Question about buying sites for backlinking

Hello there BHW members

I'm currently going through a slow backlinking acquisition campaign for my site.

I noticed that another way to get backlinks is to buy new sites from "Auction sites", some of them in my same niche are very cheap and between 2-4 months old.

Is it safe for me to buy these sites to link to my main site? Should I watch out for anything when I'm buying these kinds of sites?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thank you

This is called a private blog network, you are better off asking this in the blackhat section!

Oh, I didn't realiaze this was actually PBN, thanks mate

You can buy any site you can.
Just make sure that will be relevant to your niche and do not have black history.
But you can build your own PBN. That will be cheaper, but will take more time.

NetShop ISP said:

You can buy any site you can.
Just make sure that will be relevant to your niche and do not have black history.
But you can build your own PBN. That will be cheaper, but will take more time.

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Thank you for your reply.

Can you please tell me how you would proceed on doing the background check "black history". Do you mean checking old content of that domain in "web.archive"? Or something else?

Let me show you a scenario I just checked yesterday. It wasn't for your purpose, but it qualifies just as well.

I've checked the last 20 STARTER websites on flippa that SOLD.
I've removed the automated crap with no organic traffic etc. So my list was containing only good websites ( in theory ) with 5-10$ adsense revenue and at least 30-50UV/DAY organics.

Any person would think "Hey, these are good websites, google loves them and they are worth buying a link from them"

Then I went manually with each one of them and put them in ahrefs to check the backlinks.
BIG SURPRISE!

None of them, without exaggeration, had ANY decent backlinks. All of them had the same crap, like web stats, 5-6 forum profiles, 2 comments, and in VERY RARE cases 1-2 backlinks from a web 2.0 ( most of the time with the same domain name ).

That is the result of a 30 minute 14yo SEO guy's work.

Now imagine these websites ALL sold for $500+, with some of them even hitting $900

If you put $500 to work in buying decent SEO services even from this forum, the results would perform maybe even 500x better.
It's just my opinion, but I find it decent to discuss since you are thinking of buying such websites just to put a backlink.

Thank you very much mate. Your valuable feedback is exactly what I needed to know, coming from actual experience, it's like a well tailed case study crafted perfectly to my question.

What you say makes a lot of sense to me.

These sites in my case they cost about $100-$200. But as you said, since they are empty shells, when I checked, these sites didn't have any backlinks, so in that area, they were like empty shells.

So I guess it's not worth the investment after all.

Thank you mate once again.

That being a PBN, you'd be good if you kept everything intact, keep the hold hosting, registrar, and everything the same. After all, that was a website not affiliated to you before you bought it. And owned by a stranger. So keep everything that way, as a stranger, before you link to yourself, and it will be a good acquisition working as a PBN.

pixyer said:

That being a PBN, you'd be good if you kept everything intact, keep the hold hosting, registrar, and everything the same. After all, that was a website not affiliated to you before you bought it. And owned by a stranger. So keep everything that way, as a stranger, before you link to yourself, and it will be a good acquisition working as a PBN.

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I like your thinking, everything you said makes sense.

But for the domain name, I'm required to put my personal info for "ICANN" so I can become the legitimate owner of the domain, how would you proceed with that?

And if I want to add a backlink on the site, If I connect with a VPN will that be enough to stay safe?

The info you place as a owner of the new website can be different that what you have on the main domain. No one checks if that info is true and the person exists. Just the email address needs to be real, in case you receive emails, to transfer the domain, etc. Also, some providers like namecheap offer free lifetime privacy on hiding that information (the domain owner), meaning that it won't be in the public record. Other providers ask you to pay something for that service, usually about $10/year.

When you place a backlink to your site you don't need a VPN, in my opinion. That's too much of a sci-fi thinking that google analyze your IP when you login as admin to both your websites Technically you don't even go through Google when you login directly to your websites. But if it makes you feel more safe, sure, you can do it that way.

pixyer said:

The info you place as a owner of the new website can be different that what you have on the main domain. No one checks if that info is true and the person exists. Just the email address needs to be real, in case you receive emails, to transfer the domain, etc. Also, some providers like namecheap offer free lifetime privacy on hiding that information (the domain owner), meaning that it won't be in the public record. Other providers ask you to pay something for that service, usually about $10/year.

When you place a backlink to your site you don't need a VPN, in my opinion. That's too much of a sci-fi thinking that google analyze your IP when you login as admin to both your websites Technically you don't even go through Google when you login directly to your websites. But if it makes you feel more safe, sure, you can do it that way.

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It makes sense what you're saying. Thank you so much for the detailed answer.

But in that case, how would you deal with connecting the site in "Google search console"? Would you do it in a different google account?

If we're looking at this from a technical paranoid level, even using the same browser can get you in trouble. I'm not saying it will, but that's how effectively they can track you.

Thank you very much this is the problem that I need to find out

kurosaki4d said:

It makes sense what you're saying. Thank you so much for the detailed answer.

But in that case, how would you deal with connecting the site in "Google search console"? Would you do it in a different google account?

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If you're talking about buying 1 site and link from it, I don't think this is gonna get you in trouble, just do it. If you're talking about buying a lot of sites (build a PBN), then yeah, all sites should not be connected to each other, hence, not under the same Google Search Console.