Search the big “G” for PBN related sites and you will find quite a few websites, here are the results:
“PBN” 8,000,000 search results
“PBNs” 357,000 search results
“Private Blog Network” 85,000 search results
For all three of these searches there are multiple negative postings on “G” brutally crushing sites that use PBN. Story after story on how sites that were dominating their niche are no longer found in the search engines. These stories were warranted when the punishment was first handed out by “G”. Today sites are still getting caught and penalized for PBNs
BUT...
There Is A Way To Use PBN’s To Your Advantage!!!
PBN’s that are getting penalized today have left footprints, major footprints for many of them. If set up properly PBN’s can be one of the MOST BENEFICIAL methods you can use to move your site up in the rankings.
I am going to lay out for you a 30,000 foot view of a proper PBN setup, these are not my opinion these are methods we have had in place for over 5 years and we continue to hold page 1 rankings in some fairly difficult niches.
Some will tell you that this is complete garbage because PBN’s didn’t work for them, that doesn’t make them right. It is the equivalent of 2two guys joining a gym, both weigh 250lbs, both are 40 years old. The first guy loses 50 pounds in 6 months and the second goes up to 255 pounds. The second guy says “The gym doesn’t work, I gained weight”. It should be pretty obvious that they surely used different methods to get there.
I suggest you start this on a small scale and see for yourself.
So let’s get started.
What is a PBN (Private Blog Network)?
A PBN is a network of sites that have a certain authority that you use to build back links to your money site to raise the rankings of your money site in the search engines. This is an example of one way to lay out a PBN.
![[Image: PBN%20Layout_zpsamzbekff.jpg]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_s63VRFEiHL4aeygTG4qle4ccHTC0K5LXcvbEcLiPPQV2hCKwU6pYGcVE728IWLjNXnfwETAsUz0PTEBCgTRW1kARO6V-eiZSyM2QEyblbPlH--HTSo9hb_PrpDGd8g14P8zyUNneTw8uajuxF3_nBpb53L=s0-d)
You need to know going into this that “G” does consider this to be a violation of their terms of service and WILL penalize you if they catch you. That is why it is so important that you do everything you can to not leave footprints tying your sites together.
Sites Needed
You will need three different types of sites:
1- Your money site
2- Your high metric feeder sites
3- High metric web 2.0 sites
Your money site is the main site you need to protect at all costs. This is the site you are promoting your product from, if this site is penalized you are screwed, plain and simple.
High metric feeder sites are the most important sites in your PBN to build link juice back to your site. These are existing sites that meet a minimum metric criteria that you either buy at auction, from a private seller or are expired and you find that site and register it yourself.
High metric web 2.0 sites are sites like tumblr, twitter, blogger, etc that meet a minimum metric criteria. There are two different ways to use these sites; you can set up 20+ 2.0 properties for your money site. The first way is truly white hat method by which you set these properties up to promote your money site. Keep them fresh with quality content and links back to your money site. The second is a black hat method, you would find high metric expired sites and register them for yourself and make them part of your PBN (you can find these for sale on places like fiverr)
How Many Sites Will You Need
1- Your money site (1)
2- Your high metric feeder sites (3+)
3- High metric web 2.0 sites (3+)
The niche you are competing in will be one of the most important factors in how many sites do you need.
For your money site, that’s easy, you just need 1
The feeder sites will be one of the toughest to figure out for a newer SEO. If the niche does not have a lot of competition you will need 3 sites. If your niche is weight loss, Forex or another high competition niche you would start with at least 20 feeders. Set them up and see what happens to your rankings, if you get the results you want then you are good, if not add more sites to it.
Metrics
There are 4 major metrics that you should concern yourself with, they are:
Majestic
TF – Trust Flow (this measures how trustworthy is the site)
CF – Citation Flow (this measures how much power the links have)
Moz
DA – Domain Authority (this measures the domains authority)
PA – Page Authority (this measures the authority on the entire domain)
As a starting point you want to have each of these at a minimum of 10. Higher is better but when it comes to TF and CF I don’t want the CF to be more than twice the TF.
Once you have a site with the metrics you want then you want to check the back links and make sure they are not spammy.
You will also want to check that the anchor text has relevance and diversity. If all of the links have “Click Here” that is not what I am looking for. If that is the case and I love the metrics, I will look into the links and see if I can get them changed by the site owner, but this also takes more time.
Hosting
If you want to get busted for your PBN the way to do it is to host all of your accounts on 1 central hosting account. Talk about footprints, WOW!!! Stay far away from SEO hosting (BTW this is where I expect backlash from some SEO’s) This is where the hosting company puts your accounts on different hosting blocks and it is supposed to hide your account, and for some it has worked for a long time. For quite a few SEO’s I know in the last six months they have gotten crushed and seen their money sites deindexed and their PBN lose all of its value from being on SEO hosting.
Money Site Hosting – Use a quality hosting account for your money site, don’t cheap out on this one, pay and pay well to get the best you can afford.
Feeder Site Hosting – Each and every site you use will have its own individual hosting account. I know, I know you are starting to add up the dollar signs here but what are you trying to do here, get to page one with your money site, what would it cost you to pay an SEO to do that for you? If you have 20 feeder sites and you have $1 a month hosting per site you are spending $20 a month for feeder site hosting, much less than it will cost you to hire an SEO to do it for you.
Do a search for $1 hosting or cheap hosting and you will find plenty out there.
Setting Up Site Persona
Each feeder site needs to have its own ownership. Meaning the site will not show in the who is as being owned by you. Use the site fakenamegenerator.c o m to create individual personas for each site.
You will also want to create individual email accounts for each feeder site. DO NOT use “G” mail accounts for this, anyone else is fine just not them. You can buy email accounts from Fiverr if you don’t want to create them yourself.
This might seem like overkill but I can tell you it is well worth the extra effort.
Setting Up The Feeder Sites
If you can create (coded) web sites or if you want to hire someone to do it for you then create a mix of those with WordPress sites. If you can’t create them or you don’t want to pay for it then just create WordPress sites. It really isn’t a footprint that is visible until you get above 20 feeder sites, then it can be noticeable. The bottom line is to do it right create a few non WordPress sites in your PBN.
WordPress Setup
Each site needs to have some similar items on it such as a contact page, privacy page, about. They should not be the exact content, can someone say FOOTPTINT?
Each site will also have some plugins use ones that are installed the most by others; it will not seem like a footprint if 10mm people have installed contact form. BUT vary the plugins in as much as possible.
One plugin in I am a huge fan of is SpyderSpanker, it is well worth the investment. It is used to stop bots from crawling your site. I realize there are a few free plugins that are out there and you can also modify your code to stop the bots but my team has personally found some bots (such as bidu) that ignore the code and search anyway. SpyderSpanker does a good job of blocking them.
Money Site Theme – It is your call if you want to have a paid theme for this site, it really doesn’t matter for hiding you PBN.
Feeder Sites – These matters, DO NOT use the same theme for these sites. Actually I don’t use any paid theme for my feeder sites. Use different free themes for your sites. Just make sure they fit the layout you are looking for.
Feeder sites are not meant to be high quality; you are using them for their link juice, not their looks. You will not be driving traffic to your feeder sites; they are used to drive traffic to your money site.
Very important is to not set up your themes and plugins to auto update, this is a footprint when 12 of the 20 sites pointing to your money site update at the same exact time.
Content
It’s real simple, make it quality and unique. Don’t duplicate content, if you decide to spin your content make sure you have a high % of spin. The percentage quoted by many SEO’s will vary as it does for myself based on the niche I am promoting but we will normally spin 80% as a minimum.
Continue to add new content to your sites. How often to add will be determined by the niche and time available. This is a great task for a VA (virtual assistant) to do.
Feeder Site Theme
If you set up 10 feeder sites for the weight loss niche then just use those sites for your weight loss niche. In other words don’t bastardize your feeder site by sending one page to weight loss and another article on the same site to hotrod cars and the next to the stock market. Build a separate PBN for each of these themes.
Once you have the weight loss PBN done then it will be real easy to add a new money site (on a different premium hosting account) to that already created PBN.
Back Links
Vary the number of outgoing links to your money site between 1 and 2. Do not over do it here, don’t be a pig. In the stock market they say that bulls make money, bears make money and pigs get slaughtered. DON’T BE A PIG!!!
There are 2 other back links to consider putting on the feeder site:
Wikipedia is one of them. Find a relevant wiki page on weight loss and point to that page
YouTube is another. Find a relevant video in the weight loss niche (not another affiliate’s product, just a guy that lost weight as an example) and point to that page. Even better is if you go to Fiverr and have someone create a video for you; add it to a YouTube account (not connected to your money site, FOOTPRINT).
The reason for Wiki and YouTube is you are linking to authority sites; this is normal that people link their site to relevant content. Just look at all the links you see on face book, enough said.
Be sure to diversify your anchor text on your links. Create a system for tracking where the link is coming form along with the anchor text used.
Outsourcing The Work
Much of the work can be outsourced to a virtual assistant or to other experts in their field such as using Fiverr. The good about outsourcing is it reduces your time commitment. The bad about outsourcing is it costs money. Either way the work needs to be done, it’s all a matter of how to best get it done in your business.
Conclusion
There is my 30k foot view; there are a ton of details to work out, systems that you can create and decisions to make to get this to work for you.
Keep this in mind, I have been using this for a very long time and never had a site deindexed. I have had some products do better than others and some never take off at all. There are various factors to your success such as:
1- The product you are promoting
2- The feeder sites you are using
3- On and off page SEO
4- The content on your money site
5- And the list goes on and on.
One of the most important things in my business today is testing; we test everything from content, anchor text, graphics, page layout, etc. This is the one thing that a good SEO will never stop doing in my humble opinion.
This document is not meant to be an end all, there are others out there that are doing something different that I listed here, there are others that have had success beyond their wildest dreams and some that have failed their first in their quest, as you can see we are all different.
BUT…
We do have one thing in common, each of them have gone out and tried something, and they put the effort forward to make a better life for themselves.
“PBN” 8,000,000 search results
“PBNs” 357,000 search results
“Private Blog Network” 85,000 search results
For all three of these searches there are multiple negative postings on “G” brutally crushing sites that use PBN. Story after story on how sites that were dominating their niche are no longer found in the search engines. These stories were warranted when the punishment was first handed out by “G”. Today sites are still getting caught and penalized for PBNs
BUT...
There Is A Way To Use PBN’s To Your Advantage!!!
PBN’s that are getting penalized today have left footprints, major footprints for many of them. If set up properly PBN’s can be one of the MOST BENEFICIAL methods you can use to move your site up in the rankings.
I am going to lay out for you a 30,000 foot view of a proper PBN setup, these are not my opinion these are methods we have had in place for over 5 years and we continue to hold page 1 rankings in some fairly difficult niches.
Some will tell you that this is complete garbage because PBN’s didn’t work for them, that doesn’t make them right. It is the equivalent of 2two guys joining a gym, both weigh 250lbs, both are 40 years old. The first guy loses 50 pounds in 6 months and the second goes up to 255 pounds. The second guy says “The gym doesn’t work, I gained weight”. It should be pretty obvious that they surely used different methods to get there.
I suggest you start this on a small scale and see for yourself.
So let’s get started.
What is a PBN (Private Blog Network)?
A PBN is a network of sites that have a certain authority that you use to build back links to your money site to raise the rankings of your money site in the search engines. This is an example of one way to lay out a PBN.
![[Image: PBN%20Layout_zpsamzbekff.jpg]](https://www.anonymiz.com/?http%3A%2F%2Fs738.photobucket.com%2Fuser%2Finnovator69%2Fmedia%2FPBN%2520Layout_zpsamzbekff.jpg.html)
You need to know going into this that “G” does consider this to be a violation of their terms of service and WILL penalize you if they catch you. That is why it is so important that you do everything you can to not leave footprints tying your sites together.
Sites Needed
You will need three different types of sites:
1- Your money site
2- Your high metric feeder sites
3- High metric web 2.0 sites
Your money site is the main site you need to protect at all costs. This is the site you are promoting your product from, if this site is penalized you are screwed, plain and simple.
High metric feeder sites are the most important sites in your PBN to build link juice back to your site. These are existing sites that meet a minimum metric criteria that you either buy at auction, from a private seller or are expired and you find that site and register it yourself.
High metric web 2.0 sites are sites like tumblr, twitter, blogger, etc that meet a minimum metric criteria. There are two different ways to use these sites; you can set up 20+ 2.0 properties for your money site. The first way is truly white hat method by which you set these properties up to promote your money site. Keep them fresh with quality content and links back to your money site. The second is a black hat method, you would find high metric expired sites and register them for yourself and make them part of your PBN (you can find these for sale on places like fiverr)
How Many Sites Will You Need
1- Your money site (1)
2- Your high metric feeder sites (3+)
3- High metric web 2.0 sites (3+)
The niche you are competing in will be one of the most important factors in how many sites do you need.
For your money site, that’s easy, you just need 1
The feeder sites will be one of the toughest to figure out for a newer SEO. If the niche does not have a lot of competition you will need 3 sites. If your niche is weight loss, Forex or another high competition niche you would start with at least 20 feeders. Set them up and see what happens to your rankings, if you get the results you want then you are good, if not add more sites to it.
Metrics
There are 4 major metrics that you should concern yourself with, they are:
Majestic
TF – Trust Flow (this measures how trustworthy is the site)
CF – Citation Flow (this measures how much power the links have)
Moz
DA – Domain Authority (this measures the domains authority)
PA – Page Authority (this measures the authority on the entire domain)
As a starting point you want to have each of these at a minimum of 10. Higher is better but when it comes to TF and CF I don’t want the CF to be more than twice the TF.
Once you have a site with the metrics you want then you want to check the back links and make sure they are not spammy.
You will also want to check that the anchor text has relevance and diversity. If all of the links have “Click Here” that is not what I am looking for. If that is the case and I love the metrics, I will look into the links and see if I can get them changed by the site owner, but this also takes more time.
Hosting
If you want to get busted for your PBN the way to do it is to host all of your accounts on 1 central hosting account. Talk about footprints, WOW!!! Stay far away from SEO hosting (BTW this is where I expect backlash from some SEO’s) This is where the hosting company puts your accounts on different hosting blocks and it is supposed to hide your account, and for some it has worked for a long time. For quite a few SEO’s I know in the last six months they have gotten crushed and seen their money sites deindexed and their PBN lose all of its value from being on SEO hosting.
Money Site Hosting – Use a quality hosting account for your money site, don’t cheap out on this one, pay and pay well to get the best you can afford.
Feeder Site Hosting – Each and every site you use will have its own individual hosting account. I know, I know you are starting to add up the dollar signs here but what are you trying to do here, get to page one with your money site, what would it cost you to pay an SEO to do that for you? If you have 20 feeder sites and you have $1 a month hosting per site you are spending $20 a month for feeder site hosting, much less than it will cost you to hire an SEO to do it for you.
Do a search for $1 hosting or cheap hosting and you will find plenty out there.
Setting Up Site Persona
Each feeder site needs to have its own ownership. Meaning the site will not show in the who is as being owned by you. Use the site fakenamegenerator.c o m to create individual personas for each site.
You will also want to create individual email accounts for each feeder site. DO NOT use “G” mail accounts for this, anyone else is fine just not them. You can buy email accounts from Fiverr if you don’t want to create them yourself.
This might seem like overkill but I can tell you it is well worth the extra effort.
Setting Up The Feeder Sites
If you can create (coded) web sites or if you want to hire someone to do it for you then create a mix of those with WordPress sites. If you can’t create them or you don’t want to pay for it then just create WordPress sites. It really isn’t a footprint that is visible until you get above 20 feeder sites, then it can be noticeable. The bottom line is to do it right create a few non WordPress sites in your PBN.
WordPress Setup
Each site needs to have some similar items on it such as a contact page, privacy page, about. They should not be the exact content, can someone say FOOTPTINT?
Each site will also have some plugins use ones that are installed the most by others; it will not seem like a footprint if 10mm people have installed contact form. BUT vary the plugins in as much as possible.
One plugin in I am a huge fan of is SpyderSpanker, it is well worth the investment. It is used to stop bots from crawling your site. I realize there are a few free plugins that are out there and you can also modify your code to stop the bots but my team has personally found some bots (such as bidu) that ignore the code and search anyway. SpyderSpanker does a good job of blocking them.
Money Site Theme – It is your call if you want to have a paid theme for this site, it really doesn’t matter for hiding you PBN.
Feeder Sites – These matters, DO NOT use the same theme for these sites. Actually I don’t use any paid theme for my feeder sites. Use different free themes for your sites. Just make sure they fit the layout you are looking for.
Feeder sites are not meant to be high quality; you are using them for their link juice, not their looks. You will not be driving traffic to your feeder sites; they are used to drive traffic to your money site.
Very important is to not set up your themes and plugins to auto update, this is a footprint when 12 of the 20 sites pointing to your money site update at the same exact time.
Content
It’s real simple, make it quality and unique. Don’t duplicate content, if you decide to spin your content make sure you have a high % of spin. The percentage quoted by many SEO’s will vary as it does for myself based on the niche I am promoting but we will normally spin 80% as a minimum.
Continue to add new content to your sites. How often to add will be determined by the niche and time available. This is a great task for a VA (virtual assistant) to do.
Feeder Site Theme
If you set up 10 feeder sites for the weight loss niche then just use those sites for your weight loss niche. In other words don’t bastardize your feeder site by sending one page to weight loss and another article on the same site to hotrod cars and the next to the stock market. Build a separate PBN for each of these themes.
Once you have the weight loss PBN done then it will be real easy to add a new money site (on a different premium hosting account) to that already created PBN.
Back Links
Vary the number of outgoing links to your money site between 1 and 2. Do not over do it here, don’t be a pig. In the stock market they say that bulls make money, bears make money and pigs get slaughtered. DON’T BE A PIG!!!
There are 2 other back links to consider putting on the feeder site:
Wikipedia is one of them. Find a relevant wiki page on weight loss and point to that page
YouTube is another. Find a relevant video in the weight loss niche (not another affiliate’s product, just a guy that lost weight as an example) and point to that page. Even better is if you go to Fiverr and have someone create a video for you; add it to a YouTube account (not connected to your money site, FOOTPRINT).
The reason for Wiki and YouTube is you are linking to authority sites; this is normal that people link their site to relevant content. Just look at all the links you see on face book, enough said.
Be sure to diversify your anchor text on your links. Create a system for tracking where the link is coming form along with the anchor text used.
Outsourcing The Work
Much of the work can be outsourced to a virtual assistant or to other experts in their field such as using Fiverr. The good about outsourcing is it reduces your time commitment. The bad about outsourcing is it costs money. Either way the work needs to be done, it’s all a matter of how to best get it done in your business.
Conclusion
There is my 30k foot view; there are a ton of details to work out, systems that you can create and decisions to make to get this to work for you.
Keep this in mind, I have been using this for a very long time and never had a site deindexed. I have had some products do better than others and some never take off at all. There are various factors to your success such as:
1- The product you are promoting
2- The feeder sites you are using
3- On and off page SEO
4- The content on your money site
5- And the list goes on and on.
One of the most important things in my business today is testing; we test everything from content, anchor text, graphics, page layout, etc. This is the one thing that a good SEO will never stop doing in my humble opinion.
This document is not meant to be an end all, there are others out there that are doing something different that I listed here, there are others that have had success beyond their wildest dreams and some that have failed their first in their quest, as you can see we are all different.
BUT…
We do have one thing in common, each of them have gone out and tried something, and they put the effort forward to make a better life for themselves.
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