How to build your own PBN for under $275 (15 domains)

Why you should build your own PBN

You heard that PBN links are all the rage these days, but tired of paying $97 here and $147 there for PBN links and after all is done you are left with a small increase in ranking that you know will pass once your links will inevitable roll off the main page? Or perhaps you are forced into a monthly subscription that makes you shell out a couple of hundred $ each month, cutting into your profit, making you continuously wonder whether it still makes sense to pay for the links, but fear that your website will drop like a rock if you stop? Not to mention the constant terror that maybe the network gets penalized and you are a collateral victim of their penalty.

Having your own private blog network would be great, but when you see people charging $1,000+ for just a 5 domain PBN, you think you need a small fortune to make a significant dent in your rankings.

This is my tutorial exclusively for BHW ? completely free, not selling anything and no affiliate links ? based on my own experience (recent by the way, not techniques that worked years ago) on how to build your own private blog network for less than $275.

At the end of this post you will have a moderately effective, 15 websites PBN and it will cost you less than $275 to put it all together (for the whole first year, no monthly costs). Sounds great? Let?s get started.

Costs Breakdown

-$107.4 for 1 year webhosting with 15 Dedicated IPs (one dedicated ip for each website) and 3 free domains.
Choose the Unlimited Pro plan from IXwebhosting and pay one year in advance to get the discounted price and the 3 free domains:
http://www.ixwebhosting.com/hosting-plans

-120$ for 12 domains (there are 3 free because of the hosting) with WhoisGuard privacy coming free if you buy them from Namecheap. Go to www.namecheapcoupons.com to get a small coupon when registering the domains, gets you about 1$ off each domain, and only take 10 seconds.

-45$ - 15 unique articles to get you started (1 for each website, although you can and should add more content in time as you add more links). 3$ per 500 article is more than enough for real content for your PBN and you can find plenty of writers on DP in their content writing section, or here at BHW in the services thread.

Total :272$ for one year hosting, 15 domains, and content for your own PBN

Getting Valuable Expired Domains for Free

Since you don?t have the budget for high quality domains, you will be picking free expired domains at registration fee. They will be mostly PR 1 and PR2, ocassionaly a PR 3, but more important, they will be effective, if you follow my metrics and guidelines. You also won?t be spending a lot of time or any money on tools and private membership to find them. There are other methods to find higher quality expired domains for free than the one I expose, but they take a lot more time, and this guide is geared towards the most effective way to a valuable PBN, with the minimum amount of time and money involved.

Step 1. Make a free account at ExpiredDomains.net

Expireddomains.net publishes EVERY DAY about 100,000 domains that not only have expired, but they have the Deleted status. Deleted status means they passed both the redemption period and the auction period (where you have to outbid other people in auctions like Godaddy Auctions, NameJet, NamePros etc..) and can be picked for just registration free instantly. No need to end for any auctions to finish. Once you find them, go to your favorite registrar and pick them up for just their registration fee.

You need a free account so that you are able to use their high quality filters and save you a lot of time.

Step 2. Set Up your Filters and sort the domains.

I recommend you to look only at Deleted.com , Deleted.net and Deleted. Org sections as below:



Then setup the following filters, by pressing the Show Filter button

a) From the Common Filter you need to check as below (See Screenshot):

- Only New 24 Hours (waste of time to check longer range, since other SEOs had picked up the best from past domains. Past 24 hours give you the best chance to find a juicy domain, before anyone else picks them up)
- No Fake PR (self explanatory, to avoid bad domains)
- No Unsure PR (self explanatory, to avoid bad domains)
- No PageRank -1 (self explanatory, to avoid bad domains)



b) From the Additional Filter you need to check as below (See Screenshot)

- Only Available Domains (self explanatory)



c) From the Adwords & SEO Filters you need to check as below (See Screenshot)

- 10 Min Moz Domain Authority
- 10 Min Moz Page Authority



d) After you set up the filters and filter through the domains, you need to sort them according to PR by pressing the PR tab, as follows (See Screenshot)



You will find perhaps 30-50 domains each day that have at least PR 1, and fulfill all our Filters, across all tld, com, net org.

But our work is not yet done, we need to filter them even further.

Step 3. Further Verification of the Domains to ensure they are spam-free and high quality

After you select a batch of domains from Expired Domains, you need to start further verification to ensure they have a spam free link profile and their metrics are good.

a) Check if they are indexed in google by doing a site: domain.com search (see screenshot). If they are not, drop them off your list. Not being indexed in google after being just recently expired (since you used the last 24 hours settings in your filter) is a huge red flag, either the domain is penalized or its backlinks are not potent enough to index it. Sometimes you can get domains that are not indexed and reindexed them yourself with links and etc? but it?s better to be safe than sorry. I did the mistake of buying some domains that were not indexed, and I was never able to reindex them as well, despite all my backlinking efforts ? which should not happen in a PBN, you do not need to waste time backlinking your PBN if you choose great domains to begin with.



b) Manually check their DA and PA metrics through OpenSiteExplorer.org (make a free account, otherwise you will be limited after several searches) and note them down in an excel file.

VERY IMPORTANT: Make sure to check both www version of the domain as well as the non-www version of the domain since these tools give different results. It?s very important for you to build your site on the better version (if the previous website was linked to as being www.domain.com you need to make your own PBN with www in front), since it has better metrics.

See for instance how the OSE gives different PA metrics for an expired domain, depending on whether you use www or non-www version:





c) Manually check their TF (trust flow) and CF (citation flow) through MajesticSEO.com (make a free account, otherwise you will be limited after several searches) and note them down in an excel

VERY IMPORTANT: Similar as before, check both www and non-www version of the domain as they will be giving different metrics.

d) Ensure that their backlinks are spam free

You can take a look at the backlink profile either in Majestic SEO or Open Site Explorer, and ensure that they do not have porn, pharma or spam links pointing to them. Usually such low quality links will give excellent metrics, but they are bad in reality and google can figure that out.
This is probably the most important step, if the backlinks are not cleaned, do not bother registering the domain, no matter what the other metrics are looking like. You can take a quick look at the anchor text distribution in Majestic to figure this out.

Step 4: Deciding to buy the domain.

My personal formula for buying an expired domain is the following

If (PR x 10 + DA + PA + TF + CF) > 80


-and the domain is indexed in google
-and the backlinks are high quality and spam free

(so for instance, a domain with PR 2 , DA 12, PA 20, TF 15 and CF 15, will have 2 x 10 + 12 +20 +15 +15 = 82, worth registering )

Then it?s well worth the 10$ registration fee and the time involved in finding him. Depending on the backlinks profile, I go sometimes even if it?s just over 70.

Ever since I follow these process, I am able to find reasonable quality domains that are easily indexed by google and rank my blog posts and link to my authority sites, without needing to build any links for them. Just their past history and the fact that they are indexed by google at the time of my purchase makes them worth while.

After that, Buy them from Namecheap for 10$, enable the free whois guard that comes with it, host them at IXWebhosting each on its own ip and add quality content, and you are good to go. There is a lot to describe about setting them up, but this thread took longer than expected, so maybe I will make it as Part 2 if there is enough interest.

Good one mate.
How is the cpanel at ixwebhosting, easy to set up wordpress and so on?

0scan0 said:

Good one mate.
How is the cpanel at ixwebhosting, easy to set up wordpress and so on?

Click to expand...

They have an Easy Apps application that allows you to easily install wordpress, but they are quite an outdated hosting and their cpanel shows that.

Their big advantage is their 15 dedicated ips for what comes to about 8-9$ per month, which is way better than virtually everything i found on the market.

Great in-depth tutorial! Have you tested the difference between aged, expired domains and deleted domains? I've always gone with aged domains but if deleted domains work just as well it would be a lot cheaper for sure.

Like many of the best tutorials very clear and easy to follow.

Similar to what I am doing.

Congrats for putting the time into this.

Great guide!

I have a question, what do you think about the importance of constant update of PBN? do you think it is a must even for low budget practitioner?

I am pretty low in budget for this, so what have been pushing me back is content updating. Do you think it is really neccessary to update your PBN weekly?

Do we need to build backlinks to the PBN and howoften do we need to update it with fresh content?
BTW the best tut for PBN thank you!

meln said:

Great in-depth tutorial! Have you tested the difference between aged, expired domains and deleted domains? I've always gone with aged domains but if deleted domains work just as well it would be a lot cheaper for sure.

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Yes, i have tested and aged domains usually work better than expired domains, but they cost more, obviously and also if they already have some content on them (aged websites) then there is also an extra hassle to move everything to your hosting. I usually buy old, abandoned blogs from dp and independent owners for seo and link uice purposes, but expired domains are more straight forward, cheaper and easier to setup, and you can get in bigger numbers. Where do you buy aged domains from?

peterngo91 said:

Great guide!

I have a question, what do you think about the importance of constant update of PBN? do you think it is a must even for low budget practitioner?

I am pretty low in budget for this, so what have been pushing me back is content updating. Do you think it is really neccessary to update your PBN weekly?

Click to expand...

I only update my PBN when i post blog posts with links on them, 1-2 times per month i add an additional article with some extra links. I have a lot of websites, so for me it makes sense to update my PBN to build links to those website as well. I don't think the cost is prohibitively, i pay 3$ per 500 words article (but i count it as a marketing cost for the new website that i build links too).

If you wanna save money on the content, you can sell links privately in your PBN - you dilute your link juice, but you get content and money, you can allow free guest blogging - i do not do that, but there are plenty of people who would gladly place high quality blogposts on your network for a link, or you can write shorter articles - 250 words + an image or a video, and you can have a new post at half the cost.

There is no need to constantly update your PBN though, most public networks due that in order to sell more links, but if it's yours and it's private, you can leave the PBN at even 1 article per blog. I have found people ranking high in serps, and they get all their links from expired domains with 1 piece of content and 1 backlink on them and that's all (Although to be fairly, they had hundreds of such 1 page expired domains backlinks pointing to them).

@wizard04

I do not build backlinks to my PBN, but i follow their indexing rate, both main domain as well as subsequent blog posts to ensure they are powerful. Since i spend more time on researching and making sure i buy high quality domains, it has never been a problem building backlinks to my PBN, they pretty much do everything on their own.

I update my PBN when i add new articles with links, usually 1-2 times per month. That's because i have a lot of websites, and they need links as well, not necessary because they need updating.

thanks for your post.
is it good to build spam backlinks to our pbn??

Great guide OP.
Nice to see old members taking time to give. Cheers.

One question about the hosting. Is it safe from your point of view having all domains in one place. Is the IP enough?

Great guide, thanks for sharing. I have one question though: are the 15 IP addresses from different C Class?

Great Stuff Right here, Though i am using this very technique Since couple of weeks now with good success... Feeling Even Stronger after reading this guide...

Thanks again Nick Flame.

BTW i had a doubt, With all these filters we are gonna get Domains but not necessarily Relevent to our niche, so should we buy that domain if it passes all the above test that you have mentioned...

Detailed tutorial but this method is becoming hugely saturated. While it's not impossible to grab some good domains this way, there are alternatives.

hotguy640 said:

thanks for your post.
is it good to build spam backlinks to our pbn??

Click to expand...

No, you better invest that time in finding high quality domains. That's the main point of buying expired domains, you buy domains belonging to old real legit websites that have quality link you wouldn't be able to replicate. If you want to build a domain from ground up and spamming it up, there is no point in researching so much for an expired domain of high quality, any expired domain will do.

mindmaster said:

Great guide OP.
Nice to see old members taking time to give. Cheers.

One question about the hosting. Is it safe from your point of view having all domains in one place. Is the IP enough?

Click to expand...

For a first PBN, with 15 domains I think it's ok to have all of them from the same hosting company - obviously each with its own dedicated ip. If you are looking for more, 30,50,100 domains + then you should look at diversifying the hosting as well. I recommend ixwebhosting for starters and for 15 domains, but i use other hosts as well for my PBN as its a little bit larger.

SteveWaller said:

Detailed tutorial but this method is becoming hugely saturated. While it's not impossible to grab some good domains this way, there are alternatives.

Click to expand...

I bought 2 excellent domains yesterday. Yes, there is quite decent competition for domains at expireddomains.net, but my particular filters described in the post allow me to find some gems within the 100,000+ new domains every day.

Also, not to forget, that every day 100,000+ new domains are up for grabs. If you know how to filter them, you can snap them out before the other people get them, doesn't matter that everyone knows the method. I also see plenty of people snapping bad domains from expireddomains because they are not able to check and filter them properly. PR alone is not a good indicator.

What alternatives would you recommend that are more effective both as cost and time?

Good tut , but are you satisfied with only pr2 ? i think you should add some scraping tips to get domains with pr3+ and expired domains.net is overgrazed and it's hard to find good domains.

+ this tip can help alot.
most of class ip sellers are monitored by google bots regularly. i will suggest to go with $1/month shared hosting plans on various hosts to make your pbn look like simple sites. it's not difficult for google to find and ban ips used for pbns.

you got some good tips. bookmarked.
-=-

i never seen the op posted anythin for the time i been here but now he posted a goldmine tnx a lot very goood tuts lookin forward for some more tips

very detailed one mate.

Thanks for sharing.

i am doing pretty much the same but with my country tld (for .com it is a butchery to get it and addictive the domain farming....)
so far got 50+ blogs set up and more 20+ domains ready set up but slacking in content (i know i got caught into the "buy domain" bug but it is very addictive and gets a good ROI)
some tip i would like to add to your method is redirecting links (if u dont mind)

1.use way back machine and check what inner articles that domain had
2. write articles similar to the ones you got from way back machine (some spinner would do great also, but i prefer manual job)
3.check the backlinks that domain had.
4. redirect every old inner URL that had backlinks to the corresponding new inner URL (so you do not lose any old backlinks and if someone lands to your new site does not report tyhe broken link)
enjoy your success

Best wishes.
Leobar!

edited: grammar edit

prab1996 said:

Good tut , but are you satisfied with only pr2 ? i think you should add some scraping tips to get domains with pr3+ and expired domains.net is overgrazed and it's hard to find good domains.

+ this tip can help alot.
most of class ip sellers are monitored by google bots regularly. i will suggest to go with $1/month shared hosting plans on various hosts to make your pbn look like simple sites. it's not difficult for google to find and ban ips used for pbns.

you got some good tips. bookmarked.
-=-

Click to expand...

Thanks for adding your great tips. Yes, this is a basic guide for setting up a PBN on a budget, and i tried to be honest, it's rarely you will be able to find more than PR 2 on expireddomains, as you said due to high volume of people searching there. But even pr2 can be effective. I add a mix of higher quality domains in my PBN by buying old abandoned blogs for link juice - but i invest good money in that, so it's not suitable for those on a budget - or scraping broken links and finding domains myself, but that takes tools and time. Maybe i will follow up on this post with more tips.

CriminalMind said:

i never seen the op posted anythin for the time i been here but now he posted a goldmine tnx a lot very goood tuts lookin forward for some more tips

Click to expand...

Thanks, i am actually quite an old member here, 7 years and counting. I like to think i contributed more useful threads, but they have been in the past, i am trying to be more active.

Nick Flame said:

I bought 2 excellent domains yesterday. Yes, there is quite decent competition for domains at expireddomains.net, but my particular filters described in the post allow me to find some gems within the 100,000+ new domains every day.

Also, not to forget, that every day 100,000+ new domains are up for grabs. If you know how to filter them, you can snap them out before the other people get them, doesn't matter that everyone knows the method. I also see plenty of people snapping bad domains from expireddomains because they are not able to check and filter them properly. PR alone is not a good indicator.

What alternatives would you recommend that are more effective both as cost and time?

Click to expand...

I'm not denying that you can pick up good domains this way for sure. I guess the alternative I am talking about is scraping for expired domains but then I have my own scraper so can avoid much of the legwork required with the Xenu/Scrapebox method. Either way I picked up a PR4 .uk domain just the other day with some solid, high trust backlinks and, like your method, it only cost me reg fee.