In this post, I am going try to answer the question of are PBNs safe and do they still work? There is no black and white answer but by trying to look at this from a few different angles and my years of history building and buying and selling websites
So the big question…. ARE PBNs STILL WORKING IN 2017???
See the case study process and results below and how I generated 800 organic visitors in a day!
This post is a case study aimed at identifying the potential power of expired domains with actual traffic data and link metrics revealed.
Some of the results are pretty surprising…
PBNs have been a very controversial subject to talk about but have also been the most systematic way of ranking a website I have found. (more…)
Since 2013 I have been talking about, using and building PBN sites to help rank mine and other websites.
There are very few people that talk about PBNs in a balanced way. I hope this post helps answer some of the common questions people have.
If you have any questions feel free to drop them in the comments section and I will respond.
What is a PBN?
A Private Blog Network is a network of real, relevant and authoritative sites that are perceived to be independent from one another in the eyes of Google but you control and can link to your money site. These links being real and relevant drive ranking improvements within Google.
My Team Offers Two Services To Help:
ONE – Do PBNs Still Work to Rank Websites?
The short answer is that backlinks from relevant authoritative sites definitely still works! The question of how much does it work is answered in more detail below but I can say that it definitely does work on both my sites and clients.
Each week we receive emails like this one received last week…
TWO – What is the Best PBN Hosting Options Now?
Hosting can be a massive pain! I now have 1 person who works full time to manage all my hosting accounts.
I now have two simple recommendations for people who are looking to host a PBN…
(prices increase for this host Sep 1, 2016)
THREE – Do PBNs help all websites rank and how many backlinks do I need to rank on the first page?
The type of sites that seem to respond the best are those in “boring” niches that traditional white hat link building is the hardest in! This usually involves an affiliate site or a business site.
The sites PBNs don’t make a lot of sense to use on are sites that have an easier time to build links. For example a “mom blog” would do better to allocate its money for SEO to guest post outreach and creation.
Sometimes the ones that don’t respond the best are either the crazy competitive local niches (unless a lot of links are sent at them) or the large magazine style site who need a monthly link velocity way higher than the package purchased.
To help people answer the question of “how many links do I need” I wrote this post and provided a free guide.
FOUR – What is the risk of using a PBN?
There is risk with every marketing strategy online. I have an issue with SEOs who don’t try and communicate the risk of using PBNs.
The right level of risk vs reward to accept is highly dependent on everyone’s personal situation.
What I can share to try and help quantify the risk is that our lifetime deindexation rate over the course of 3,000+ sites being built is…
What will happen if sites do get deindexed is that the rankings benefit of the use of those PBNs is lost.
I DO NOT RECOMMEND someone only use PBNs as their SEO strategy. It is critical that your sites footprint remains distributed and not easily identified as a site that exclusively uses PBNs.
FIVE – For the Use My PBN Service do links on my PBN stay live after someone cancels?
Yes, links on my use my PBN service stay live even if someone cancels.
The most common reason people have for cancelling is that their rankings have jumped up to where they want them and they no longer need the service. So a lot of people tend to use the service until they achieve the ranking goals for their site or clients site and then cancel the service.
SIX – Can I Add More Articles for the Done For You PBN Service?
In our done for you PBN building service we create 1 article per site every 5 months. There are times that people would like to add more.
When we build your PBN with our done for you service we provide you with admin access to the site and you can post as many articles as you would like.
Many SEO agencies use this access for when they add a new client. A lot of our clients have a network relevant to a specific industry or geography and then when they add a new client use that existing PBN to build relevant/authoritative links to that new website.
SEVEN – Does it Work for Reputation Management?
With the growth of the online reputation management industry we have seen an increase in the number of people using our service for Reputation Management.
The basic strategy for reputation management fits well with our services…
Similar to the agencies mentioned above a lot of reputation management consultant clients we work with like to use a combination of having their own PBN network managed by us and as they add new clients simply post new posts to that network.
EIGHT – Does it Work for Videos?
Although it works for videos and clients have seen substantial ranking improvements there are a lot of strategies that are higher risk/lower cost that seem to be able to rank videos more cost effectively.
The reason is that the domain strength of YouTube is strong enough that if you throw some crappy links at the video it usually doesn’t result in the post getting penalized.
However, I believe this will continue to move in the direction that higher quality links will have a bigger and bigger impact driving results for your site.
NINE – Can I Rank My Amazon Private Label Listings?
This is a fun one I have been experimenting with lately.
The answer is that YES you can influence which Amazon listing shows up in Google.
It is either Feast or Famine when it comes to rankings Amazon Listings. Since Google only shows a couple results in Google you need to be in the top 2 for Amazon listings for the given keyword or you get no benefit.
Here is the basic strategy I have tested with success…
TEN – Should I Hide My Sites from Crawlers like Majestic, OpenSiteExplorer and AHRefs?
I go against the grain when it comes to my recommendation to NOT hide your PBN from crawlers.
The reason?
You are only asking the crawlers to not index the links from your site and it would be easy for Google to create a crawler that looks for the sites that request to not have the link networks track their links.
Now once they have a list of all the sites that have hidden themselves from Majestic, AHRefs and Moz what is the chance that they are all PBN sites or doing something sketchy…. I would theorize it would be pretty high!
For that reason a better approach is to build a PBN that is real/relevant and could stand up to a manual review if necessary.
Eleven – When is the right time to start building a PBN or Links?
People that are just starting out often wonder what the right approach is to the timing for building their PBN.
The short answer is that as soon as you know you are going to be going into a niche it is a good idea to start building out a niche relevant PBN but do not let that stop you from getting started.
TWELVE – What is the PBN backlinking strategy I use now for new sites?
So, what do I do today to get a site moving up the rankings?
It of course depends on the competition and the number of links I suspect I will need to rank. Like I have mentioned above using PBNs exclusively is NOT the best strategy but using them strategically still makes a lot of sense for me.
What I really like about the strategy of using PBNs as the cornerstone of ranking a website is that it is scalable based on the results. Because of that here is the basic strategy I use with a new site…
Today I have a quick update on my Six Figure Website Challenge website and the results over the last month. Would I hit the 1,000 visitors per day milestone?…
As I mentioned in my last update Mid Year Six Figure Challenge Update I was going to reduce my team working on the site and continue only what I thought were the critical activities…
It has been three weeks since I launched a couple offerings on Market.Source-Wave.com and this post is a review of how this business has been going.
What qualifies me to write a review/how to make money post for the new marketplace? So far I have had the #1 selling SEO service on Source Wave 3 weeks running…
The service(s) have been going great! To get the exact details on the number of sales and revenue click here. As a result August is on track to be a record month!
Alex Becker is a big personality with a big presence in the SEO world and love him or hate him he undeniably offers a lot of great SEO information and resources in an entertaining manner.
One of his recent ventures is the creation of a marketplace similar to Fiverr but exclusively for SEO services and not limited to $5. This is the marketplace I am discussing in this post. (more…)
