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It’s the year 2001 and I’m about to show you something that will blow your mind.
Welcome to the future of SEO: it’s built on a nifty concept called PBN backlinks. We have officially figured out how to beat the search engines. It’s a good day.
Veteran SEOs will remember those halcyon days with a wry smile. Things were so simple. Today, in 2024, the private blog network (PBN) has a bleak reputation – and with good reason.
This guide will walk you through the history of PBN backlinks, how this link-building strategy fell from Google’s good graces, and the best SEO strategies to use instead of PBNs.
A private blog network (PBN) is made up of a collection of old or expired domains that are acquired for the sole purpose of transferring domain authority or link juice to a target website.
PBN backlinks add up to provide the target website with significant authority. This domain can then be used either as:
A successful website in itself, promoting or selling any type of product or service, or
A high-authority website that can be used for “reselling” link juice as backlinks and guest posts
Whatever the ultimate purpose, there are obvious commercial advantages to owning a high-ranking website that seemingly never needs to perform any manual outreach or do any link-building at all.
Let’s explore what made PBN backlinks such a successful SEO strategy for so long.
PBN links come from a network of websites owned by one individual or organization. These websites are usually expired domains (i.e. nobody owns them anymore).
These domains must have the advantage of already possessing value in the eyes of search engines. As they’re no longer being used or owned by an individual, they can be acquired cheaply – but their existing authority and content remain.
These other websites are also typically also domains in a field that is somewhat related to the target website. Google has always had a keen eye for catching unnatural links between sites in completely different fields – the old-school PBN link-builders weren’t stupid!
Let’s talk about the target website. The ultimate goal of building private blog network links is to boost this site’s performance in search rankings.
See the diagram to the right for an illustration of how PBN backlinks are structured. All that link juice from those sites is passed onto the target website – it’s fully managed link-building.
It’s kind of genius. And it’s a tactic that credibly survived until very recently, despite numerous Google crackdowns on black hat SEO.
The origins of PBN backlinks are in the early days of Web 2.0. Google Search was becoming ubiquitous, and the fledgling SEO industry was trying to figure out how it all worked.
Building PBN links is what’s known as a black-hat SEO tactic. This refers to any SEO strategy that attempts to boost a website’s performance by “gaming the system” rather than by publishing useful, meaningful content or services.
You can understand why these black hat strategies were so popular. Internet search isn’t fair and never has been.
Website owners publishing great content and offering excellent services found they weren’t getting any traction – so if Google wasn’t playing fair, why should they? Private blog networks were an accessible, manageable way to put a website at the top of the search rankings.
Of course, part of what defines a black-hat strategy is that Google doesn’t like people doing it. So PBN link-builders had to be increasingly careful about:
The sites they chose for their link-building efforts
How PBNs were structured
How links were embedded in content
This is a major reason that more reputable tactics like niche edits and guest posting have become more popular in recent years. They’re less time-consuming and carry fewer risks.
So all this said – why shouldn’t you use a PBN? Why wouldn’t you?
PBN backlinks work by passing link juice along from a network of thrall domains to a main site.
This exploits the referencing system Google uses in its PageRank algorithm – in the simplest terms, the more authoritative sites you have linking to your website, the better.
The problem is that one of Google Search’s key missions is to better understand the context of:
Where a link comes from
Why it exists
Why it’s linking to another site
Whether the link is for the benefit of a human reader who may want to learn more, or whether it exists because someone profits from it existing
Why does this matter so much to Google, and why does it mean that you’ll always be at risk when you build PBN links?
PBNs are considered unethical because they contribute to a website’s success in SERPs (search engine results pages) rather than offering anything useful to internet users.
Google is – or claims to be – absolutely focused on user experience. This means that every link published online should add value for the user.
The problem is that regardless of what you’ve heard about developments in AI or the Google algorithm, Google Search is still a machine. It doesn’t understand value, so it has to use metrics a machine can understand to approximate whether websites and links create genuine value for users.
Those involved with this link-building tactic traditionally used this to their advantage.
The first step is website acquisition. A PBN creator will seek out sites that can provide high-quality backlinks in terms of link juice transferred and topical relevance – but that aren’t currently owned or operated by anyone.
The sites are then organized into a structure that allows link juice to be passed through the lowest-value sites to higher-authority sites, with all links pointing ultimately to the main site.
This structure is similar to how tiered link-building works, with Tier 3 links at the bottom, followed by higher-value Tier 2 links, and then Tier 1 links finally linking directly to the target site.
This also allows for a wider variety of feeder sites to be used when building links, as the site’s topical relevance can be removed by one or two degrees.
Next, these websites need to start publishing content that can point links naturally towards the main website, if they don’t already have such content.
This wasn’t such an issue in the very early days of PBNs, but became more important as Google became better at using link relevance to identify private blog networks – such as after the great PBN crackdown of 2014.
Web hosting has become one of the toughest parts of creating private blog networks. Search engines are now more adept at identifying when groups of sites are controlled by the same user or party.
Tell-tale signs of a private blog network include:
Several unrelated sites are managed using the same Google Search Console account
The sites are all typically accessed from just a few IP addresses
Duplicate content is posted across multiple websites
A bunch of links with the same anchor text appear at once on unrelated websites, all pointing to the same place
It became increasingly difficult to build PBN links during the 2010s, with some link-builders using numerous IPs, creating dozens of accounts to manage and oversee their websites, and generally becoming very paranoid as they sought to evade Google’s attention.
The upshot was that by the start of the 2020s, building private blog networks simply wasn’t worth the investment of time and money for SEOs.
Even before Google cracked down on black-hat link-building strategies, what set PBNs apart from other techniques?
Let’s summarize the advantages for SEOs and website owners alike.
The main reason PBN backlinks were so popular was because they were both reliable and mysterious.
Savvy SEOs would keep their networks de-indexed from popular analytical tools (though not from Google, obviously) so competitors could see that their sites were performing well – but not why.
SEO has always been an opaque industry, and demonstrable “guaranteed results” is something that less than 1% of the market can offer. So PBN backlinks were popular because they worked.
Anchor text is the clickable text a link is attached to. It’s also what search engines crawl when they’re considering whether a link is natural and relevant.
The simplest way to keep the search engines happy is to have the anchor text loosely match the slug of the target URL. The surrounding text, the post’s title, and the host website also play a part in this analysis – but there’s a reason SEOs still choose anchor text very carefully. It matters.
When you control every website in a network, you also have full control over the anchor text for your PBN links. You can ensure they’re natural, inserted in the right places, and not misspelled by jobbing guest post blogs.
What do you do if your industry:
Has a massive proliferation of companies with a digital presence, and
Has basically nothing new to publish blogs about?
Let’s take roofing as an example. The top 20% of roofing companies online have well-maintained blogs, a well-designed website, backlinks – all that good stuff.
But cracking the top spot is much more difficult.
So you need an advantage that your competitors don’t have, and can’t copy. This used to be the attraction of a PBN, and it enjoyed a long day in the sun.
Here’s how Google has called time on this type of link building.
The major disadvantages of PBNs are due to the risk of search – but that’s not the only consideration.
Google has become adept at identifying PBN links by the way they’re built.
It’s still theoretically possible to get around this, but it requires a huge amount of time, money, and expertise. SEO strategies like niche edits can get you the same kind of link juice without all the stress.
Penalties for PBN backlinks include suspicious links and sites being de-indexed and even blacklisted by Google. It could even lead to other sites that weren’t associated with the PBN being penalized – see below.
If a search engine identifies a PBN, it will penalize every site connected to that PBN.
If you’ve been using your site’s authority to sell links to other websites, or if they’ve linked to your site organically, there’s a chance that Google will identify those sites as part of the private blog network.
This means that there can be a lot of collateral damage when a PBN gets taken down. Innocent bystanders could be blacklisted by Google because they unwittingly associated with your PBN.
It’s also an unethical strategy in general. There’s plenty of moral grey area in SEO, but simply buying up a bunch of old sites to artificially boost yours is definitely at the shadier end of the spectrum.
Ultimately, Google defeated PBNs by making them so time-consuming and expensive to build and manage that they’re just not worth it anymore.
Given that a major selling point of PBNs over manual outreach was that they saved time and resources, SEOs and site owners simply can’t justify this method as the best way to boost your search engine rankings in 2024.
So if PBNs are dead, what can reliably put you at the top of Google Search results?
Thankfully, it’s not that complicated.
Content creation lies at the center of every white-hat SEO strategy.
Content is the foundation on which you build links that are relevant, organic, and algorithm-proof. A well-structured site full of meaningful content is exactly what Google wants to see.
Focus on your site, not how someone else’s could benefit you.
Manual outreach seems tedious and time-consuming, but it’s the only foolproof way to acquire links that Google will always consider valuable. Having guest blogs published on relevant websites with a natural link back to your site is what Google’s referencing system wants to see.
Want to learn more? Check out our comprehensive guide to guest posting for SEO.
There are other ways to get links built that don’t involve black hat tactics.
SEO citations are a great example. This is the information that indexing systems rely on – so give it to them and get a backlink in the process!
Publishing high-value SEO content featuring original research or insights is a fantastic way to get individual web pages at the top of search engine rankings – and it also gets you 100% organic backlinks!
The title may have given away my answer to whether PBNs work in 2024.
No, no, and no.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
It’s not like it was a bad strategy.
In fact, PBNs were a fantastic strategy for a long time. But Google caught up to them, and today, the risks massively outweigh the benefits.
Another reason you shouldn’t use PBNs today is that the smartest PBN SEOs are smart enough to have realized it’s time to move on.
Which means the PBNs you’ll find on offer today are most likely run by people who haven’t heard the alarm bells ringing.
It’s never impossible that a strategy comes back in an unexpected way. But in the meantime?
Come where the party is – and try SEOButler’s guest posting services for starters. High-quality backlinks. Reputable vendors. No PBNs.
Let’s go!
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Free Guest Post Database
1,500+ Sites
Sign up to receive our free guest post database list where you can start your link building campaign for free !