server rendering, logins or an API. Astro outputs plain HTML with zero JavaScript by default and its content collections are made for blogs. Next.js works too, but for a PBN you'd mostly be using it as a static site generator anyway.

When WordPress still makes sense: you're maintaining an existing WP network, your VAs only know WordPress, or you want a mix of platforms in a big network.

A few WP sites among static sites is actually a good thing — the real web is mixed.

Where to find PBN domains (now with AI agents)

PBNs are only as good as the domains they're built on. We know that.

Today (compared to 2021), you still only have two options: buy from a vendor, or find them yourself.

Domain vendors

Most of you don't have the time, expertise or patience to sift through thousands of expiring domains every day. Vendors did the groundwork: they went through the garbage, bid at auctions, hassled with sellers and scraped until their di*ks fell off. You pay a pretty penny for that, but if it saves you time, it's a no-brainer. We still don't give vendor recommendations — there are plenty of good ones around.

Finding them yourself

ExpiredDomains.net is still free and still the classic.

New in 2026: CatchDoms aggregates expiring and auction domains from more than a dozen platforms — and, more importantly, it has a REST API and an MCP server.

That means an AI agent can query it directly (more on that below).

Stages of an expiring domain

What hasn't changed are the stages at which a domain can be grabbed at different points of the expiration process.

Source: seolutions.biz

Renewal Grace Period — the owner still has a few days to renew. No way to bid or buy.
Domain Auction Period — if the owner doesn't renew, the domain goes to auction. One of the best times to snap up a great PBN domain, but you won't be the only bidder. GoDaddy has a HUGE auction marketplace: GoDaddy expired auctions.
Closeout Period — not sold at auction? It becomes a closeout domain, available at a fixed price for a few days. People overlook gold nuggets here: GoDaddy closeouts.
Pending Delete — not sold at closeout, it moves to pending deletion, and then drops. Use a backorder / dropcatch service to get it the moment it drops: SnapNames, DropCatch, Nicsell. Browse them: pending delete
Deleted Domains — nobody caught it, it's available to everyone. Millions of domains, mostly garbage. You may still get lucky, but don't expect much: deleted domains.

The new part: let an AI agent do the first 90%, you do the rest.
Manually vetting a domain took us 10–20 minutes each back in the day. Now we run Claude Code (or Codex) with:

the CatchDoms MCP / API for candidates,
a backlinks API (DataForSEO via MCP, or the Ahrefs API),
browser use for Wayback Machine snapshots and a quick site: check.

The agent pulls 200 candidates, kills 180 of them, and writes a short report on the rest. A human makes the final call and places the bid.

Example prompt:

Code:

Find expired/auction domains for a PBN in the [home office / remote work] niche.
1. Use the CatchDoms MCP to pull candidates: .com/.net/.org, aged 5+ years,
   ending within 14 days, at least 50 referring domains.
2. For each candidate, use the backlinks tools (Ahrefs API or DataForSEO API)
   to get referring domains, top 20 anchors and individual backlinks. Drop any
   domain where >30% of anchors are exact-match commercial keywords, or with
   casino/pharma/adult/crypto anchors or non-Latin-script anchors.
3. For the survivors, open the Wayback Machine in the browser and check 4
   snapshots spread across the domain's history. Drop anything that was ever
   spam, a PBN, parked for years, or switched topics abruptly.
4. Check that each domain still has indexed pages (site: search) and that the
   name isn't an active trademark.
5. Output a table: domain, RDs, top 10 linking sites, top linked pages,
   history summary, topical fit 1–5, red flags, buy/skip recommendation.
Do not buy or bid on anything. I'll make the final decision.

Keep that last line. Let the agent research.

You spend the money.

PBN domain analysis

Now for first timers, we recommend analyzing a potential PBN domain manually.

You basically want to check five things.

The agent does the grunt work, but you need to know what it's checking — and spot-check its results.

Indexation
History
Trademarks
Link profile (and link targets)
Anchor profile

1. Check indexation

Go to Google, type site:domain.com and check the results. Not a must, but an indexed domain is a good sign.

Takeaway: an indexed domain is a good domain ;-)

2. Check the domain history

Make sure the domain was never used as a PBN or for anything spammy.

Use Archive.org and spot-check snapshots across the years. Red flags: Chinese/Japanese spam, casino, pharma, adult, sudden topic switches, spun content. Also check how often it's dropped — domains that have expired and been re-registered several times often have damaged history.

Takeaway: never used for a PBN or anything spammy? Good to go.

3. Check trademarks

It would suck to get a C&D on a $500 domain because you skipped a one-minute check:

US: USPTO Trademark Search
UK: UK IPO
EU: TMview / Germany: DPMA

Takeaway: no trademarks? Cool, proceed.

4. Check the link profile

The most crucial step. You want strong links that are still live.

In Ahrefs Site Explorer → Backlinks, use these filters:

********
Link type: "in content" (contextual links only)
DR 10+
One link per domain

Then sort by DR, descending.

Ahrefs also shows lost links, so you get a clear picture of how the profile is holding up. DataForSEO and Majestic work just as well — and they're what the agent uses via API. Remember: DR, DA and TF are filters, not verdicts. All of them can be faked.

Takeaway: strong, live, preferably contextual links.

Check the link targets

Next, check which pages have the most links pointing to them. You'll re-create those pages on your PBN. In Ahrefs, go to "Best by links" and sort by referring domains.

Takeaway: make sure the links point to pages you can re-create.

5. Check the anchor profile

You want a diverse anchor profile with less than 10% exact-match anchors and no spammy sh*t.

Takeaway: diverse and natural anchor profile.

All five checks in one prompt

The Ahrefs or DataForSEO MCP can do all of this for you in one prompt:

Code:

Analyze the expired domain [DOMAIN] as a potential PBN domain. Use the
Ahrefs or DataForSEO tools you have connected, plus web search / browser.

1. INDEXATION
   - Run a Google "site:[DOMAIN]" search (DataForSEO SERP API, or the
     browser). Report roughly how many pages are indexed and list up to 5.
   - Flag if nothing is indexed, or if the indexed pages show spam
     (casino, pharma, adult, foreign-language spam, doorway pages).
2. HISTORY (Archive.org)
   - Get the snapshot list from the Wayback Machine CDX API:
     web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=[DOMAIN]&output=json&fl=timestamp,statuscode&collapse=timestamp:6
   - Open at least one snapshot per year (more around ownership changes)
     and summarize what the site was: topic, language, type of site.
   - Flag: spam (casino, pharma, adult, foreign-language spam), parked or
     "for sale" pages, sudden topic or language switches, signs of an old
     PBN (thin posts, many outbound links, random topics), and long gaps.
   - Count how often the domain seems to have dropped and been re-registered.
   - Give a short timeline: years → what the site was.
3. TRADEMARK
   - Take the brand part of the domain name (e.g. "bluewidget" from
     bluewidget.com) and search for live trademarks in:
     USPTO (tmsearch.uspto.gov), EUIPO / TMview (tmdn.org/tmview),
     UK IPO (trademarks.ipo.gov.uk).
   - List any live marks that match or are confusingly similar: owner,
     registry, classes, status.
   - Also check if a current company or product actively uses the name.
   - Rate the risk: none / low / high.
4. LINK PROFILE
   - Referring domains: ******** only, in-content (contextual) links only,
     DR / domain rank 10+, one link per domain. Sort by DR, descending.
   - Show the top 20 in a table: referring domain, DR, link type,
     first seen, live or lost.
   - Summary: total referring domains, % ********, % contextual,
     live vs. lost links over the last 12 months.
   - Flag link sources that look like spam: link farms, directories,
     comment/forum spam, other PBNs, hacked sites, or unrelated
     foreign-language sites.
5. LINK TARGETS
   - Top 10 pages on [DOMAIN] by referring domains (Ahrefs: "Best by links").
   - Table: URL, referring domains, backlinks, best linking site.
   - Mark which pages I should re-create at the same URL and what each
     was about.
6. ANCHOR PROFILE
   - Top 20 anchors by referring domains.
   - Group all anchors into: branded, URL, generic, partial match,
     exact match. Show the % for each group.
   - Flag if exact match is over 10%, and any spam anchors (casino,
     pharma, adult, crypto, loans, non-Latin script, or keyword stuffing).
7. VERDICT
   - Score each section 1–5 and give an overall BUY / MAYBE / SKIP.
   - A high trademark risk, spam in the index or a spam/PBN history is an
     automatic SKIP.
   - List every red flag in one short list.

Only use data from the tools. If a metric isn't available, say so instead
of guessing. Do not buy, bid on or register anything.

That covers all five steps in one go: a complete domain audit in a few minutes. Still spot-check a few snapshots yourself before you buy. The trademark check is a first pass, not legal advice: if anything comes up, check it yourself before buying.

That's domain analysis in 2026. Too easy.

Now the part where most networks die — the setup and its footprints.

PBN footprints (to avoid) — all updated

So far we've covered why PBNs work, how to find domains, and how to analyze them. Now the footprints. Same 15 as in 2021 — some unchanged, some completely flipped.

#1 Bad hosting

Still the most common footprint for PBNs we see. And the biggest change since 2021.

The goal is the same as always: your sites shouldn't cluster. What changed is what "cluster" means. Google — and anyone with a reverse-IP tool — can see:

The IP (and the old A/B/C-class split)
The ASN — who owns the IP block.
Reverse IP — what else is hosted on that IP
Nameservers, SSL certificates, server headers and page code.

So with that in mind, you're best off avoiding:

Shared hosting (HostGator, SiteGround & co.) - outdated, still a headache to manage, even with AI, and overpriced
Cheap "PBN hosting"
"SEO hosting"

Imo, you have two options that are so good that you don't have to look elsewhere.

Option A — For bigger networks > DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS with one droplet per PBN (the classic)

In 2021 this was our only recommendation and it still is.

Our preferred providers: DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS, Linode.

Entry prices with a public IPv4 (October 2026 — always check the pricing page):

Provider	ASN	Entry plan with IPv4	Notes
DigitalOcean	AS14061	$4/mo (512 MB), $6/mo (1 GB)	Our long-time favorite. Clean API, own nameservers.
Vultr	AS20473	~$5/mo (1 GB)	30+ regions. The $2.50 plan is IPv6-only — skip it.
Akamai / Linode	AS63949	~$5/mo	Underrated — less crowded than DO/Vultr.
AWS Lightsail	AS16509	~$5/mo	IPv4 charge is bundled in. IPv6-only bundles are useless here.
Hetzner Cloud	AS24940	~€4–5/mo	Best price/performance, EU + US. Stricter signup checks.
OVHcloud	AS16276	~$5–7/mo	Another distinct ASN, strong in EU/Canada.

Why one droplet per IP?

Because the IP is one of the biggest footprints. One site per droplet turns that around:

Each PBN gets its own IP, and a reverse-IP lookup shows one site. That's it. Just like the millions of startup apps, agency sites and side projects hosted on DigitalOcean, Vultr and AWS.
Spread across providers and regions, the IPs land in different /24 ranges and different ASNs. (Same-provider IPs often sit in neighbouring /24s, which is a weak signal on its own — another reason to mix providers.)
No single platform account holds your network. One provider having a bad day, or one account review, never takes everything down at once.
It works for any stack — WordPress, Astro, Next.js — with full control over the server, headers and redirects.

At $4–6 a month per droplet, doubling up to save a few bucks is never worth it. Put Cloudflare (free plan) in front if you want to hide the droplet IPs as well — just lock the origin down properly (see #13), or it can still leak through old DNS history or direct scans.

Spread the PBN across DO, Vultr and AWS and you're good to go.

And "Managing five providers is too much work" isn't an argument anymore. Every provider has an API — Claude Code writes the provisioning scripts once, and you spin up a server anywhere with one command.

Option B — For smaller networks >>> Shared edge hosting: Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, AWS S3 + CloudFront (tried & tested!)

Another way to go. And what we recently tried (and successfully used) > Edge Hosting.

Why? Because with static sites you don't need a server at all.

These platforms serve your sites from shared edge IPs used by millions of other sites. There's no dedicated IP linking your sites, and a reverse-IP lookup shows an ocean of unrelated domains. Tiny IP footprint and it scales.

Cloudflare Workers: serving static assets is free on every plan. Only requests that run Worker code count toward the free 100,000/day. For a static Astro site that's basically free hosting.
Vercel: Use Pro ($20/seat/month). Put Cloudflare in front of Vercel to mask it further — it works for static sites.
AWS S3 + CloudFront: avoids the IP problem the same way Vercel does — CloudFront's edge IPs are shared with millions of sites. Pennies per site at PBN traffic levels.

Why it's not as bad of a footprint anymore

You'd probably say: "Wait — Vercel serves a huge number of sites from the same few IPs. Doesn't it look unnatural if my money site gets 10 links from sites on that one IP?"

But no, not really.

A shared IP is only a footprint when the group of sites on it is small and connected. On a normal $5 server, the reverse-IP list is basically a list of what one person owns — that's why it used to be such a strong signal.

An edge IP from Vercel, Cloudflare or CloudFront says nothing about ownership:

A reverse-IP lookup returns a massive number of unrelated sites: startups, portfolios, docs sites, big brands. Your 10 PBN sites are a drop in that ocean.
Search engines know these IPs belong to CDN networks. Treating "same Vercel IP" as "same owner" would tie millions of strangers together, so a signal like that is worthless to them.
Cloudflare alone sits in front of roughly a fifth of all websites. Every natural backlink profile already has plenty of links from Cloudflare IPs.

What can still look odd is the mix, not the IP. Cloudflare is everywhere; Vercel is a much smaller slice of the web. If 10 of your money site's referring domains resolve to Vercel, that's a statistical oddity. So:

Mix platforms: some sites on Cloudflare, some on Vercel, some on CloudFront.
Put Cloudflare in front of Vercel, so those sites resolve to Cloudflare's far more common IPs. Reverse proxy > great.
Spread across several accounts.

It's really good for smaller scale PBNs.

Our verdict

Bigger networks: one droplet per PBN, spread across DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS and Linode (plus Hetzner/OVH for diversity), multiple regions, no provider over ~25–30%. Still our go-to.
Smaller networks: shared edge hosting on Vercel, Cloudflare Workers or S3 + CloudFront, mixed across platforms and spread over several accounts. Good for entry PBNs.

Or a mix of both.

#2 Bad registrars

Mostly unchanged. Don't register all domains on the same date, and don't leave domains sitting at the dropcatch service's registrar — transfer them out. Spread across registrars: Dynadot, Name.com, NameSilo, GoDaddy, Porkbun, Namecheap, Spaceship. Cloudflare Registrar sells at cost, but it ties registrar + DNS + proxy into one account — fine for some sites, not all. And don't use your money site's registrar account.

#3 No WHOIS privacy

Same as 2021: thanks to GDPR, WHOIS privacy is free and standard almost everywhere. Not having it is the bigger footprint.

#4 Custom nameservers

Still a hard no. ns1.mypbnhost.com is a perfect fingerprint.

DigitalOcean (ns1–3.digitalocean.com), Vultr (ns1/ns2.vultr.com), Linode and Hetzner all give you their own nameservers, used by huge numbers of unrelated sites and apps. You blend right in.
Cloudflare nameservers are fine too. One nuance: Cloudflare gives every domain in an account the same nameserver pair (e.g. ada + bob.ns.cloudflare.com). Each pair is shared by millions of sites, so it's no footprint on its own — but put your whole network in one account and every PBN site has the exact same pair. Spread over 10+ accounts and it stops meaning anything.
Mix it up: some sites on host DNS, some on Cloudflare.

#5 Blocking crawlers

Our take hasn't changed: blocking Ahrefs, Majestic & co. via .htaccess or a plugin is the footprint. 80%+ of real sites don't do it, so why would you?

One 2026 nuance: blocking AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot…) in robots.txt is now common on real sites, and Cloudflare blocks many of them by default on new domains. Either way looks natural — just don't do the same thing on every site.

#6 Build unique PBNs

This is where the game changed completely.

In 2021 we said you only need Elementor Pro + Astra/Hello/OceanWP, Divi or GeneratePress to build hundreds of unique sites. That was true — but they all still shared themes, page builder markup and plugin footprints with thousands of other PBNs.

Now, with Opus 5.5, it's almost too easy. Every site gets a custom-built template — its own layout, typography, custom fonts, color system, CSS and components — in minutes. OpenAI and Gemini image models generate the logo, hero images, featured images and illustrations in a consistent style per site. That's how we redesigned 100+ sites in four days.

Skip WordPress here. It's outdated for a modern PBN.

Our build process per site:

Write a site brief (or let Claude write one from the domain's Wayback history): who's the "publisher", audience, tone, visual direction.
Generate the codebase in Claude Code from the brief.
Generate images with OpenAI / Gemini, using a per-site style prompt so everything looks like it belongs to that site.
Fill content (#7) and link internally (#10).
Run your footprint checks and deploy.

Example build prompt:

Code:

Build a new Astro static site for oldgardenshed.com.

Brief: a small UK-based gardening publication run by two editors since 2014.
Feels like an independent print magazine: warm, editorial, a bit old-fashioned.

Requirements:
- Fully custom design. No Tailwind, no UI kit, no starter template.
  Hand-written CSS with its own design tokens (colors, spacing, type scale).
- Pick two fonts that fit the brief; self-host them.
- Magazine-style homepage with a featured story, category rails and an
  "Editors' picks" sidebar. Unique header, footer and article template.
- Pages: home, category, article, about (with the two editors), contact,
  privacy policy, terms, cookie policy, editorial policy.
- Article content collection with title, description, date, updated, author,
  category, tags, hero image and related posts.
- Sitemap, RSS, robots.txt, OG tags, Article + Organization schema.
- No generator meta tag, rename the default asset folder, no analytics or
  third-party scripts.
- Lighthouse 95+ on mobile.
Show me the homepage and article template before writing content.

Change the brief per site and you get a genuinely different site every time. Change the structure too — a magazine, a resource hub, a small review site, a local guide, a personal blog. The real web is varied. Your network should be too.

And just like in 2021: every site needs the mandatory pages — about, contact, privacy policy, T&C, cookie policy. Have Claude write unique legal text per site. Copy-pasted legal pages across a network are a footprint.

New footprints to watch with modern frameworks:

Generator meta tags (Astro, Next.js, Hugo can all add them) — remove them.
Next.js sends X-Powered-By: Next.js by default — turn it off (poweredByHeader: false).
Default asset folders (/_astro/, /_next/) — rename them where the framework allows it.
Shared components, CSS class naming schemes, icon sets, fonts or code comments across sites.

Pro tip: put a few site repos side by side and ask Claude: "List everything that's identical or near-identical across 3 or more of these sites: markup patterns, class names, file structure, headers, fonts, scripts, legal text, copy phrases." It finds things you'd never spot by hand. Better yet, have it turn that into a check that runs before every deploy.

#7 Use unique content

So easy now — see above. The risk has actually flipped: the danger isn't too little content, it's too much content that's obviously mass-produced.

We still never use spun, scraped or old expired content. And Google's scaled content abuse policy doesn't care whether text is AI-written — it cares whether pages are pumped out at scale with little value. Opus 5.5 writes genuinely good content; your job is to ask for that, not for 500 keyword-stuffed posts.

Give each site a voice. Authors, tone and point of view from the site brief — stored in the repo so every article follows it.
Fewer, better articles. 20–40 solid articles beat 300 thin ones.
Original angles. Real how-tos, comparisons, opinions, local details, data. Feed the model real sources.
Natural cadence. Don't publish 40 articles on day one and nothing after. Schedule them.
Images: in 2021 we said use Pixabay/Pexels instead of scraped images. Now generate them per site with OpenAI or Gemini — unique, on-brand, no copyright risk, and no stock photo shared with 500 other PBNs.
Light human review. 15 minutes per site to catch factual errors and anything that reads robotic.

#8 Don't interlink your PBNs

Duh. Still self-explanatory. And make sure the money sites you link to are hosted separately from your PBNs.

#9 Build links to your PBNs (optional)

Unchanged. Real sites gain and lose links all the time, so add a few quality tier 2 links into the mix. It helps the PBN site and the money site. Not a must, but incredibly helpful.

#10 Use internal links on your PBNs

Real sites have a LOT of internal links. They pass link juice between pages and the homepage and build topical relevance for the whole site.

In 2021 that was a manual chore. Now it's one prompt:

Code:

Do an internal linking pass on this site.

1. Read every article. Build a topical map: group articles into clusters and
   pick one pillar article per cluster. Save it as a topical graph file
   (clusters, pillar, members, links).
2. Add contextual internal links in the article bodies:
   - each article links to its pillar and to 2–4 closely related articles
   - each pillar links to every article in its cluster
   - add 1–2 cross-cluster links only where genuinely relevant
3. Anchor text: natural and varied, using phrases already in the sentence.
   No exact-match anchor more than twice across the site. Never link the
   same target twice in one article. No links in headings.
4. Fill the related-posts field for each article (3 posts).
5. Don't touch external links. Don't change wording except where a minimal
   edit is needed to place a link naturally.
6. Report: links added per article, orphan pages, and pages with fewer than
   3 inbound internal links.

#11 Skip GA/GSC

Still a duh. No Google Analytics, no Search Console, no Tag Manager, no AdSense IDs and no shared verification tokens on your PBNs. Paranoia gets the best of us — but why risk it? If you really want stats, use a self-hosted or server-side counter per site.

#12 Use redirects correctly

Unchanged in principle. Some domains have more links to the root (non-www), some to www. Pick the version with more links and redirect the other one — otherwise you'll get underwhelming results.

And rebuild every inner page that has links pointing to it, with the exact same URL structure, fresh content and internal links to the homepage. Pages you can't rebuild get a 301 to the closest new page.

What changed is where you do it: instead of .htaccess, redirects live in the repo — vercel.json, a _redirects file on Cloudflare, or your nginx/Caddy config. Version-controlled and easy to check.

#13 Say YES to Cloudflare

In 2021 we said: "Say no to Cloudflare. You DON'T need it if your hosting is done right."

We changed our mind. Cloudflare is good now — we recommend it.

A huge chunk of the web now sits behind Cloudflare, from tiny blogs to Fortune 500s. Being on Cloudflare is the normal setup; it's no longer a pattern. And it gives you:

Your origin IP hidden behind shared anycast IPs
Nameservers and IPs shared with millions of sites
Free SSL, caching and DDoS protection
Free hosting for static sites (Workers)

But do it properly, or your origin still leaks:

Lock the origin to Cloudflare. Firewall your droplet so ports 80/443 only accept Cloudflare's IP ranges. Otherwise scanners like Censys and Shodan find your site on the raw IP.
Use a Cloudflare Origin Certificate instead of Let's Encrypt on the server. Let's Encrypt certs land in public Certificate Transparency logs, and the server hands them to anyone scanning the IP.
Don't serve the site on the raw IP. The default server block should just close the connection.
Watch old DNS history. Services like SecurityTrails keep every A record a domain ever had. If the domain ever pointed straight at your droplet, that IP is on record — move the site to a fresh droplet once it's behind Cloudflare.
Don't send email from the origin. Mail headers leak the real IP.
Spread across accounts. Same reason as nameservers — and so one account action can't take down the network.

#14 Say yes to SSL

In 2021 SSL was "the standard for new sites". In 2026, a site without HTTPS is the footprint — browsers flag it as "Not secure" and default to HTTPS. Vercel, Cloudflare and Caddy all handle certificates automatically, so there's zero excuse. Behind Cloudflare, use an Origin Certificate (see #13).

#15 Maintain your PBN

In 2021: keep themes and plugins updated, install Wordfence, add a caching plugin, and we'd still had a few hacking attempts.

With Astro or Next.js, maintenance is now easy. No plugins to update, no database, no admin panel to break into. Caching is built in — it's served from a CDN.

What maintenance looks like now:

Everything lives in git. One repo per site or a monorepo. Every change is a prompt + push, and the deploy picks it up.
Network-wide changes are scripts, not clicking. Pinned posts, removals, redirects and link changes across the whole network are scripted and committed — reviewable and reversible.
Keep a topical graph per site. The topical graph from #10 is the map of the site: clusters, pillars and how articles link. Every new article must be added to the graph — assigned to a cluster and linked to its pillar and siblings. Put that rule in each repo's instructions file so the AI agent does it automatically.
Keep a network-level map too — every site's topic, host, ASN, region, registrar, nameservers, Cloudflare account and which money pages it links to. That's how you avoid accidentally creating a pattern.
Run footprint checks before every deploy — a simple script that compares all sites and fails if two of them share design, class names, SVGs, file hashes or legal text.
Fresh content — 2–4 non-commercial posts per site every month or two keeps sites alive and crawled.
Uptime monitoring — a dead PBN site passes nothing.
Auto-renew your domains. Losing a strong domain because a card expired hurts more than anything in this guide.

Optional, same as 2021: create a few social accounts per PBN. Not necessary, but makes the site more legit.

That pretty much covers the footprints.

PBN setup by stack

WordPress (not recommended)

DigitalOcean and Vultr are still our go-to recommendation for WordPress. One-click apps are still the easiest way.

However, in 2026, using Wordpress for your PBNs is simply outdated.

Astro (our recommendation)

Astro's static output is just HTML, CSS and JS files — it runs anywhere:

Droplets (bigger networks): DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS Lightsail, Linode, Hetzner
Shared edge (smaller networks): Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Pro, AWS S3 + CloudFront.

Next.js

Static export: treat it exactly like Astro — any of the hosts above. For a PBN, this is what you want 99% of the time.

Stack	Our recommended hosting
WordPress	DigitalOcean + Vultr (still our go-to), plus Linode / Hetzner / OVH for spread. One site per droplet.
Astro	DO / Vultr / Linode / Lightsail droplets behind Cloudflare for bigger networks — or Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Pro, AWS S3 + CloudFront for smaller ones.
Next.js (static export)	Same as Astro.
Next.js (SSR)	Vercel Pro, Cloudflare Workers via OpenNext

Have claude build out those sites as outlined above, and walk you through it.

It's so easy.

How to link out from your PBN

This part hasn't changed — AI doesn't change link math.

Source: seolutions.biz

Linking to one page of your money site
The best and safest approach. Keep OBL = 1 and you pass all the power. You can target different inner pages with separate PBNs: PBN A links to moneysite.com/abc/, PBN B to moneysite.com/xyz/. Totally fine.

Linking to several pages on one money site
You can, but use it VERY sparingly — it can leave a footprint.

Linking to several money sites
Fine if the niches are related and the money sites don't share footprints (same host, DNS, email, monetization). A tech affiliate blog and a web dev site from one tech PBN: easy. Adding an insurance site to that: not ideal (though creative content topics can make it work).

FAQ — Frequently Answered Questions

What anchors should I use?
Same ratios we've used for years:

Branded: 70–80%
Generic: 8–10%
Long-tail and partial match: 5–8%
Exact match: 3–5%

PBNs are perfect for sniping exact or phrase-match anchors — you're in full control. Track your anchor profile across all your link sources, not per PBN.

Should I display full posts on the homepage?
If you keep OBL = 1 on the homepage, you don't need posts there at all. Make it look like a business or publication homepage and place the link in a section surrounded by at least 250–300 words of content. With a custom-built site that's just part of the brief. We also run PBNs with excerpts or several full posts on the homepage (for OBL > 1).

How much content should I use on my PBN?
Today? At least 30+ pages and 30k+ words.

Do you guys use anything except PBNs for your own sites?
Of course. We usually start a new site with a branded foundation: branded guest posts, listicles, niche edits, structured and unstructured citations.

Does the PBN have to be 100% niche related?
It still works if it's not — you can build relevance on page level instead of domain level.

Are PBNs still worth it in 2026?
For competitive niches, yes.

Do I still need WordPress?
No. Astro + Opus 5.5 gives you more unique, faster, safer sites with less maintenance. WordPress is fine for existing networks, and a few WP sites in a mixed network is natural.

What do I lose by leaving WordPress?
The admin panel — every edit goes through the repo, a build and a deploy. Comments and server-side forms are gone too. In exchange there's nothing to hack, nothing to patch and no WordPress fingerprints.

Can I host the whole PBN on Vercel & Cloudflare?
Yes, and it works well for smaller networks. For bigger networks we still prefer droplets.

Is AWS S3 + CloudFront a good option?
Yes. CloudFront serves from shared edge IPs just like Vercel and Cloudflare.

Won't Cloudflare on every site be a pattern?
Not anymore — it's the default setup for a huge part of the web. Just don't put everything in one account, and leave some sites unproxied.

Will AI content get my PBN penalized?
Google doesn't penalize content for being AI-written. It penalizes content mass-produced with little value. Give each site a voice, publish fewer and better articles, use unique images, and do a quick human review.

How fast can I add money links to a new PBN site?
Let it settle first: build it, publish content, let it get crawled and indexed (a few weeks). Then add links gradually.

Should I 301 an expired domain instead of building a site?
Redirects pass value but are easier to spot, and they carry over any bad history. We build sites on most domains and only redirect where a domain is a near-exact topical match to a money page.

Can an AI agent buy domains and deploy sites for me?
It can research, shortlist, build and deploy. It's so easy now. We use opus 5.5

Closing thoughts

That's it. Five years later, the fundamentals are exactly the same: great domains, zero footprints, smart linking. Everything else — the building, hosting, content and maintenance — got faster, cheaper and safer.

Hope you liked the guide.

Now get to work and set up your first PBN. It's never been easier.

Tanaiso · 2026-10-26T14:43:34+0000

Best Blackhat related thing i've read in ages anywhere online

Steptoe · 2026-10-26T14:44:59+0000

This is a slab of pure fried gold. I'm expecting to see a massive rise in the quality of PBN sites once this post does the rounds.

@mods get this pinned!

sanseraservices · 2026-10-26T15:04:42+0000

With Astro/Next.js PBNs behind Cloudflare/Vercel which non-content footprints DNS history origin ASN, TLS patterns, deployment headers, analytics IDs, or crawl timing,
Do you consider the highest-risk signals for network clustering in 2026?

janist · 2026-10-26T15:10:11+0000

sanseraservices said:
With Astro/Next.js PBNs behind Cloudflare/Vercel which non-content footprints DNS history origin ASN, TLS patterns, deployment headers, analytics IDs, or crawl timing,
Do you consider the highest-risk signals for network clustering in 2026?

Imo, the biggest footprint remains the link graph (e.g. where the PBNs link to) - but that's unavoidable with PBNs - after all it's what they're made for.

sanseraservices · 2026-10-26T15:12:31+0000

janist said:
Imo, the biggest footprint remains the link graph (e.g. where the PBNs link to) - but that's unavoidable with PBNs - after all it's what they're made for.

Agreed — the destination link graph is inherent to a PBN.
Do you think the bigger clustering risk comes from multiple PBN domains converging on the same money pages/anchors?
or is it from the surrounding shared outbound-link patterns across the network?

Funiki · 2026-10-26T15:25:42+0000

WOW! This is really great! You shared the whole package in there. Awesome guide.

HustleTong · 2026-10-26T15:38:45+0000

Bookmarked. Appreciate the effort you put into this.

Catchdoms · 2026-10-26T16:22:19+0000

Thank you for mentioning Catchdoms, appreciate the support

tiiberius · 2026-10-26T17:54:20+0000

Nice new gem on the forum.

I'm personally still in love with WordPress and it works great for me.
But I can't deny benefits of modern tools and approaches.

Need to update my head.

mangoone1 · 2026-10-26T19:01:29+0000

Read the whole thread, amazing tutorial.
I have a question about How to link out from PBNs:

My best idea which i have heard i think from influencer Matt Diamante (@heytonyagency - Tiktok, FB and Instagram) that i only need 2 or 3 backlinks from a single website, more from same site(different pages) it is not worth it, so it will be 1 homepage link, 1 article/blog and 1 category, and if it is ecommerce site then 1 product backlink instead of article/blog. Is this the right way to get only 3 backlinks per PBN to not get penalized by Google and get full power from PBN?

EDIT: Or should i go with 1 backlink per each page?

Thanks

V · 2026-10-26T19:07:22+0000

tiiberius said:
Nice new gem on the forum.

I'm personally still in love with WordPress and it works great for me.
But I can't deny benefits of modern tools and approaches.

Need to update my head.

I used to be head over heels for WordPress, but not anymore.

Every few months, it seems like there’s another vulnerability to worry about. The performance isn’t great out of the box, either. You end up spending hours tweaking configurations, optimizing performance, and getting rid of unnecessary bloat - time you could be spending on something far more productive.

These days, I prefer building everything from scratch, and honestly, the out-of-the-box performance is so much better.

Don’t get me wrong, if you want to avoid coding and are willing to invest some time in setup and optimization, WordPress is still a solid choice. But if you have even a little coding knowledge, I’d encourage you to explore other options. You might be surprised by how much time, effort, and frustration you can save in the long run. Hehe.

TheMarquis · 2026-10-26T19:14:36+0000

It looks like Christmas came earlier this year.

Regarding the hosting, recently, I re-discovered Hetzner. Top-notch provider. Vultr still the second best choice for my projects.

Great guide, Janist!

janist · 2026-10-26T19:31:22+0000

mangoone1 said:
Read the whole thread, amazing tutorial.
I have a question about How to link out from PBNs:

My best idea which i have heard i think from influencer Matt Diamante (@heytonyagency - Tiktok, FB and Instagram) that i only need 2 or 3 backlinks from a single website, more from same site(different pages) it is not worth it, so it will be 1 homepage link, 1 article/blog and 1 category, and if it is ecommerce site then 1 product backlink instead of article/blog. Is this the right way to get only 3 backlinks per PBN to not get penalized by Google and get full power from PBN?

EDIT: Or should i go with 1 backlink per each page?

Thanks

We often only do one link per PBN to one money site, but you can link to more than one money site, for sure. However, linking to the same site from one PBN = diminished returns. I'd avoid.

mangoone1 · 2026-10-26T19:34:59+0000

janist said:
We often only do one link per PBN to one money site, but you can link to more than one money site, for sure. However, linking to the same site from one PBN = diminished returns. I'd avoid.

Okay, Noted

Thanks

tiiberius · 2026-10-27T00:34:44+0000

V said:
I used to be head over heels for WordPress, but not anymore.

Every few months, it seems like there’s another vulnerability to worry about. The performance isn’t great out of the box, either. You end up spending hours tweaking configurations, optimizing performance, and getting rid of unnecessary bloat - time you could be spending on something far more productive.

These days, I prefer building everything from scratch, and honestly, the out-of-the-box performance is so much better.

Don’t get me wrong, if you want to avoid coding and are willing to invest some time in setup and optimization, WordPress is still a solid choice. But if you have even a little coding knowledge, I’d encourage you to explore other options. You might be surprised by how much time, effort, and frustration you can save in the long run. Hehe.

Yes, know what you mean.
I am already doing it on a smaller scale.

Scaling and providing PBN like that as service is what I find challenging.
So far nothing has beat ease of content management in WordPress.

-

TechEinstien · 2026-10-27T00:39:35+0000

Good guide after a long time.

Knasper · 2026-10-27T06:41:10+0000

What a fantastic piece, thanks @janist ! Any suggestions as how to find local TLDs with this method?

Nikolaos · 2026-10-27T07:50:09+0000

janist said:
The Ultimate PBN Guide — v2.0 Edition
So,

back in 2021 we wrote the Ultimate PBN Guide. A lot of you used it to build your first networks.

Five years later, a big part of it is outdated. Not the fundamentals — links still work, domains still bring the power, footprints still get networks killed. But the way you build, host and run a PBN has completely changed.

WordPress isn't a necessity anymore. Cloudflare went from "skip it" to "use it". Building a unique site went from a day of fiddling with Elementor to a few minutes with Claude Opus 5.5. And content and internal linking? One prompt.

To give you an idea: this year we redesigned all of our PBNs — 100+ sites — in 4 days. New templates, custom fonts, new layouts, new images. Opus 5.5 for the code and copy, OpenAI and Gemini for the images. Two years ago that would have been a quarter's worth of work for a small team.

This is the updated guide. Same structure as the original, every section rewritten for 2026.

Grab some coffee. This is gonna be even longer.

Table of Contents

Glossary

What is a PBN and why is everyone (still) raving about them?

Risks and costs of a PBN in 2026

The 2026 stack: WordPress is optional now

Where to find PBN domains (now with AI agents)

PBN domain analysis

PBN footprints (to avoid) — all 15, updated

PBN setup by stack

How to link out from your PBN

FAQ

Glossary

PBN — Private Blog Network

RD — Referring Domains

DR / DA — Domain Rating (Ahrefs) / Domain Authority (Moz)

OBL — Outgoing Backlinks

Money Site — your main website

Droplet — a server on a cloud host (DigitalOcean's name for it; Vultr, Linode, Hetzner etc. have their own)

ASN — Autonomous System Number: the network that owns an IP block. Every DigitalOcean IP belongs to the same ASN, no matter the C-class.

Static site / SSG — a site pre-built into plain HTML files (Astro, Next.js static export). No PHP, no database.

Shared edge hosting — platforms like Vercel, Cloudflare Workers or AWS CloudFront that serve millions of sites from the same shared IPs.

Origin — the real server behind a proxy like Cloudflare.

T2 — tier 2 links: links pointing to your PBN sites.

What is a PBN and why is everyone (still) raving about them?

PBN is short for "Private Blog Network".
As the name suggests, it's a network of expired domains with strong link profiles and clean histories that you use to funnel link equity to your money site. Done right, it improves your rankings over time.

Typical PBN structure:

View attachment 554369
Source: seolutions.biz

Why does that work?

Google uses links as one of their key ranking factors. It all started with a little algorithm called PageRank, which valued a page by looking at who links to it. You can still read about it in the original paper: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

View attachment 554371
Source: Stanford InfoLab

And in 2024 the leaked Google Search API documentation listed several PageRank-style attributes. Read Hobo's guides, he broke down the leaks in incredible detail > Big shoutout: https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/the-defi...ding-after-the-google-content-warehouse-leak/

Takeaway: Links are still in the core of the algorithm. What's new in 2026: links don't just move you up the classic blue links anymore. AI Overviews, ChatGPT search and Perplexity all lean heavily on pages that already rank. Rank better, get cited more. Links feed both.

So on that front nothing changed.

Google still loves links - especially contextual links: in-content links from sites with great link profiles. Guest posts, editorials, link insertions and, you guessed it, PBNs.

BUT, and it's a big but.

PBNs still have risks. They are not for everyone.

So let's get into those.

Risks and costs of a PBN

The risks

Google is still highly against any kind of grey'ish link building. Their spam policies call links meant to manipulate rankings "link spam" - so by definition, any link building you do is against their guidelines.

But this is BlackHatWorld, not Google Search Central. So who gives a sh*t?

We love building links. We always have.

We just need to be extra careful — and in modern times, there's more to be careful about:

SpamBrain, Google's AI spam detection, is much better at spotting networks than in 2021.

Since March 2024 there are two spam policies aimed straight at lazy PBNs: expired domain abuse (buying an expired domain mainly to rank low-value content on its old reputation) and scaled content abuse (mass-producing pages with little value — AI or not).

However, penalties are rarely a single manual action anymore. More often the links just quietly stop counting. You won't get an email. Your PBN just stops passing equity.

You can't just buy a random domain, host it wherever, slap on a free theme and link to all your sites anymore. That worked back in 2014.

So, to keep your PBN safe, you want to avoid the proverbial footprints at all costs.

The good news: in 2026 that's much easier than it used to be.

The costs — then vs. now
Back in 2021 we estimated a small 10-site network like this. Here's how it looks today:

Item (10 sites) 2021 2026
Domains (RD20+, com/net/org, incl. registration) $450 minimum, $1,000–3,000 for good ones Possibly around $600+. Good domains haven't gotten cheaper.
Hosting $60+/month (10 droplets incl. backups) $0–20/month on shared edge hosting, or ~$40–60/month for 10 droplets
Setup (theme customization, plugins, htaccess, redirects) $300–500 An AI subscription and a few hours of your time (Claude ideally)
Content (1,500–2,000 words per site) $250 minimum A few dollars in AI usage + human review time
Premium themes + Elementor Pro ~$500 $0 — every site is custom-built

In 2021 you paid at least $100–150 per site, and $500–2,000 for really good domains. Today almost all of your money goes into the domains, a bit of hosting and the AI of your choice (we recommend Claude). Building and running the sites costs a fraction of what it did.

The 2026 stack: WordPress is optional now
In 2021 every PBN was WordPress + a theme builder (Elementor) or a custom theme.

That's no longer a necessity.

For new networks we build our PBNs solely on Astro (our default) or Next.js, with Claude Opus 5.5 doing all the heavy lifting.

View attachment 554394
Source: seolutions.biz

Advantages over WordPress

Nothing to hack. The sites are plain static files: no PHP, no database, no plugins, no login page. On WordPress, outdated plugins and themes are the usual way sites get hijacked and filled with injected spam links. On a static build that can't happen.

No shared footprints. WordPress pages give themselves away through /wp-content/, /wp-json, xmlrpc.php, generator tags and shared themes or CSS classes. Static builds have none of those. Each site gets its own design, CSS class names, SVGs, file hashes and legal text — and you can check that mechanically across the whole network with a simple comparison prompt, something you can't really do with a WordPress network at scale.

Speed. Astro / Next sites are blazing fast. Core Web Vitals are better and there's virtually no server load.

Cost and upkeep. No servers to patch, update or back up. No themes to maintain, no plugins to check.

Control from one place. Network-wide changes like pinned posts, post removals, 301s and link changes are scripted and kept in separate git repos. Every change is reviewable and can be rolled back, and two people can work on the network without stepping on each other.

The downsides. There's no admin panel, so every edit goes through the repo, a build and a deploy. Comments and server-side forms are gone too. For a PBN, we don't miss either.

We personally use Astro now for every new AND old PBN we have. A PBN site is a content site - it doesn't need server rendering, logins or an API. Astro outputs plain HTML with zero JavaScript by default and its content collections are made for blogs. Next.js works too, but for a PBN you'd mostly be using it as a static site generator anyway.

When WordPress still makes sense: you're maintaining an existing WP network, your VAs only know WordPress, or you want a mix of platforms in a big network.

A few WP sites among static sites is actually a good thing — the real web is mixed.

Where to find PBN domains (now with AI agents)

PBNs are only as good as the domains they're built on. We know that.

Today (compared to 2021), you still only have two options: buy from a vendor, or find them yourself.

Domain vendors

Most of you don't have the time, expertise or patience to sift through thousands of expiring domains every day. Vendors did the groundwork: they went through the garbage, bid at auctions, hassled with sellers and scraped until their di*ks fell off. You pay a pretty penny for that, but if it saves you time, it's a no-brainer. We still don't give vendor recommendations — there are plenty of good ones around.

Finding them yourself

ExpiredDomains.net is still free and still the classic.

New in 2026: CatchDoms aggregates expiring and auction domains from more than a dozen platforms — and, more importantly, it has a REST API and an MCP server.

That means an AI agent can query it directly (more on that below).

Stages of an expiring domain
What hasn't changed are the stages at which a domain can be grabbed at different points of the expiration process.

View attachment 554400
Source: seolutions.biz

Renewal Grace Period — the owner still has a few days to renew. No way to bid or buy.

Domain Auction Period — if the owner doesn't renew, the domain goes to auction. One of the best times to snap up a great PBN domain, but you won't be the only bidder. GoDaddy has a HUGE auction marketplace: GoDaddy expired auctions.

Closeout Period — not sold at auction? It becomes a closeout domain, available at a fixed price for a few days. People overlook gold nuggets here: GoDaddy closeouts.

Pending Delete — not sold at closeout, it moves to pending deletion, and then drops. Use a backorder / dropcatch service to get it the moment it drops: SnapNames, DropCatch, Nicsell. Browse them: pending delete

Deleted Domains — nobody caught it, it's available to everyone. Millions of domains, mostly garbage. You may still get lucky, but don't expect much: deleted domains.

The new part: let an AI agent do the first 90%, you do the rest.
Manually vetting a domain took us 10–20 minutes each back in the day. Now we run Claude Code (or Codex) with:

the CatchDoms MCP / API for candidates,

a backlinks API (DataForSEO via MCP, or the Ahrefs API),

browser use for Wayback Machine snapshots and a quick site: check.

The agent pulls 200 candidates, kills 180 of them, and writes a short report on the rest. A human makes the final call and places the bid.

View attachment 554401

Example prompt:

Code:

Find expired/auction domains for a PBN in the [home office / remote work] niche. 1. Use the CatchDoms MCP to pull candidates: .com/.net/.org, aged 5+ years, ending within 14 days, at least 50 referring domains. 2. For each candidate, use the backlinks tools (Ahrefs API or DataForSEO API) to get referring domains, top 20 anchors and individual backlinks. Drop any domain where >30% of anchors are exact-match commercial keywords, or with casino/pharma/adult/crypto anchors or non-Latin-script anchors. 3. For the survivors, open the Wayback Machine in the browser and check 4 snapshots spread across the domain's history. Drop anything that was ever spam, a PBN, parked for years, or switched topics abruptly. 4. Check that each domain still has indexed pages (site: search) and that the name isn't an active trademark. 5. Output a table: domain, RDs, top 10 linking sites, top linked pages, history summary, topical fit 1–5, red flags, buy/skip recommendation. Do not buy or bid on anything. I'll make the final decision.

Keep that last line. Let the agent research.

You spend the money.

PBN domain analysis
Now for first timers, we recommend analyzing a potential PBN domain manually.

You basically want to check five things.

The agent does the grunt work, but you need to know what it's checking — and spot-check its results.

Indexation

History

Trademarks

Link profile (and link targets)

Anchor profile

1. Check indexation

Go to Google, type site:domain.com and check the results. Not a must, but an indexed domain is a good sign.

Takeaway: an indexed domain is a good domain ;-)

2. Check the domain history
Make sure the domain was never used as a PBN or for anything spammy.

Use Archive.org and spot-check snapshots across the years. Red flags: Chinese/Japanese spam, casino, pharma, adult, sudden topic switches, spun content. Also check how often it's dropped — domains that have expired and been re-registered several times often have damaged history.

Takeaway: never used for a PBN or anything spammy? Good to go.

3. Check trademarks

It would suck to get a C&D on a $500 domain because you skipped a one-minute check:

US: USPTO Trademark Search

UK: UK IPO

EU: TMview / Germany: DPMA

Takeaway: no trademarks? Cool, proceed.

4. Check the link profile

The most crucial step. You want strong links that are still live.

In Ahrefs Site Explorer → Backlinks, use these filters:

********

Link type: "in content" (contextual links only)

DR 10+

One link per domain

Then sort by DR, descending.

Ahrefs also shows lost links, so you get a clear picture of how the profile is holding up. DataForSEO and Majestic work just as well — and they're what the agent uses via API. Remember: DR, DA and TF are filters, not verdicts. All of them can be faked.

Takeaway: strong, live, preferably contextual links.

Check the link targets

Next, check which pages have the most links pointing to them. You'll re-create those pages on your PBN. In Ahrefs, go to "Best by links" and sort by referring domains.

Takeaway: make sure the links point to pages you can re-create.

5. Check the anchor profile
You want a diverse anchor profile with less than 10% exact-match anchors and no spammy sh*t.

Takeaway: diverse and natural anchor profile.

All five checks in one prompt
The Ahrefs or DataForSEO MCP can do all of this for you in one prompt:

Code:

Analyze the expired domain [DOMAIN] as a potential PBN domain. Use the Ahrefs or DataForSEO tools you have connected, plus web search / browser. 1. INDEXATION - Run a Google "site:[DOMAIN]" search (DataForSEO SERP API, or the browser). Report roughly how many pages are indexed and list up to 5. - Flag if nothing is indexed, or if the indexed pages show spam (casino, pharma, adult, foreign-language spam, doorway pages). 2. HISTORY (Archive.org) - Get the snapshot list from the Wayback Machine CDX API: web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=[DOMAIN]&output=json&fl=timestamp,statuscode&collapse=timestamp:6 - Open at least one snapshot per year (more around ownership changes) and summarize what the site was: topic, language, type of site. - Flag: spam (casino, pharma, adult, foreign-language spam), parked or "for sale" pages, sudden topic or language switches, signs of an old PBN (thin posts, many outbound links, random topics), and long gaps. - Count how often the domain seems to have dropped and been re-registered. - Give a short timeline: years → what the site was. 3. TRADEMARK - Take the brand part of the domain name (e.g. "bluewidget" from bluewidget.com) and search for live trademarks in: USPTO (tmsearch.uspto.gov), EUIPO / TMview (tmdn.org/tmview), UK IPO (trademarks.ipo.gov.uk). - List any live marks that match or are confusingly similar: owner, registry, classes, status. - Also check if a current company or product actively uses the name. - Rate the risk: none / low / high. 4. LINK PROFILE - Referring domains: ******** only, in-content (contextual) links only, DR / domain rank 10+, one link per domain. Sort by DR, descending. - Show the top 20 in a table: referring domain, DR, link type, first seen, live or lost. - Summary: total referring domains, % ********, % contextual, live vs. lost links over the last 12 months. - Flag link sources that look like spam: link farms, directories, comment/forum spam, other PBNs, hacked sites, or unrelated foreign-language sites. 5. LINK TARGETS - Top 10 pages on [DOMAIN] by referring domains (Ahrefs: "Best by links"). - Table: URL, referring domains, backlinks, best linking site. - Mark which pages I should re-create at the same URL and what each was about. 6. ANCHOR PROFILE - Top 20 anchors by referring domains. - Group all anchors into: branded, URL, generic, partial match, exact match. Show the % for each group. - Flag if exact match is over 10%, and any spam anchors (casino, pharma, adult, crypto, loans, non-Latin script, or keyword stuffing). 7. VERDICT - Score each section 1–5 and give an overall BUY / MAYBE / SKIP. - A high trademark risk, spam in the index or a spam/PBN history is an automatic SKIP. - List every red flag in one short list. Only use data from the tools. If a metric isn't available, say so instead of guessing. Do not buy, bid on or register anything.

That covers all five steps in one go: a complete domain audit in a few minutes. Still spot-check a few snapshots yourself before you buy. The trademark check is a first pass, not legal advice: if anything comes up, check it yourself before buying.

That's domain analysis in 2026. Too easy.

Now the part where most networks die — the setup and its footprints.

PBN footprints (to avoid) — all updated

So far we've covered why PBNs work, how to find domains, and how to analyze them. Now the footprints. Same 15 as in 2021 — some unchanged, some completely flipped.

#1 Bad hosting

Still the most common footprint for PBNs we see. And the biggest change since 2021.

The goal is the same as always: your sites shouldn't cluster. What changed is what "cluster" means. Google — and anyone with a reverse-IP tool — can see:

The IP (and the old A/B/C-class split)

The ASN — who owns the IP block.

Reverse IP — what else is hosted on that IP

Nameservers, SSL certificates, server headers and page code.

So with that in mind, you're best off avoiding:

Shared hosting (HostGator, SiteGround & co.) - outdated, still a headache to manage, even with AI, and overpriced

Cheap "PBN hosting"

"SEO hosting"

Imo, you have two options that are so good that you don't have to look elsewhere.

Option A — For bigger networks > DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS with one droplet per PBN (the classic)

In 2021 this was our only recommendation and it still is.

Our preferred providers: DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS, Linode.

Entry prices with a public IPv4 (October 2026 — always check the pricing page):

Provider ASN Entry plan with IPv4 Notes
DigitalOcean AS14061 $4/mo (512 MB), $6/mo (1 GB) Our long-time favorite. Clean API, own nameservers.
Vultr AS20473 ~$5/mo (1 GB) 30+ regions. The $2.50 plan is IPv6-only — skip it.
Akamai / Linode AS63949 ~$5/mo Underrated — less crowded than DO/Vultr.
AWS Lightsail AS16509 ~$5/mo IPv4 charge is bundled in. IPv6-only bundles are useless here.
Hetzner Cloud AS24940 ~€4–5/mo Best price/performance, EU + US. Stricter signup checks.
OVHcloud AS16276 ~$5–7/mo Another distinct ASN, strong in EU/Canada.

Why one droplet per IP?

Because the IP is one of the biggest footprints. One site per droplet turns that around:

Each PBN gets its own IP, and a reverse-IP lookup shows one site. That's it. Just like the millions of startup apps, agency sites and side projects hosted on DigitalOcean, Vultr and AWS.

Spread across providers and regions, the IPs land in different /24 ranges and different ASNs. (Same-provider IPs often sit in neighbouring /24s, which is a weak signal on its own — another reason to mix providers.)

No single platform account holds your network. One provider having a bad day, or one account review, never takes everything down at once.

It works for any stack — WordPress, Astro, Next.js — with full control over the server, headers and redirects.

At $4–6 a month per droplet, doubling up to save a few bucks is never worth it. Put Cloudflare (free plan) in front if you want to hide the droplet IPs as well — just lock the origin down properly (see #13), or it can still leak through old DNS history or direct scans.

Spread the PBN across DO, Vultr and AWS and you're good to go.

And "Managing five providers is too much work" isn't an argument anymore. Every provider has an API — Claude Code writes the provisioning scripts once, and you spin up a server anywhere with one command.

Option B — For smaller networks >>> Shared edge hosting: Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, AWS S3 + CloudFront (tried & tested!)

Another way to go. And what we recently tried (and successfully used) > Edge Hosting.

Why? Because with static sites you don't need a server at all.

These platforms serve your sites from shared edge IPs used by millions of other sites. There's no dedicated IP linking your sites, and a reverse-IP lookup shows an ocean of unrelated domains. Tiny IP footprint and it scales.

Cloudflare Workers: serving static assets is free on every plan. Only requests that run Worker code count toward the free 100,000/day. For a static Astro site that's basically free hosting.

Vercel: Use Pro ($20/seat/month). Put Cloudflare in front of Vercel to mask it further — it works for static sites.

AWS S3 + CloudFront: avoids the IP problem the same way Vercel does — CloudFront's edge IPs are shared with millions of sites. Pennies per site at PBN traffic levels.

Why it's not as bad of a footprint anymore

You'd probably say: "Wait — Vercel serves a huge number of sites from the same few IPs. Doesn't it look unnatural if my money site gets 10 links from sites on that one IP?"

But no, not really.

A shared IP is only a footprint when the group of sites on it is small and connected. On a normal $5 server, the reverse-IP list is basically a list of what one person owns — that's why it used to be such a strong signal.

An edge IP from Vercel, Cloudflare or CloudFront says nothing about ownership:

A reverse-IP lookup returns a massive number of unrelated sites: startups, portfolios, docs sites, big brands. Your 10 PBN sites are a drop in that ocean.

Search engines know these IPs belong to CDN networks. Treating "same Vercel IP" as "same owner" would tie millions of strangers together, so a signal like that is worthless to them.

Cloudflare alone sits in front of roughly a fifth of all websites. Every natural backlink profile already has plenty of links from Cloudflare IPs.

What can still look odd is the mix, not the IP. Cloudflare is everywhere; Vercel is a much smaller slice of the web. If 10 of your money site's referring domains resolve to Vercel, that's a statistical oddity. So:

Mix platforms: some sites on Cloudflare, some on Vercel, some on CloudFront.

Put Cloudflare in front of Vercel, so those sites resolve to Cloudflare's far more common IPs. Reverse proxy > great.

Spread across several accounts.

It's really good for smaller scale PBNs.

Our verdict

Bigger networks: one droplet per PBN, spread across DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS and Linode (plus Hetzner/OVH for diversity), multiple regions, no provider over ~25–30%. Still our go-to.

Smaller networks: shared edge hosting on Vercel, Cloudflare Workers or S3 + CloudFront, mixed across platforms and spread over several accounts. Good for entry PBNs.

Or a mix of both.

#2 Bad registrars

Mostly unchanged. Don't register all domains on the same date, and don't leave domains sitting at the dropcatch service's registrar — transfer them out. Spread across registrars: Dynadot, Name.com, NameSilo, GoDaddy, Porkbun, Namecheap, Spaceship. Cloudflare Registrar sells at cost, but it ties registrar + DNS + proxy into one account — fine for some sites, not all. And don't use your money site's registrar account.

#3 No WHOIS privacy

Same as 2021: thanks to GDPR, WHOIS privacy is free and standard almost everywhere. Not having it is the bigger footprint.

#4 Custom nameservers

Still a hard no. ns1.mypbnhost.com is a perfect fingerprint.

DigitalOcean (ns1–3.digitalocean.com), Vultr (ns1/ns2.vultr.com), Linode and Hetzner all give you their own nameservers, used by huge numbers of unrelated sites and apps. You blend right in.

Cloudflare nameservers are fine too. One nuance: Cloudflare gives every domain in an account the same nameserver pair (e.g. ada + bob.ns.cloudflare.com). Each pair is shared by millions of sites, so it's no footprint on its own — but put your whole network in one account and every PBN site has the exact same pair. Spread over 10+ accounts and it stops meaning anything.

Mix it up: some sites on host DNS, some on Cloudflare.

#5 Blocking crawlers

Our take hasn't changed: blocking Ahrefs, Majestic & co. via .htaccess or a plugin is the footprint. 80%+ of real sites don't do it, so why would you?

One 2026 nuance: blocking AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot…) in robots.txt is now common on real sites, and Cloudflare blocks many of them by default on new domains. Either way looks natural — just don't do the same thing on every site.

#6 Build unique PBNs

This is where the game changed completely.

In 2021 we said you only need Elementor Pro + Astra/Hello/OceanWP, Divi or GeneratePress to build hundreds of unique sites. That was true — but they all still shared themes, page builder markup and plugin footprints with thousands of other PBNs.

Now, with Opus 5.5, it's almost too easy. Every site gets a custom-built template — its own layout, typography, custom fonts, color system, CSS and components — in minutes. OpenAI and Gemini image models generate the logo, hero images, featured images and illustrations in a consistent style per site. That's how we redesigned 100+ sites in four days.

Skip WordPress here. It's outdated for a modern PBN.

Our build process per site:

Write a site brief (or let Claude write one from the domain's Wayback history): who's the "publisher", audience, tone, visual direction.

Generate the codebase in Claude Code from the brief.

Generate images with OpenAI / Gemini, using a per-site style prompt so everything looks like it belongs to that site.

Fill content (#7) and link internally (#10).

Run your footprint checks and deploy.

Example build prompt:

Code:

Build a new Astro static site for oldgardenshed.com. Brief: a small UK-based gardening publication run by two editors since 2014. Feels like an independent print magazine: warm, editorial, a bit old-fashioned. Requirements: - Fully custom design. No Tailwind, no UI kit, no starter template. Hand-written CSS with its own design tokens (colors, spacing, type scale). - Pick two fonts that fit the brief; self-host them. - Magazine-style homepage with a featured story, category rails and an "Editors' picks" sidebar. Unique header, footer and article template. - Pages: home, category, article, about (with the two editors), contact, privacy policy, terms, cookie policy, editorial policy. - Article content collection with title, description, date, updated, author, category, tags, hero image and related posts. - Sitemap, RSS, robots.txt, OG tags, Article + Organization schema. - No generator meta tag, rename the default asset folder, no analytics or third-party scripts. - Lighthouse 95+ on mobile. Show me the homepage and article template before writing content.

Change the brief per site and you get a genuinely different site every time. Change the structure too — a magazine, a resource hub, a small review site, a local guide, a personal blog. The real web is varied. Your network should be too.

And just like in 2021: every site needs the mandatory pages — about, contact, privacy policy, T&C, cookie policy. Have Claude write unique legal text per site. Copy-pasted legal pages across a network are a footprint.

New footprints to watch with modern frameworks:

Generator meta tags (Astro, Next.js, Hugo can all add them) — remove them.

Next.js sends X-Powered-By: Next.js by default — turn it off (poweredByHeader: false).

Default asset folders (/_astro/, /_next/) — rename them where the framework allows it.

Shared components, CSS class naming schemes, icon sets, fonts or code comments across sites.

Pro tip: put a few site repos side by side and ask Claude: "List everything that's identical or near-identical across 3 or more of these sites: markup patterns, class names, file structure, headers, fonts, scripts, legal text, copy phrases." It finds things you'd never spot by hand. Better yet, have it turn that into a check that runs before every deploy.

#7 Use unique content

So easy now — see above. The risk has actually flipped: the danger isn't too little content, it's too much content that's obviously mass-produced.

We still never use spun, scraped or old expired content. And Google's scaled content abuse policy doesn't care whether text is AI-written — it cares whether pages are pumped out at scale with little value. Opus 5.5 writes genuinely good content; your job is to ask for that, not for 500 keyword-stuffed posts.

Give each site a voice. Authors, tone and point of view from the site brief — stored in the repo so every article follows it.

Fewer, better articles. 20–40 solid articles beat 300 thin ones.

Original angles. Real how-tos, comparisons, opinions, local details, data. Feed the model real sources.

Natural cadence. Don't publish 40 articles on day one and nothing after. Schedule them.

Images: in 2021 we said use Pixabay/Pexels instead of scraped images. Now generate them per site with OpenAI or Gemini — unique, on-brand, no copyright risk, and no stock photo shared with 500 other PBNs.

Light human review. 15 minutes per site to catch factual errors and anything that reads robotic.

#8 Don't interlink your PBNs

Duh. Still self-explanatory. And make sure the money sites you link to are hosted separately from your PBNs.

#9 Build links to your PBNs (optional)

Unchanged. Real sites gain and lose links all the time, so add a few quality tier 2 links into the mix. It helps the PBN site and the money site. Not a must, but incredibly helpful.

#10 Use internal links on your PBNs

Real sites have a LOT of internal links. They pass link juice between pages and the homepage and build topical relevance for the whole site.

In 2021 that was a manual chore. Now it's one prompt:

Code:

Do an internal linking pass on this site. 1. Read every article. Build a topical map: group articles into clusters and pick one pillar article per cluster. Save it as a topical graph file (clusters, pillar, members, links). 2. Add contextual internal links in the article bodies: - each article links to its pillar and to 2–4 closely related articles - each pillar links to every article in its cluster - add 1–2 cross-cluster links only where genuinely relevant 3. Anchor text: natural and varied, using phrases already in the sentence. No exact-match anchor more than twice across the site. Never link the same target twice in one article. No links in headings. 4. Fill the related-posts field for each article (3 posts). 5. Don't touch external links. Don't change wording except where a minimal edit is needed to place a link naturally. 6. Report: links added per article, orphan pages, and pages with fewer than 3 inbound internal links.

View attachment 554404

#11 Skip GA/GSC

Still a duh. No Google Analytics, no Search Console, no Tag Manager, no AdSense IDs and no shared verification tokens on your PBNs. Paranoia gets the best of us — but why risk it? If you really want stats, use a self-hosted or server-side counter per site.

#12 Use redirects correctly

Unchanged in principle. Some domains have more links to the root (non-www), some to www. Pick the version with more links and redirect the other one — otherwise you'll get underwhelming results.

And rebuild every inner page that has links pointing to it, with the exact same URL structure, fresh content and internal links to the homepage. Pages you can't rebuild get a 301 to the closest new page.

What changed is where you do it: instead of .htaccess, redirects live in the repo — vercel.json, a _redirects file on Cloudflare, or your nginx/Caddy config. Version-controlled and easy to check.

#13 Say YES to Cloudflare

In 2021 we said: "Say no to Cloudflare. You DON'T need it if your hosting is done right."

We changed our mind. Cloudflare is good now — we recommend it.

A huge chunk of the web now sits behind Cloudflare, from tiny blogs to Fortune 500s. Being on Cloudflare is the normal setup; it's no longer a pattern. And it gives you:

Your origin IP hidden behind shared anycast IPs

Nameservers and IPs shared with millions of sites

Free SSL, caching and DDoS protection

Free hosting for static sites (Workers)

But do it properly, or your origin still leaks:

Lock the origin to Cloudflare. Firewall your droplet so ports 80/443 only accept Cloudflare's IP ranges. Otherwise scanners like Censys and Shodan find your site on the raw IP.

Use a Cloudflare Origin Certificate instead of Let's Encrypt on the server. Let's Encrypt certs land in public Certificate Transparency logs, and the server hands them to anyone scanning the IP.

Don't serve the site on the raw IP. The default server block should just close the connection.

Watch old DNS history. Services like SecurityTrails keep every A record a domain ever had. If the domain ever pointed straight at your droplet, that IP is on record — move the site to a fresh droplet once it's behind Cloudflare.

Don't send email from the origin. Mail headers leak the real IP.

Spread across accounts. Same reason as nameservers — and so one account action can't take down the network.

#14 Say yes to SSL

In 2021 SSL was "the standard for new sites". In 2026, a site without HTTPS is the footprint — browsers flag it as "Not secure" and default to HTTPS. Vercel, Cloudflare and Caddy all handle certificates automatically, so there's zero excuse. Behind Cloudflare, use an Origin Certificate (see #13).

#15 Maintain your PBN

In 2021: keep themes and plugins updated, install Wordfence, add a caching plugin, and we'd still had a few hacking attempts.

With Astro or Next.js, maintenance is now easy. No plugins to update, no database, no admin panel to break into. Caching is built in — it's served from a CDN.

What maintenance looks like now:

Everything lives in git. One repo per site or a monorepo. Every change is a prompt + push, and the deploy picks it up.

Network-wide changes are scripts, not clicking. Pinned posts, removals, redirects and link changes across the whole network are scripted and committed — reviewable and reversible.

Keep a topical graph per site. The topical graph from #10 is the map of the site: clusters, pillars and how articles link. Every new article must be added to the graph — assigned to a cluster and linked to its pillar and siblings. Put that rule in each repo's instructions file so the AI agent does it automatically.

Keep a network-level map too — every site's topic, host, ASN, region, registrar, nameservers, Cloudflare account and which money pages it links to. That's how you avoid accidentally creating a pattern.

Run footprint checks before every deploy — a simple script that compares all sites and fails if two of them share design, class names, SVGs, file hashes or legal text.

Fresh content — 2–4 non-commercial posts per site every month or two keeps sites alive and crawled.

Uptime monitoring — a dead PBN site passes nothing.

Auto-renew your domains. Losing a strong domain because a card expired hurts more than anything in this guide.

Optional, same as 2021: create a few social accounts per PBN. Not necessary, but makes the site more legit.

That pretty much covers the footprints.

PBN setup by stack

WordPress (not recommended)

DigitalOcean and Vultr are still our go-to recommendation for WordPress. One-click apps are still the easiest way.

However, in 2026, using Wordpress for your PBNs is simply outdated.

Astro (our recommendation)

Astro's static output is just HTML, CSS and JS files — it runs anywhere:

Droplets (bigger networks): DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS Lightsail, Linode, Hetzner

Shared edge (smaller networks): Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Pro, AWS S3 + CloudFront.

Next.js

Static export: treat it exactly like Astro — any of the hosts above. For a PBN, this is what you want 99% of the time.

Stack Our recommended hosting
WordPress DigitalOcean + Vultr (still our go-to), plus Linode / Hetzner / OVH for spread. One site per droplet.
Astro DO / Vultr / Linode / Lightsail droplets behind Cloudflare for bigger networks — or Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Pro, AWS S3 + CloudFront for smaller ones.
Next.js (static export) Same as Astro.
Next.js (SSR) Vercel Pro, Cloudflare Workers via OpenNext

Have claude build out those sites as outlined above, and walk you through it.

It's so easy.

How to link out from your PBN

This part hasn't changed — AI doesn't change link math.

View attachment 554410
Source: seolutions.biz

Linking to one page of your money site
The best and safest approach. Keep OBL = 1 and you pass all the power. You can target different inner pages with separate PBNs: PBN A links to moneysite.com/abc/, PBN B to moneysite.com/xyz/. Totally fine.

Linking to several pages on one money site
You can, but use it VERY sparingly — it can leave a footprint.

Linking to several money sites
Fine if the niches are related and the money sites don't share footprints (same host, DNS, email, monetization). A tech affiliate blog and a web dev site from one tech PBN: easy. Adding an insurance site to that: not ideal (though creative content topics can make it work).

FAQ — Frequently Answered Questions

What anchors should I use?
Same ratios we've used for years:

Branded: 70–80%

Generic: 8–10%

Long-tail and partial match: 5–8%

Exact match: 3–5%

PBNs are perfect for sniping exact or phrase-match anchors — you're in full control. Track your anchor profile across all your link sources, not per PBN.

Should I display full posts on the homepage?
If you keep OBL = 1 on the homepage, you don't need posts there at all. Make it look like a business or publication homepage and place the link in a section surrounded by at least 250–300 words of content. With a custom-built site that's just part of the brief. We also run PBNs with excerpts or several full posts on the homepage (for OBL > 1).

How much content should I use on my PBN?
Today? At least 30+ pages and 30k+ words.

Do you guys use anything except PBNs for your own sites?
Of course. We usually start a new site with a branded foundation: branded guest posts, listicles, niche edits, structured and unstructured citations.

Does the PBN have to be 100% niche related?
It still works if it's not — you can build relevance on page level instead of domain level.

Are PBNs still worth it in 2026?
For competitive niches, yes.

Do I still need WordPress?
No. Astro + Opus 5.5 gives you more unique, faster, safer sites with less maintenance. WordPress is fine for existing networks, and a few WP sites in a mixed network is natural.

What do I lose by leaving WordPress?
The admin panel — every edit goes through the repo, a build and a deploy. Comments and server-side forms are gone too. In exchange there's nothing to hack, nothing to patch and no WordPress fingerprints.

Can I host the whole PBN on Vercel & Cloudflare?
Yes, and it works well for smaller networks. For bigger networks we still prefer droplets.

Is AWS S3 + CloudFront a good option?
Yes. CloudFront serves from shared edge IPs just like Vercel and Cloudflare.

Won't Cloudflare on every site be a pattern?
Not anymore — it's the default setup for a huge part of the web. Just don't put everything in one account, and leave some sites unproxied.

Will AI content get my PBN penalized?
Google doesn't penalize content for being AI-written. It penalizes content mass-produced with little value. Give each site a voice, publish fewer and better articles, use unique images, and do a quick human review.

How fast can I add money links to a new PBN site?
Let it settle first: build it, publish content, let it get crawled and indexed (a few weeks). Then add links gradually.

Should I 301 an expired domain instead of building a site?
Redirects pass value but are easier to spot, and they carry over any bad history. We build sites on most domains and only redirect where a domain is a near-exact topical match to a money page.

Can an AI agent buy domains and deploy sites for me?
It can research, shortlist, build and deploy. It's so easy now. We use opus 5.5

Closing thoughts
That's it. Five years later, the fundamentals are exactly the same: great domains, zero footprints, smart linking. Everything else — the building, hosting, content and maintenance — got faster, cheaper and safer.

Hope you liked the guide.

Now get to work and set up your first PBN. It's never been easier.

Great and very useful guide especially for beginners! Thank you for this!

[GUIDE] Ultimate PBN Guide v2.0

Elite Member

The Ultimate PBN Guide — v2.0 Edition​

Table of Contents​

Glossary​

What is a PBN and why is everyone (still) raving about them?​

Risks and costs of a PBN​

The costs — then vs. now​

The 2026 stack: WordPress is optional now​

Advantages over WordPress​

Where to find PBN domains (now with AI agents)​

Domain vendors​

Finding them yourself​

Stages of an expiring domain​

PBN domain analysis​

1. Check indexation​

2. Check the domain history​

3. Check trademarks​

4. Check the link profile​

5. Check the anchor profile​

All five checks in one prompt​

PBN footprints (to avoid) — all updated​

#1 Bad hosting​

#2 Bad registrars​

#3 No WHOIS privacy​

#4 Custom nameservers​

#5 Blocking crawlers​

#6 Build unique PBNs​

#7 Use unique content​

#8 Don't interlink your PBNs​

#9 Build links to your PBNs (optional)​

#10 Use internal links on your PBNs​

#11 Skip GA/GSC​

#12 Use redirects correctly​

#13 Say YES to Cloudflare​

#14 Say yes to SSL​

#15 Maintain your PBN​

PBN setup by stack​

WordPress (not recommended)​

Astro (our recommendation)​

How to link out from your PBN​

FAQ — Frequently Answered Questions​

Closing thoughts​

Attachments

Newbie

Elite Member

Supreme Member

Elite Member

Supreme Member

Moderator

Elite Member

Newbie

Elite Member

Junior Member

Elite Member

Elite Member

Elite Member

Junior Member

Elite Member

Elite Member

Junior Member

Elite Member

The Ultimate PBN Guide — v2.0 Edition​

Table of Contents​

Glossary​

What is a PBN and why is everyone (still) raving about them?​

Risks and costs of a PBN​

The costs — then vs. now​

The 2026 stack: WordPress is optional now​

Advantages over WordPress​

Where to find PBN domains (now with AI agents)​

Domain vendors​

Finding them yourself​

Stages of an expiring domain​

PBN domain analysis​

1. Check indexation​

2. Check the domain history​

3. Check trademarks​

4. Check the link profile​

5. Check the anchor profile​

The Ultimate PBN Guide — v2.0 Edition

Table of Contents

Glossary

What is a PBN and why is everyone (still) raving about them?

Risks and costs of a PBN

The costs — then vs. now

The 2026 stack: WordPress is optional now

Advantages over WordPress

Where to find PBN domains (now with AI agents)

Domain vendors

Finding them yourself

Stages of an expiring domain

PBN domain analysis

1. Check indexation

2. Check the domain history

3. Check trademarks

4. Check the link profile

5. Check the anchor profile

All five checks in one prompt

PBN footprints (to avoid) — all updated

#1 Bad hosting

#2 Bad registrars

#3 No WHOIS privacy

#4 Custom nameservers

#5 Blocking crawlers

#6 Build unique PBNs

#7 Use unique content

#8 Don't interlink your PBNs

#9 Build links to your PBNs (optional)

#10 Use internal links on your PBNs

#11 Skip GA/GSC

#12 Use redirects correctly

#13 Say YES to Cloudflare

#14 Say yes to SSL

#15 Maintain your PBN

PBN setup by stack

WordPress (not recommended)

Astro (our recommendation)

How to link out from your PBN

FAQ — Frequently Answered Questions

Closing thoughts

The Ultimate PBN Guide — v2.0 Edition

Table of Contents

Glossary

What is a PBN and why is everyone (still) raving about them?

Risks and costs of a PBN

The costs — then vs. now

The 2026 stack: WordPress is optional now

Advantages over WordPress

Where to find PBN domains (now with AI agents)

Domain vendors

Finding them yourself

Stages of an expiring domain

PBN domain analysis

1. Check indexation

2. Check the domain history

3. Check trademarks

4. Check the link profile

5. Check the anchor profile

All five checks in one prompt

PBN footprints (to avoid) — all updated

#1 Bad hosting

#2 Bad registrars

#3 No WHOIS privacy

#4 Custom nameservers

#5 Blocking crawlers

#6 Build unique PBNs

#7 Use unique content

#8 Don't interlink your PBNs

#9 Build links to your PBNs (optional)

#10 Use internal links on your PBNs

#11 Skip GA/GSC

#12 Use redirects correctly

#13 Say YES to Cloudflare

#14 Say yes to SSL

#15 Maintain your PBN

PBN setup by stack

WordPress (not recommended)

Astro (our recommendation)

How to link out from your PBN