PBN Audit

Hi,
I have been assigned to audit a PBN Network, New Agency Management wants to cut costs on the Current network that we have. Obviulsy buying domains and hosting them is the first main cost they want to cut.
I have checked the age of domains and Ahrefs best by links (Referring Domains Only). The stats does not look good the first pool of expiring domains the maximum number of good referring domains "5" and most of them are "0". I dont think these are worth keeping. Domain age is good every domain is 5+ years some are 10+ years old. Now i am confused should we look for better domains with more RD ?
Or use these expired aged domains network.

I never owned a PBN, so I don't know all of the intricacies of this type of business. But, from what I've picked about PBNs from various forum members that I trust, the name of the game with PBNs seems to be trust with google. Well, trust is one of the big fads today with every site, not with PBNs only, but since PBNs are nothing more than money sites nowadays.... well... you need google to trust them

But trust is only one thing. The other big thing with PBNs is their authority, of course. Which means their backlinks, which (ultimately) means their RDs like you said.

And the reason I've mentioned trust and backlinks is because domain age is not important (according to someone I trust that keeps saying this)....

So, trust and backlinks should be your focus, so keep only the domains that have good backlinks (and authority, implicitly), but also those that google trusts.

How google determines trust is still an enigma for me, but you can get an idea of it based on how well these sites rank in google, the traffic they get, but also the number of keywords they rank for, as well as the numbers of pages that these sites have in google's index. If google bothers to index a lot of pages from these sites, and to rank them for 100s or 1000s of keywords this - to me - is a pretty good indicator that google trusts those sites, therefore - even if their authority is not high enough - with enough topical authority and relevancy, any PBN backlink coming from these websites should be extremely valuable if the price is appropriate.

So, work on (and keep) the sites that google trusts and that have high topical authority (niche relevancy basically) and / or normal authority (DR), and ditch the others.

That's what I would do if I was tasked with this. But if you don't like / trust my reply (understandable since I've never owned a PBN before), you can wait for other people's replies, no problem

Ways to cut costs on a PBN ...

You could move it to cloud hosting practically free if hosting bills are the main issue.

If the domains have 0 backlinks, but they've been aged a year with the same content related to your money site, far better to renew a domain for $10 (skip sandbox) and build links to it. You can interlink between your PBN sites conservatively with in-content links, so if you have a large PBN there's no reason every site shouldn't have 10+ backlinks just from your own domains.

If the main issue is that you have dozens or hundreds of PBNs and their renewal cost is so high, and their profitability is so low that they don't justify their renewal fee, that's a big problem. Maybe you should build links with something like icopify where you can pick sites you want a link from and not have recurring fees.

Just being old doesn’t matter if no one links to you. I’d drop the domains with almost zero backlinks and look for expired ones that already have 20+ quality links. Good backlinks always beat age.

Remember there is a PBN already built on these domains. These websites doe not rank, no traffic, there referring domains are poor and some of the domain names are also shady like besttajmahalindia , affilliatemarketersbest.
Main cost is renewing these domains and there are 200+ for renewals this month. The Network is of 3000+ websites.
Currently as we have decided to bring it down to just 1000 i think the first filter should be if there are no good referring domains get rid of them. Second would be name of the domain if it is not expandable in future , get rid of them.
If i am still left with more than 2000 , i think i'll tha filter out based on the domain age
also i'll prefer .com's over .org but keep a mix of .net,.com and .org
So basically it will be brand able/expandable domains for future use, that we can expand and maybe built links to these domains after adding good quality content.

TFletcher said:

Hi,
I have been assigned to audit a PBN Network, New Agency Management wants to cut costs on the Current network that we have. Obviulsy buying domains and hosting them is the first main cost they want to cut.
I have checked the age of domains and Ahrefs best by links (Referring Domains Only). The stats does not look good the first pool of expiring domains the maximum number of good referring domains "5" and most of them are "0". I dont think these are worth keeping. Domain age is good every domain is 5+ years some are 10+ years old. Now i am confused should we look for better domains with more RD ?
Or use these expired aged domains network.

Click to expand...

Age has no point if there are no good links.

What we usually recommend to do is buy a few strong domains so you don't need to spend so much on maintenance. Quality over quantity is a mindset to follow.

From my experience, domain age alone does not help much if the domain has no strong backlinks. A 10 year old domain with low referring domains might not be worth keeping.

When I audit PBNs, I usually look for domains that have several good links from real websites. It’s a smart move to drop the weak domains and keep only the clean and strong ones. That way, you save on hosting and renewal costs.

And honestly, to rank well, you will still need to invest in other link types like guest posts or niche edits. Everything in SEO takes some budget, so better to focus your money on things that actually bring value.

Regarding interlinking between your PBN sites, might seem helpful, but it also makes the whole network easier to detect. If Google sees too many sites linking to each other in a loop, that’s a big footprint. Better to keep links natural and only connect sites when it really makes sense.

TFletcher said:

If i am still left with more than 2000 , i think i'll tha filter out based on the domain age

Click to expand...

multiple people told you that domain age is not importnat, why are you trying to force us to agree with your bad strategy? Just focus on...

- authority + backlinks
- rankings + traffic + indexed pages + number of ranked keywords
- niche / topical relevancy

Everything else is secondary at best...

TFletcher said:

Hi,
I have been assigned to audit a PBN Network, New Agency Management wants to cut costs on the Current network that we have. Obviulsy buying domains and hosting them is the first main cost they want to cut.
I have checked the age of domains and Ahrefs best by links (Referring Domains Only). The stats does not look good the first pool of expiring domains the maximum number of good referring domains "5" and most of them are "0". I dont think these are worth keeping. Domain age is good every domain is 5+ years some are 10+ years old. Now i am confused should we look for better domains with more RD ?
Or use these expired aged domains network.

Click to expand...

Yeah, if the referring domains are that low, it might not be worth keeping them especially if the goal is cutting costs. Better to invest in fewer but higher-quality domains with stronger RD, even if that means trimming the current network.