Website promotion is an important marketing channel for businesses. It’s a source of stable and high-quality traffic. Search engines use their algorithms to dictate the conditions for website promotion and update them every quarter.
In Google, link signals remain a critical ranking factor. However, now they’re evaluated alongside user experience and content quality signals like E-E-A-T.
To get stable, quality links for your project, you need to allocate a good budget. You can acquire links, guest posts, and crowd links from various marketplaces and exchanges. But the problem is that your competitors do the same thing. And when many competitors act similarly, none of them can get a promotion advantage over the others. This creates a new challenge: finding unique links that your competitor can’t get.
Here’s the solution.
You build your own sites and place links from them pointing to your target projects. These resources are called a Private Blog Network (PBN).
Creating a PBN gives its owners a powerful promotional tool. They decide who can get these links and who can’t. However, this very power makes PNBs a primary target for Google’s spam-fighting algorithms.
Advantages and Disadvantages
To see the advantages and disadvantages of owning a PBN in general, let’s describe the pros and cons point by point.
Advantages:
- Full site management. You have complete control over your sites, deciding what content to publish and who receives links.
- Unique links. It’s difficult to describe exactly, but Google likes it when a site has unique links (i.e., those that no one else has), and it evaluates it additionally.
- Lower link cost. The cost of a link in such a PBN can be much lower than buying one from other websites. This often ignores the immense upfront and maintenance costs of a safe network.
- Multi-site promotion. You can promote multiple websites with a single network. A PBN can support anywhere from 2 to 100 sites.
- Link exchange opportunities. You can use your network to exchange links with partners or other relevant sites in your niche.
In summary, using a PBN can save the budget and promote sites more effectively than standard link building.
But it also has some disadvantages:
- Additional costs for maintaining and creating networks. This includes buying high-quality expired domains, using multiple premium hosting providers, and commissioning unique, high-quality content for every site.
- Additional management of networks. You must check link integrity and ensure site availability, etc. All this requires time and financial expenses.
- Domain and hosting management. This requires advanced skills to avoid creating detectable patterns.
- Risk of Google penalties. Google’s algorithms, such as the Helpful Content System and Spam Updates, now effectively identify and de-index entire PBNs.
- Advanced site-building skills and maintenance of sites. Basic footprint avoidance is no longer enough. Google’s AI can now detect subtle, large-scale patterns in hosting, content structure, and outbound link profiles that are invisible to the human eye.
Key Indicators of Network Performance
To get the most from your investment in a PBN, you need to understand what to track, what to enhance and develop, and what to leave as it is or abandon completely. While SEOs use third-party metrics, remember that Google’s evaluation is more sophisticated and prioritizes genuine signals of quality.
The main factor that shows the link’s effectiveness is indexing. Both the website and the specific page containing the link must be in Google’s index. This is a basic point.
Experts highlight the following factors that influence the effectiveness of placed links:
- site traffic from search,
- traffic to the donor page from search,
- site traffic from other sources,
- traffic to the donor page from other sources,
- the number of clicks on the posted link,
- DR (Domain Rating) from Ahrefs,
- UR (URL Rating) from Ahrefs,
- the number of keywords in the top 100 (KW by Ahrefs/Serpstat/Semrush),
- the number of referring domains (Ahrefs/Serpstat/Semrush indicator),
- the number of backlinks (Ahrefs/Serpstat/Semrush indicator),
- DA (Domain Authority) and PA (Page Authority) from Moz,
- TF (Trust Flow) and CF (Citation Flow) from Majestic.
Remember, these are third-party metrics that only serve as quick proxies. People can manipulate these numbers, and Google doesn’t use them directly. You should always consider them secondary to real traffic. Our clients and SEO specialists often use this general list to find a site to buy links and build a PBN.
The Core Checklist for Site Selection
Many experienced practitioners often condense their focus to a core checklist for practical evaluation:
- indexation,
- thematicity of the site (desirable),
- thematicity of the donor page (mandatory),
- quality and stability of the donor site’s own links,
- DR as a quick check,
- indexation of the placed links.
Then you should consider the analysis of the effectiveness of promotion by links. From experience, results typically appear within 14 to 180 days, and this process may occur in several stages. However, this timeline applies only to links from quality sources. For a link from a PBN, you constantly risk a Google penalty instead of a ranking improvement.
Methods for Safe Network Management
How can you manage a network without Google catching you? Algorithms detect networks indiscriminately. This puts any network at risk, regardless of its size. What you can do to avoid it:
- Do not use the same tracking ID or container (Google Tag Manager) on all sites.
- Never add all network sites to a single Google Search Console account.
- Don’t use the same images, especially if they contain repeating metadata.
- Avoid using the same text, themes, etc.
- Avoid placing the same outbound link in the same location (e.g., the footer) on every site.
In short, you can’t use any object on all sites, so that Google or your competitors can programmatically determine that these are sites of the same owner. However, remember that Google’s detection now goes beyond these basic footprints. It also analyzes patterns in content generation and outbound link behavior.
Placing Effective Links from Your PBN
How should you place links from your PBN sites to make them effective? We propose the following algorithm:
- First, check the website indicators you believe are important. Well, or trust us and use our list.
- Once you are sure that the sites are indexed, you can plan a schedule for link placement as part of a wider link-building strategy.
- Many strategists recommend using branded anchors for less than 5% of your links to avoid detection by competitors. However, using a variety of anchor text types is crucial for a natural profile. Note that if it’s a branded anchor, there is a probability of detection by competitors of your sites (if they search). And they’ll be able to understand that this is a PBN network (if they will be badly done or has an obvious purpose).
- Having other outbound links to authoritative sites is crucial to make a PBN site appear natural and avoid being part of a “bad neighborhood”.
Anchor Text and Timing
Few words can be said about timing. Acceptable for the smallest site, with a zero link weight as one link from the PBN in 5-10 days. We don’t recommend a faster pace.
Link Location
The dynamics of brand anchors are similar to the link strategy.
- Where to place a link. There may be several options. Is it an article link or from the main page? Article links should have the most general nature in link promotion. But the link from the main page can still be divided into several types. It can be a link in a menu or a secondary menu. It can be a banner or a picture of a partner brand with the fictional firm or site (offline). Link variations and ratios should also be taken from your linking strategy.
- Neighborhood links, link-tops. Having other outbound links from your site is a natural sign of a regular site (especially non-CIS). Therefore, it’s important to have links to:
- Wikipedia,
- mass media – to a themed page or event,
- a direct competitor who is not in your sales region,
- top-ranking, near-thematic sites.
The existence of such sites will disguise the true purpose of creating such a site and won’t allow you to say 100% that you’re the owner and created it to promote your main site. Here are a few examples.
For a Casino Niche
- A casino in another country with similar games.
- A casino rating or review site.
- A media site that highlights the casino construction on the page.
- A media site that highlights the tournament.
- A media site that highlights the legality of this activity.
- An online store website with products for casino games, cards, poker sets (e.g., Amazon, eBay, or any auction).
- A social media site on the subject.
- A link to a charity foundation.
- A link to a math school or university that has done a study on the probability of winning at a casino.
For a Niche Cottage Construction
- The official website of the country’s construction ministry.
- A site with GOSTs.
- A site with reviews on construction.
- An e-store for building materials.
- A website page about the increase in the cost of utilities.
- A site page about road construction.
- A link to the aggregator for the home or construction equipment category.
Controlling Link Indexing
Each link you place must work for the promotion of your site. Let’s describe the main parameters of control to achieve this result:
- Placement indexing. Google must know and keep in its cache that the link from this page leads to your site. Then, a stable reference weight, which grows over time.
- Overall site health. They should remain normal – no drop in indexation, donor domains don’t fall off, backlinks don’t fall off, bad links don’t grow, and the availability of the site doesn’t decrease.
We recommend you regularly audit the entire link mass of the site for stable measurement of indicators. This applies not only to PBN links, but also to all in general, including those purchased for SEO promotion.
What to Do When a Page Loses Indexing
Checklist:
- Check the stability of the site.
- Check the index as a whole site, there is no hacking or something “Chinese”.
- Check the speed of the site and analyze the state of the site as a whole using a crawling program.
- Check the content’s uniqueness on the page that contains your link.
If this work doesn’t answer what you need to fix to get the page back in the index, we recommend using external tools to work on the current page.
Developing and Maintaining Your PBN
By developing your sites on the web, you increase the value of the stable links across all the projects that use your grid. This long-term investment allows you to rank or maintain top positions. Development involves both internal (on-site) and external (off-site) work.
Internal Site Development
Technical maintenance:
- Update to new PHP versions.
- Update the core CMS (e.g., WordPress).
- Updating plugins.
- Updating the theme of the site (if it doesn’t harm and doesn’t throw off your work).
Content development:
- Update content and titles throughout the year to keep them current.
- Add new, unique articles and other topical materials. Google gives more weight to sites that it sees as actively developing.
External Site Development (Link Building)
Growth of quality links to the main page and to your article placements on this PBN. Often, this method is used if the page jumps on indexation and you need to increase its priority in the eyes of the search engine.
Backup option. If the link reinforcement doesn’t work as well as the index isn’t coming back, but the site itself is stably in the index, we recommend expanding the content on the page.
- Develop a brief semantic core for the page.
- Create comprehensive content that targets this group of keywords.
- Publish the new content and submit the updated page to Google for indexing.
- Measure the results.
This is the best solution to this problem. Google often considers substantial, professional content the best solution, even if it has fewer links than top-ranking competitors. Even if it has fewer links than the competition. Google likes complete answers to user queries (look for research on the importance of volume and the usefulness of content on SEO promotion).
How Do You Know If You Need a PBN?
Creating a network is quite costly and is often an unaffordable step in the efficient use of funds. We’ve developed a checklist for when you definitely need a PBN:
- Your niche is highly competitive, and all available links are already bought out.
- Link building in your niche is extremely expensive, with individual links costing $200 or more.
- You have more than three sites to promote, and they aren’t affiliates.
- You have some near-thematic sites, which should also be promoted (e.g., an HVAC store, an installation service, and an insulation service).
- You’re planning to exchange links with future partners or create more than three sites in this niche.
- You have a number of clients for SEO promotion and you need to get links quickly and of high quality.
- From the purchase of 30-100 article links, the project doesn’t grow.
- The project froze at the top 10 and didn’t grow in the top 3. Any links give no result.
- Budgets for external promotion of the resource are more than 3000$ per month. And you need a maximum working and fast growth tool for the site.
How to Order a Network from Buylinkco
If you need advice on estimating or tips on how to form an order, you can contact our support in the chat (on the right), or leave a request on the page – https://buylinkco.com/order/.
- After communication, we make the technical task (TT) for the development of the PBN.
- We specify all the parameters, details and deadlines of the project.
- You pay for the order, and we get to work.
- We deliver the project on time. Provide all data for verification.
- The client checks all sites, according to the TT.
- We close the order.
- We provide consultations on working with the PBN network.
This is your opportunity to build a lasting competitive advantage. Let’s discuss your project today.
