PBN usage

Private Blog Networks, or PBNs, are essentially a collection of websites that exist solely to link to other websites that either pay for the links or that are owned by the PBN owner themself. PBNs are fairly common in the blogging space and can actually yield some crazy results if done correctly and carefully.

That’s the key though — correctly and carefully. This requires proxies, different hosts, and tons of time to make each of the websites in the PBN authoritative themselves. Because of this difficulty, many people use low-quality PBNs to get better rankings without the effort.

With low-quality PBNs, they usually do have a positive impact on a websites for a little bit. That is, until they don’t. Google’s fairly good at detecting sub-par PBNs, and they actively punish websites using them. So a website that gets detected using a bad PBN can and will have their rankings negatively impacted. Because of this, you’ll want to avoid websites that use PBNs altogether, unless you’re fine with investing in a ticking timebomb.

Fortunately, PBNs are very well known, and most brokers and marketplaces require the disclosure of any PBN usage. In fact, some websites, like Empire Flippers, let you specifically filter out websites like this. However, just because there are requirements, doesn’t mean everybody is truthful. You’ll want to check for yourself if the website has any links coming from a potential PBN.

The main way to do this is to analyze the backlink health and check the few characteristics we reviewed in the previous video.

You can usually tell a PBN website just by looking at it. These websites look extremely generic and either post a wide variety of content if they’re purchased links or extremely specific content if they’re home-grown PBNs. The content on these sites is usually very thin and clearly the result of doing the bare minimum to get content out there.

If you find a couple links that you may suspect are from a PBN, I would run the other way — it’s always better to be safe than sorry in this space.