PBN aka Private Blog Network, Public Blog Network
Also called Link Wheel or Private Link Network. So, what’s the deal with PBNs today?
If you still believe that following Google guidelines will bring you results, let me explain: it won’t work for 99% of people, including website owners and SEOs.
It will work if you are part of the top 1% of the best of the pyramid of content producers. If you know what to do, if you understand marketing well, if you’re creative, if you do the job, yes, it works.
How to build a Private Blog Network?
As with anything, you can’t control at 100%, and it’s a long-term game. There are a lot of similarities with the game of poker. A lot of SEOs play poker. They like that game because luck is just one part of the strategy. And if you play long term, you can build the career of a professional poker player.
You also can build the career of a very successful SEO who is not following those goddamn Google guidelines.
Being the best at what you can will never be enough. Creating good content is only one part of the process. Then, you have to publish the content and promote it. Content marketing is a whole process.
Check out my post about the strategy I call Topical Mesh.
I talk about integrating a solid semantic layer inside a content marketing strategy.
That’s what I do today, and also I endorse private links networks. PBNs are trendy those days. Everybody is talking about PBN. But before we dive into PBNs, let me tell you about another way to get links: go dig and find a footprint of spots, places on the Internet where it’s interesting to put the backlink.
Be in control of your backlinks
Today, we’re going to take control of one part of your backlinks, and we’re going to try to do it in the best, safest way possible. And even in the worst-case scenario, when you get that message in your search console, PBNs are still the best solution. I’ll tell you how to get out of a manual penalty in a week or less. Those days, when people are doing a website for a PBN, there’s no finesse, no granularity, no variation. But if you have only one word to focus on, it’s variation. You have to simulate what goes on naturally; you can’t have one huge footprint.
If you copy a URL on Majestic, you will immediately see it. Every website is the same, and I don’t need to click on the links. Just by looking at the expired domains, I know what I’m going to find behind: a crappy blog with a few very crappy posts and most likely just one backlink toward the homepage of the Money Site.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you will have a few outbound links to dilute the signal. Or you will have links to the other websites of the network. It’s flat. People don’t try to do things. They don’t use their imagination, they don’t use the most common sense, and they don’t know the number one rule of link building:
When you get a link; you have to link the link
So what do people do? They buy expired domains. They put up some blog or crappy automated content. So you got the money site of the center, and then you get one link on the wheel, one circle of links concentrated around the money site. No variation. And I’m not saying it could not work, but it’s so evident that it smells from miles away. I mean, if I have to open Majestic and not even click on the links, that’s a crappy blog network. Remember that Google can see things that you don’t see. I’ll show you how to hide your footprints later. You can do a crappy PBN if you’re dropshipping and don’t care about the website. But if that website is important to you and people’s lives, jobs, and incomes depend on it, you must be more careful.
How to “link the link”
You must link your PBN, not the sites between them; you must build links to all those websites.
Even if I agree that the purpose of buying an expired domain is to save time and/or money, it’s necessary to rebuild links to that expired domain. If you don’t link the link, you already have a big hole in your strategy. If you build private blog networks, you have to stay private. You have to own those websites. You’ve got to control them. Go on to Fiverr or BlackHatWorld and buy a blast. You can use that to link the link.
Let’s delve deeper. Suppose you opt for the gold service for one of your links. In that case, you might also consider the silver or bronze service to amplify the impact. However, it’s important not to go overboard. Avoid blasting hundreds of links. We’ll explore a more strategic approach, working on concentric circles. Remember, caution is key when using external services for link building.
How do I build safe backlinks?
If you want to stay on the safe side, keep all the backlinks anchor-text free, with no keywords or optimization, and then use internal linking with exact-match anchor text.
It exactly matches the anchor text because a link is a link. Once again, you can watch the video about the Topical Mesh, where I explained the strategy. I’m going to go on all year long with 50 videos to explain in detail how to work out what I call the topical mesh. It’s about Semantic SEO, a Content Marketing strategy with a secure SEO layer. You need to follow that semantic proximity concept: who is related to what and why on the page, around the page, inside the website, and around the site. That’s the Topical Mesh.
First, you take a piece of paper or an online mind-mapping tool (I use MindMeister).
You put your website at the center of your mindmap, and you’re going to work out 52 branches coming out of the site, with 52 topics. That’s the first exercise, and I want you to do those 52 little bubbles. It would be best if you had topics in relation to your main topic. So, you dive into semantic associations between your topic, what’s on-site, and what’s around the website.
That’s the first exercise, the first step to building your perfect Topical Mesh. Build the 52 topics associated with your website. And you got to be creative. For example, an associated topic would be algorithms if I want to talk about semantic SEO. Beyond that, you have Page Rank, Salton Cosynus, tf-idf, n-grams, etc.
So first, start with the topics, then be creative about what type of website you will build.
What kind of website for my private link network?
My problem with PBN comes with the B of PBN, which means Blog. I don’t do blogs. I don’t do any website that requires management. Be simple. Be more creative. I like project websites. I want five-page websites. For example, you could build a website about Insomnia. You have a project or a mobile app, a plan to save the world; you want to develop something to help people sleep better. Well, you have a project, whatever it is, just an idea. And this idea is to be topically related to your leading site. And even if you want to go into more complicated websites, stay simple; no blogs, forums, none. Let’s say that you want to do a social sharing platform. Well, I would build a website where people share photos.
So now you’ll find a way to find photos that are free of rights. You can use pictures since you don’t steal or transform content. But that’s a different story. Put out a random number of users that you’re going to build. Try to avoid creating an actual web social website. Let’s say you have 17 users who will share a random number of images, and that’s it. It was just an idea of a social media platform. You have the right to put out a site with a great idea, and it didn’t work. But it looks legit.
I wouldn’t do a forum, but why not do a Yahoo Answers? Get a bunch of users that you build. Your users are going to answer all these questions, but you do it yourself. And that’s it.
You could do a directory. Directories are not dead. You will integrate 150 websites into a directory, rewriting the titles and the description; that’s not a lot of work. That’s easy to do.
Imagine all those types of websites that you can build to be something different than just blogs and crappy blogs.
Those websites are going to bring a little more finesse. That will get a lot more granularity and not look so obvious. As a bonus, you won’t pollute the web with crap.
The best is not to have just a private link that works around your website. The best is, of course, to have some legit links, to do press relations, and to do content marketing. Why not a few directories? It would help if you had a lot of links, and the portion of the links you’ve got to control could go from 1/4 to 1/3. But I would only go up 1/3 of the number of referring domains. I’ll get backlinks; how many, we don’t care. We care about the number of referring domains. I would only go up to 1/3. You could go 100%, but you leave it up regarding the risk. As long as you know the risk and the potential damage ball, you could go all the way.
The proof is on the screen. Do you rank on that? Does it work on this? Yes, it works. Is it risky? Yes, like everything else. But again, if you follow Google guidelines, produce great content, and wait for links to appear good luck.
FREQUENCY – HOW TO INTEGRATE YOUR BACKLINKS
Let’s talk about frequency. In the old days, we could send thousands of links per minute. We didn’t care. Now it’s different. That’s why you must take advantage of internal linking; here you are, sitting on the hidden treasures.
That’s a key element. If you adopt that mindset, you must also understand why the principle applies to the website.
Since you don’t have such limitations inside your site, you can publish thousands and dozens of pages without risk. Without an exact match of anchor text, there is no problem. On the other hand, on the backlink side, we haven’t had such a high frequency and high volume of links since Penguin.
Nowadays, a very aggressive strategy is to create one link every two or three days. One link a day is 30 links per month, which is already a lot of links.
I remember seeing somewhere that the average link is around 30 domains. So, not that much, but you’re not ordinary.
Do you want to rank on very competitive keywords? We’re going to go on the safe side, building one link a week with our private link network. It should be 1/3 of your link-building strategy. We’re going to work on one a week, 52 per year.
That’s why I made you work out 52 bubbles and 52 topics.
Try to be more creative and try to simulate what goes on in nature; it’s not the same everywhere.
Let me know if you have any question. Thank you.
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