What are Private Blog Networks?

A private blog network (PBN) is a network of websites that place a high quantity of links to another website. These link networks consist of low-quality links designed to manipulate search engine rankings.

SEOs who choose to use PBNs to build links typically use this tactic as a way to be in “full control” of their link building efforts. Other white hat link building tactics such as digital PR, [broken link building, or resource link building involve third parties editorially placing links, and SEOs or webmasters can’t always “control” where those links are coming from.

For this reason, PBNs are often built using expired domains. These expired domains used to have a site that had earned links and had built up some level of authority in the eyes of the search engines. These expired domains are purchased and turned into a site that’s part of a private blog network, usually having new content added so that it’s outbound links pass

Black hat SEOs who use this tactic tend to go to great lengths to prevent Google from identifying that their sites are part of a network or finding any footprint between them, including:

  • Hosting with different hosting providers
  • Registering the domains with different registrars
  • Using different domain extensions
  • Using different themes or layouts
  • Creating content that doesn’t link out to money sites in an attempt to disguise posts that do

While PBN sites are often talked about as being part of a network, the intention is that they appear to be independent sites.

Just think about it this way… rather than earning links, owning a private blog network would mean you could place links to your site(s), with the exact anchor text that you want to use whenever you want, and to whichever page needs boosting.

All this sounds great, right? Wrong. PBNs are a clear violation of Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines and can result in your site being penalized. For this reason, it’s not a tactic that we’d condone or recommend.
I hope you find this information helpful…see you on the next topic