Private Blog Network
Building links with private blogs networks has always been a controversy in the SEO industry and also being avoided by tons of SEO Agency. Other experts say not to do it, while the others also say it’s the best thing that ever happened to them. But in the eyes of Google, they’re considered as a black hat SEO strategy (which never changed!) and should never be a part of any game plan on gaining rankings.
SEO has always been a complicated field. Even the most experienced digital marketers in the industry still get baffled by it today that they have to get ready whenever there’s an algorithm update coming up.
Concerning Private Blog Network links, you still have the option to use that as a strategy in 2020. But you need to know how to do it the right way or else dire consequences will come crashing down on your rankings, traffic, and overall sales. When setting up your own network of multiple sites, there’s a lot of things to consider and always remember not all private blog network sites are negative- you just have to do the right thing.
If you are thinking about link building for your own sites, here’s an easy guide you can learn effectively:
Choose and Set Up Your Domains Wisely
Sorting out domains and getting them ready for development is probably the most crucial and technical step you’ll face in this guide (although that will depend on your technical skill level.)
Purchase expired domains
In this step, you will need a lot of time and patience in finding the right set of domains. It is critical that you choose an old domain name, has a good set of stats such as domain authority and topical flow metrics, and the assurance that the domain was not used as a Private Blog Network or spam site by the old owners.
Register the domains
Registering domains for regular sites might be a piece of cake. But it’s a whole different level when it comes to PBN domains. There are certain factors and setups that you should enforce to make sure all your effort and investment won’t go in vain.
Google is smart enough to know the domain’s history; it’s current owner, and what it’s currently used for. Even if you opted for whois protection and privacy, to keep your domains safe from being detected, use false whois information on each domain, do not register all your domains in one day, and try to mix up the TLDs and domain extensions in your network.
Host your PBN network domains
If you’re going to be using shared hosting, make sure the IP addresses where you host your PBN sites are genuine and not shared by other spammy sites. Otherwise, this will crash your entire network.
Remember to host each domain with their unique IP address. It is not recommended to use the same hosting IP address on multiple domains.
Your hosting servers should also be as if it’s from different countries all over the world. It works the same as a proxy server per se. So whenever Google crawls your PBN sites, it won’t be able to locate your original footprint.
Select a CMS for Your Blog Network
Select a CMS for Your Blog Network
Choosing different CMS platforms for each site in your private blog network won’t affect your PBN efforts. It also includes using one CMS platform for all your domains. But if you want to go with the former, you should probably split up your domains and assign a CMS platform accordingly. Let’s say 70% of your domains would be under one CMS platform, and the other 30% would be on another.
With all the different domains that you have to manage on your blog network, it’s best if you find a CMS that’s easy to use and is very flexible with editing content, structuring pages, and many more. WordPress is the most widely used CMS platform.
Publish Relevant Content
Remember that in SEO, being connected to your niche is one of the significant reasons that will get you into the top of the search results. That’s why from buying your domains down to creating quality content and being specific on the niche are all steps that you shouldn’t miss in setting up your site. All articles, images and even infographics must remain relevant to the website you’re currently trying to rank.
So if your money site is on the digital marketing services niche, your private blog networks should be a cluster of different topics about digital marketing such as social media, SEO, link building, content marketing, influencer marketing, and many others.
The length and quality of the articles should also be an essential matter in your content strategy, even for PBN sites.
Build a Natural Site and Linking Structure
When you’re building your site structure, you want to make sure that it looks natural and not something that was just made up under an hour without any once of thought on its logo, sidebar, and navigation bar. If you have too many sites, you can delegate them to the members of your team to make sure each website is unique from the other. That way, your PBN wouldn’t look “ordinary.”
Now when your site structuring is flawless, it’s time to move on to the part where you link your PBN site to your money sites.
Whenever you create new content, make sure to link those to your money site. But always ensure to keep the linking natural, try to have no more than two links per money site, and of course, you have to link to four other authority sites as well.
The critical thing here is to make your content at least read-worthy and try to link it to the most relevant authority sites as possible.
Block Necessary Crawlers
You can expect that your competitors are also doing extensive backlink research on your site. To do that, they’re going to have to use backlink research tools such as SEMrush and SEMrush Alternatives like Majestic, Ahrefs, and many others.
To prevent them from discovering your PBN backlink profile, you’re going to have to block these crawlers on your robots.txt or htaccess file. Here, list all the crawlers you don’t want poking around on your data. But make sure you don’t block out Google crawlers. Otherwise, all these efforts would have been for naught.
Takeaway
Google has always frowned upon PBN sites to the point where they penalize anyone they caught guilty with this strategy of manipulating search results but why are people still doing it? It’s because it also showed effectiveness when it comes to higher seo rankings. Building a private blog network right from scratch is no easy task, and not getting found is even harder. But as long as you follow these golden rules, you’ll be fine. If you are still not sure about these things, consult a reliable SEO Agency for expert advice.
