Private Blog Network (PBN) As A Link Building Method: To Try Or Not To Try

Any niche can use PBNs. At the end of the day, a PBN is just another WordPress site until proven guilty. But the niches that PBNs work best in are typically the high-competition ones that are hard to get natural links for. Think casino. Think pharma. In these niches, PBN usage is going to be more of the norm, so the algorithm isn't going to freak out that you have an unnatural amount of homepage links going to your site.

When is the usage of PBN worth the risk? Everything is about ROI. If you're in a lucrative niche, where competition is high, it's likely that if you don't use PBNs you simply won't compete.

At a certain point, going too heavy on PBNs will give you diminishing returns. I alluded to this before, but with PBNs you're typically getting links from their homepages. That's why they're so powerful. But homepage links are rare. So when Google sees that you have too many, its time to diversify with links from inner pages. Typically I'm using guest posts and link insertions for this.

PBN is generally referred to as a number of web pages belonging to a person / company and set up to influence certain sites in the ranking (and, if possible, to generate additional revenue through advertising).

These pages are often created using cheap methods. The photos on the pages are usually royalty-free images or cheap stock photos. The visual part of the sites is often similar. It may even be that the texts of the subpages are the same length. Sometimes network operators copy texts from several other pages, slightly modify them and publish on PBN pages. This is done to minimize workload while avoiding pure duplicate content.

The contact details on the page are often displayed as a picture. It even happens that contact information is generated and the person doesn't actually exist. The Internet offers imprint generators with the ability to select the country, city and gender to generate a fictitious address.

PBNs were formerly used on a larger scale as a link-building method. However, this has been leveling off for years due to the inferiority and content-related emptiness of the pages, which Google is increasingly recognizing. But you also have to point out that there are occasionally better-patched PBNs where the network is not immediately noticeable to the user or link builder.

Links from such sites are of no use and are considered to be inferior, they have negative or no impact at all. With larger and more elaborate PBNs, which often link for monetary reasons, it's only a matter of time before Google downgrades pages, if that's not already happening.

PBN can be recognized if a website is linked, for example, by similar-looking websites. Next you can find out if the pages that are linked to each other also have similar backlink profiles. Almost identical backlink profiles on multiple websites may also indicate a personal blog network. Clever PBN operators disable the crawlers of backlink analysis tools through the Robots.txt so that certain user queries in SEO Tools don't bring results.

Links from such networks can still work. Here it depends on the actual linking domain and its quality characteristics. After all, it could be that somebody really took a page and upgraded its content, even though it belongs to a PBN. However, links from 98% of existing PBNs are inferior, tend to be harmful and therefore not recommended.

There are several ways to set positive signals through respectable link building. Google is designed to provide users with the best possible content in the search results. Search engine results are ordered by relevance. It depends on various factors. The major are the links to the website. Thus, the link building focus must be placed on thematically relevant pages with well-researched and maintained content. Diligence pays off, even in link building.

PBNs are private blog networks that consist of various domains owned by the same person or company. Links are set over several layers of such domains to pass signals to an important site or a page on this site. PBN website should thereby achieve keywords rankings in search engines for terms that can be used to earn money as an online shop or affiliate publisher. Black Hat SEOs (search engine optimizers that deliberately violate the rules and guidelines of search engines) actively used this kind of link building before Google implemented its Penguin algorithm update. Some still use the method — in an advanced and much more complex form than explained here.

It is relatively easy for the algorithms of search engines to recognize links from PBNs as they are usually ignored directly and they don't help with search engine optimization. In even worse cases, you can expect manual penalties for unnatural backlinks from the search engines, whereby the original domain disappears almost completely from Google's Top 100.

There are many different link building methodology and tactics that will work well in 2019 and bring backlinks on a sustained basis. Just to name a few: broken link building, tracking of mentions without linking, local link building, guest contributions, etc. The biggest strategic recommendation, however, remains content marketing, because, without content, it will be increasingly difficult to come to strong links.