In March 2013, I had built a niche website on a health topic on which I had to research quite a lot. No wonder, I was able to rank it really well with none other than the ‘PBN’s’ which I had built from my knowledge over 4 years in SEO.
The site was generating over $600 of passive income monthly after 5 months of work and most importantly patience. The most crucial and important thing that helped me rank this website was the 30 PBN sites which I had crafted beautifully so that I can get the maximum link juice from them. Today, I will tell you some secrets which you can implement on your niche website and private blog network in order to sustain long term rankings easily with minimum work.
You might be wondering what’s so special about PBN’s? Why choose them over the traditional link building methods to rank higher? Why I choose PBN’s over all other methods to rank quicker as well as without fear of losing rankings in the long term?
Overview
Let’s start with the facts and figures,the PBN strategy was introduced back in 2010 when many people tried ranking their amazon affiliate niche websites by the use of PBN’s by hosting all the PBN websites with different C class IP’s. People could see a significant jump in their ranking when they used this technique and their competitors were startled as they couldn’t make out how they were being outranked so easily!
In September 2014, Google created a new algorithm which was aimed at penalizing the websites in a particular blog network as they had very thin content and they weren’t updated since a long time. So a lot of websites were de-indexed over the period of 4-6 months in 2014-15.
This taught a lot to the website owners and it’s quite amazing to know how the SEO and bloggers community has grown and how they help each other to understand things and act in the right direction. Statistics show that the efficiency of a Private Blog Network has certainly increased over time even after the penalty by Google. Moreover, the websites ranking on top of Google for the most competitive niches use PBN’s to stay at that place.
What decides your fate while using a private blog network is the tactics you use in order to get the most out of your PBN. When you build a PBN, you need to do it right and not prefer methods which don’t comply with the Google search engine guidelines.
To make sure you all succeed in this year while creating your own PBN, we have prepared a check-list of the Do’s and Don’ts from our experience of 4-5 years with PBN which will really help you to rank your website higher without getting a manual penalty from Google. So let’s begin!
Don’ts – Things that don’t work now for a Private Blog Network
- Producing Spun, low quality and thin content for PBN sites: A lot of people think it’s easily possible to publish around 5-6 articles having spun content on a high authority expired domain and getting the ink juice from them. But this is totally against Google’s vision so try to avoid this!
- Hosting your PBN on C class IP’s: There has been a trend of hosting the PBN websites on the C class IP addresses which are a big footprint to get penalized. As Google is getting smarter, it is advisable to mix things up and not follow a set plan as SEO requires diversity in all terms.
- 301 redirects: The 301 redirect involves a lot of work as well as risk. You would have to add lots of content relevant to your niche and then point it to your website which means you can’t use it to point links to your other websites as well. Google algorithms can be very strict towards 301 redirects as well. You can say PBN is a controlled process while 301 is a bulldozer.
- Outbound links: Maintaining the number of outbound links is very important. There should only be one article on your PBN site pointing to your money site as if all the 5 articles would have links to your money site, it wouldn’t look natural to Google.
Do’s – Things that do work and you should implement them while building your PBN
- Build a real website: The key to build a ‘great’ private blog network is to make the websites look ‘real’ and not create a bad image when Google visits your site. Choose a good hosting option, install a beautiful relevant theme and consider adding description, logo, About us, Contact us and even a privacy policy page to the site. All this makes the websites look quite real and wouldn’t look spammy at all.
- Get Social Signals: Boosting your PBN website with the social signals is a great advantage. As Google gives a lot of importance to the content marketed on the social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other sources. You can create some social profiles related to your niche or brand and point numerous social signals by sharing the content on your website or even buy some services.
- Use A class IP’s and multiple location hosting: It is advisable to use different A class IP addresses and multiple locations hosting servers. Also, mixing the IP owners and ASN would be very advantageous here. Check the procedure to find the ASN of an IP below,
- Head over to bgp.he.net
- Besides seeing your current IP, the site also shows your ISP’s ASN.
- A click on this number shows how many ASN peers your current ISP has, as well as some other information.
- On this website, it is also possible to find the ASN of any other website by typing in the URL of the website, then select the tab “IP Info”. The last number (the one beginning with the letters “AS”) is the ASN, followed by the hosting provider. Keep in mind that the ASNs don’t change hands as often as IPs, they are an excellent tool for pinpointing where a website is hosted.
- Quality Content with fresh Information: Writing quality content on your PBN websites is very important, I personally prefer iWriter where I get my articles written at $3 for 500 words easily. You just need to Sign Up on the website and click on ‘Get Content’ and enter the specified details for the project and the interested writers will start bidding for it soon. You can hire the one with good skills and minimal charges quite easily.
- Outbound links: I personally point out only 1 link to my money site from the PBN site. Let each of your articles also have 2 – 3 other outbound links to authoritative, non-competitive web pages. This is really important because these links provide context about the article and Google takes note that your money site is linked alongside authoritative web pages.
Well, I have tried to put a maximum of my experience out in the above 5 minutes read. I really hope you go out and build a successful niche website and rank on the top of Google by building the most amazing and authority PBN in your niche and even use it for other money websites. If you have any queries or doubts regarding any of the steps mentioned above or any SEO related questions, feel free to comment below and reach me out. I will be the happiness to help you in the best possible way. Cheers!