Question about ranking in google.de

I might be trying to rank on Google.de

How important is it that the pbns be .de

If I built just .com and org and net pbns work or do I need .de

I would mix it up really. Not sure how a .de domain with just top TLD backlinks will be perceived. I will have some .de domains in the upcoming days, so hit me up if you want a few.

It's mostly irrelevant. You can rank with just com/org/net PBNs that have solely english content, as long as the anchors are properly adjusted. Having said that, rationality dictates that some PBNs with german content wouldn't hurt. It really depends on the overall goals you want to achieve with the site, your risk aversion, longevity etc.

But you do not need .de PBNs - further, I wouldn't really recommend using .de domains for PBNs anyway, because you can't hide your privacy well, which in turn leaves a decent footprint.

janist said:

It's mostly irrelevant. You can rank with just com/org/net PBNs that have solely english content, as long as the anchors are properly adjusted. Having said that, rationality dictates that some PBNs with german content wouldn't hurt. It really depends on the overall goals you want to achieve with the site, your risk aversion, longevity etc.

But you do not need .de PBNs - further, I wouldn't really recommend using .de domains for PBNs anyway, because you can't hide your privacy well, which in turn leaves a decent footprint.

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What do you mean by adjusting anchor text? Having English content but German anchor text?
Thanks

It doesn't matter what thy name or extension of the domain is.
The vital thing is to host it on a .de server and IP.

It's right that the TLD does not impact the link juice but it's not a good practice for longterm projects to use an unnatural TLD distribution. I don't have a definition of natural TLD distribution.
So you have a lot of playroom since the internet is very diverse. Google can't draw a line where something is natural or unnatural based on one factor. The whole link composition is important. If the quality is right, then I wouldn't care much to be honest.

john1444 said:

It doesn't matter what thy name or extension of the domain is.
The vital thing is to host it on a .de server and IP.

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You can host the website on the Moon if you want to - as long as it can be indexed by the search engines, it doesn't matter where the physical website files are located. It only matters for website speed (visitors having a lower latency will have higher bandwidth speeds and vice versa), but since everyone can use CloudFare nowadays or any other CDN, that's irrelevant as well.

@OP: You will rank equally well by using top TLD PBN-s as opposed to using only .de ones, if not better. As someone said above, a lot of country-specific TLD-s cannot be used with WHOIS privacy, so you will be leaving a major footprint there (if all the data is the same). If I were you, I would keep the ratio around 80:20, so for every 10 PBN links, only 2 are .de domains. I've used the same ratio in 3 foreign niches (countries in Europe) so far without any problems.

Last but not least, depending on the TLD and country, such expired domains will be way more expensive than normal ones because of scarcity. If you scale up to hundreds of links, the costs will add up quickly with almost no benefit at all.

THUNDERELVI said:

You can host the website on the Moon if you want to - as long as it can be indexed by the search engines, it doesn't matter where the physical website files are located. It only matters for website speed (visitors having a lower latency will have higher bandwidth speeds and vice versa), but since everyone can use CloudFare nowadays or any other CDN, that's irrelevant as well.

@OP: You will rank equally well by using top TLD PBN-s as opposed to using only .de ones, if not better. As someone said above, a lot of country-specific TLD-s cannot be used with WHOIS privacy, so you will be leaving a major footprint there (if all the data is the same). If I were you, I would keep the ratio around 80:20, so for every 10 PBN links, only 2 are .de domains. I've used the same ratio in 3 foreign niches (countries in Europe) so far without any problems.

Last but not least, depending on the TLD and country, such expired domains will be way more expensive than normal ones because of scarcity. If you scale up to hundreds of links, the costs will add up quickly with almost no benefit at all.

Click to expand...

@OP He is right in all of his points. There a services even for .de domains which register the domain for you to hide your WHOIS. I think this is not a good practice. I would just use fake data.

janist said:

It's mostly irrelevant. You can rank with just com/org/net PBNs that have solely english content, as long as the anchors are properly adjusted.

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You can perfectly rank this way, true, but it's not irrelevant for one reason: If you are using an english content PBN and german anchors, Google will think the linked money site is english language, although the anchors are german and the site is 100% german and show german users in Google.de a "translate this site" in the SERPs that totally crushes CTR.

No joke, no bad luck, we tested it with multiple foreign languages and about a dozen sites. The result is always exactly the same, even with properly defined content language in site header.

janist said:

It's mostly irrelevant. You can rank with just com/org/net PBNs that have solely english content, as long as the anchors are properly adjusted. Having said that, rationality dictates that some PBNs with german content wouldn't hurt. It really depends on the overall goals you want to achieve with the site, your risk aversion, longevity etc.

Click to expand...

It's not about rationality, it's about relevance, both on a site & page level. It's one of the most important factors, if not the most important one, along with links. The more relevant a website that is linking out is, the more powerful that backlink becomes for the linked site. This means that, all other things being equal, a relevant backlink is 10x more powerful than a non-relevant one, which further means that you need less links to rank for your keywords.

However, relevance isn't just writing in English and putting an anchor somewhere in a foreign language. Does it work?! Yes, it does and so far it works wonders especially in countries where Google's algorithms are still on the stone age (2008 or before maybe). Also, the competition is substantially less in foreign markets as opposed to US ones, so that's another reason why it works. But, if you bother to put in just a bit more effort and money in writing your articles (the ones that contain links in your PBN sites) in the foreign language instead, you will get way more effect (as in higher rankings ) even from a single link.

Things such as anchor text, main keyword frequency, LSI keyword frequency and overall website topical relevance will decide how "relevant" your backlink really is for your website. To write these near perfect articles, you need either experience or to successfully reverse engineer others ranking and banking with backlinks like these ones. You will be surprised to find out that there are websites with as many as 2-3 links outranking sites with thousands of links. That's what you want to achieve as well - less costs, more profit, less risk, etc...