I spend a lot of time in various forums and social media groups pertaining to SEO. In particular, grey hat SEO groups where people are more often than not, using PBN as their primary ranking strategy.
Without a doubt, the most common question I see is:
“How many times can I link from each of my PBNs?”
I will soon be putting this issue to rest.
The question above can actually be interpreted in two different ways:
Question 1 – How many times can you link from one PBN to a single money site?
Question 2 – How many different money sites can be linked to from a single PBN?
Without a doubt, both of these questions arise quite frequently so I’ll be addressing them both. But first, let’s make sure we are completely on the same page when it comes to the foundational concept of link juice.
How Link Juice is Affected by the Number of Outbound Links
What I’m about to discuss isn’t novel by all means. These concepts date as far back as 1998 with the birth of the Page Rank algorithm that is still at the core of what Google uses today to determine SERP results.
The Page Rank algorithm can get quite complicated to say the least, so I’m going to attempt to illustrate this much more simply using a fictional measurement I made up called “Link Juice Points (LJPs).” LJPs represent the ranking potential one site has if it were to link to another site.
Let’s imagine that a site called pbn.com is linking to a site called moneysite.com. Pbn.com has enough incoming links such that it has accumulated 100 LJPs. Since it only links out to one site (moneysite.com), that site receives 100 LJPs. Easy breezy.
Figure A: Linking from a single PBN to a single money site.
Let’s say that pbn.com links to two URLs now. These URLs can be on the same domain or different domains completely. Because there are now two links, the LJPs are divided and the target URLs each end up with 50 LJPs each. Still very easy to conceptualize.
Figure B: Linking from a single PBN to two separate URLs.
The concept continues on as the outbound link count (OBL) increases. For example, if you have 10 OBL on your PBN, then each site gets 10 LJP.
Or does it? You’ll read more about this later.
Authority and Trust
Additional complexity is added when we factor in the concept of “authority” or “trust”. Modern day link building campaigns aren’t just about delivering link juice. It’s also our job as SEOs to deliver trust and authority to a site which helps to validate our link building efforts.
Example:
Imagine you have an affiliate website called “bestgaminglaptopguru.com” (and yes, that’s a great niche to be in). One day you pull off some white hat wizardry and get yourself a link in a brand new post on Techcrunch.com.
Since this is a new post and has no links going to it, the link juice delivered is going to be negligible. However, TechCrunch has a Domain Authority of 94, and you can bet your buns that when you get this link you’re going to see some movement.
Thus, our simple diagram gets a little more complicated. There’s an unquantifiable ranking factor called authority (or trust) which is added into the mix. This trust factor isn’t divided up when the OBL of the referring URL increases. If you get a link from TechCrunch, it effectively acts as a vote from an authority saying that your site is ok in their book. That vote isn’t diminished if they also linked to someone else in the same post.
Figure C: Factoring in Authority/Trust
The Authority and Trust of PBNs
Now that I’ve explained all the above, when it comes to (most) PBNs, completely ignore everything I’ve just said regarding authority and trust.
I’ve played a lot with building trust and authority with PBNs, and they can indeed move the trust needle but you either need volume, huge metrics, or traffic generating PBNs.
For the purpose of answering the two questions proposed in this article, let’s simplify by dropping the concept of trust and simply think in terms of link juice.
Question 1 – How many times can you link from one PBN to a single money site?
Answer: As many times as you want, but the more natural it looks, the better result you’ll get.
PBNs are blogs. The most natural use of blogs is when individuals or businesses write articles that deliver value for their readerships. The authors will commonly link out to other URLs that help to supplement their article, improving the information provided to the reader.
Most commonly, people link to a given domain one time per blog article.
However, that’s not always the case. For example, it’s certainly possible for someone to write a blog article about the increase of inflation over the past three years, in which they could link to Forbes financial reports from 2014, 2015, and 2016.
However, with SEO it’s always best to mimic the norm, so most of the time, link once per article.
Exception
I don’t do client SEO anymore, but with some of my LeadSpring JV affiliate partnerships I sometimes need to correct the anchor text distribution.
In that case, I’ll try to get more mileage out of each PBN by getting 2-3 anchors out of each to a given money site. Once the anchor text distributions are good to go, then I go back to one link per money site.
Sub-Question: If I link multiple times to the same URL, which anchor text is used and how much link juice goes to each link?
Let’s imagine that you have a PBN article that links to the homepage of your site twice and an inner page once.
What happens in this situation is that only the first anchor text is considered, while the homepage gets 2/3 of the link juice and the inner page gets 1/3.
Figure D: Illustration of multiple links going to a single URL.
Sub-Question: Can I link to the same money site twice, but from different articles?
Abso-friggin-lutely.
People write about what they know about. Let’s imagine that an American guy named Bob has a blog about sports. It’s completely reasonable (and likely) to assume that Bob will link to ESPN.com more than once from his website.
Question 2 – How many different money sites can be linked to from a single PBN?
Another way to look at this… do you really get more “mileage” out of each PBN by linking from them multiple times? Let’s see.
If you always link three times from each of your PBNs, then the link juice delivered to each URL is 1/3 of the original. Based on the diagrams I’ve offered above, you’ll essentially need three times as many PBNs as compared to if you just used one PBN per URL. So we’re break-even.
Right? Not quite.
How to Increase PBN Efficiency
These days a PBN should have additional OBLs on their page in order to look more legitimate: outbound authority links and embedded videos. Authority links on referring domains have actually been tested and shown to have a very significant effect on rankings (read more).
So knowing that each PBN needs a certain amount of credible outbound links per page, we can share this burden by putting more money site links on each PBN.
For example, in the figure below, if we decide that each PBN should have just one authority link (I actually recommend a lot more) and we put two money sites on each PBN, each money site will effectively receive 32% more link juice. The efficiency increases as you add more authority links and more money sites.
Figure E: Comparing delivered link juice when one authority link is present.
If you want to maximize the value you’re getting from each PBN, link out to them to multiple money sites. How many is safe? Let’s take a look.
There is one major pitfall you need to watch out for.
Pitfall: Outbound Link Overlap Patterns
If you’re being a good tin hat SEO, taking care of all your footprints and hosting them correctly, then really there should be no cause for deindexes… except for this.
Take a look at the figure below and try to find the footprint.
Figure F: Outbound link overlap footprint.
As you can see, each PBN links to the same three money sites.
Let’s imagine that you specialize in local SEO for dentists, so you decide to make a dentist PBN network. You have three clients ranking for “dentist chicago”, “dentist new york”, and “dentist miami” and you link to them from your PBN.
The probability that even a small handful of websites all decide to link to the same three dentists is very low.
The only way to prevent this is to avoid repeating OBL patterns. The following configuration would be ideal.
Figure G: Outbound link overlap footproint is resolved.
This year, I invested a few thousand dollars to create an internal software tool that would detect these very patterns and prevent them from happening. It’s paid itself over simply due to the lack of deindexes I’ve experienced.
Conclusion
So folks, at the end of the day, I don’t really have a magic number for you. It’s not as simple as me saying, “Always link out to 4 money sites from each PBN.”
SEO is a game of balance. You’ll have to take a look at the risk you’re willing to take and weigh that against the efficiency you’re aiming for.
Perhaps you decide to go with 5 money sites per PBN for your clients, while increasing that number to 10 for your own lead generation sites, while making sure to avoid OBL patterns.
Either way, you now have a full understanding of the subject of link juice and linking, which will enable you to find the sweet spot that your business is comfortable with.
Hi Matt,
awesome article, as always, thank you very much! So… when I link out in the following sequence from my PBN:
1 PBN Article -> Moneysite (www.moneysite.com) – 3 Links in 1 Article
Like this:
Dog -> http://www.moneysite.com
Cat -> http://www.moneysite.com
Mouse -> http://www.moneysite.com/mouse
Only Link 1 and 3 are counted for the anchor ratio, because the second link is getting ignored…
But when I link like this:
Dog -> http://www.moneysite.com
Cat -> http://www.moneysite.com/cat
Mouse -> http://www.moneysite.com/mouse
All 3 anchor are counted? So for diluting anchor text ratios this would be a good thing when I use 3 different URLs from my money site as anchor and target…
Thanks
Nils
Correct.
Hey Matt, great article as usual. Was the survey you conducted(auction/expired domains) for this article?
No, thats for later. 🙂
Interesting point there about link patterns. My take has been to have each money site having its own personal PBN network….so the links have optimum LJP’s and no risk of overlapping.
Does embedding a youtube video lose juice points?
Yes, it does.
so if i have a pbn network i should not embed a video on a post? What about a sales page on my money site should i not embed a video from my channel?
You most certainly can embed videos on your PBNs or money sites. Do so knowing that there will be a link juice loss, but you’re trading that in favor for the benefits, which might be trust and CRO, respectively.
My first ever comment on this site…found your blog I think like a month ago and literally devoured it for information…so much great stuff, it’s basically unbelievable you’re giving away this for free… Thanks Matt for the wealth you’re sharing with us!
One question if I may: let’s assume I have a PBN which was used for a few clients, and then the campaign was stopped (like a year ago). Then I started using the PBN again for other clients; if the link juice is diluted when more articles (with links) are added to the PBN, shouldn’t the rankings for the initial customers slowly drop, since no more new links are being built, and the link juice from the previous ones is now being shared with other sites? Thank you!
Theoretically, that is correct. Luckily you have age and thus trust supporting the older client.
Great article buddy!
Thanks dude.
Hey Matt, thanks for the great post.
I have a question for you: does the nofollow tag still play a role these days or can/should you completely ignore it? I’m barely using it anymore anyways, but I’d much rather rely on a rule (of thumb). Are there situations when you still use it and what for?
Cheers
It definitely has it’s place. Turns off link juice flow. Nofollow contextual links to your contact page, for example.
So, how do you build trust and authority without PBNs since it’s so difficult to do with PBNs?
That’s probably a great topic for another blog post.
How much overlap % of links to specific money sites do you allow your pbns to have? Since you have created an actual software there must be a specific ratio that you went for 😛
E.g. MS1.com and MS2.com must only share x% of the same PBN links. What do you set x to?
Thanks for another great article!
Stinus! Trying to dig out the intellectual property. 🙂
worth a try 😀
Always Crushing.
Thanks, Mr. Gomez.
Nice write up Matt
Thanks, Gavin.
Hi Matt, loved the article.
Why would you link out to an authority site if you are going to lose linkjuice? I guess the answer would lie somewhere between “increasing relevancy” but losing linkjuice?
Cheers
Bennie
Please have a gander at this test.
Dude another good one. Thanks a lot for your time on these. Much appreciated.
My pleasure.
Nice article, Matt. But one question does arise. In all you figures you show pbn.com -> moneysite.com. When you write pbn.com, does this mean you only link from the homepage? Or do you also link from inner pages? Or do you perhaps create inner pages to support articles on the home page? I am very curious…
For the purpose of illustration in this article, I’m only referring to the PBNs homepage.
Great post, Matt. The overlapping footprint is what nailed me back in the day. I wish I wore a tin hat back then.
Ya win some ya lose some. But at least it stung you then and not now when the stakes are higher. 🙂
Great article Matt.
One question regarding link juice: Let’s say a page on my PBN has more links and hence its PA is higher than other pages on the PBN. Would linking from such a high PA page provide more link juice to a moneysite than perhaps linking from a low PA page on the same PBN? Or are all pages in the PBN equal in terms of delivering link juice?
Good question. Your best links possible come from your own site.
Hey Matt, Great article.
You mentioned trust and authority as an important factor in the algorithm. Does this only work on Domain level or should we also hit our individual pages that we want to rank with Wikipedia, Huffington post links etc. ?
Trust applies to both page and domain level.
Great article, Matt. This and your backlink PDF answer a lot of questions, but how do you vary the pages on your money site that you decide to link to? For example, if I am trying to rank 3 service pages on my website, how often do you link to the home page, services pages, and blog posts.
Spread them out based on priority of what you want to rank.
Great article Matt!
I have a question though, and I haven’t seen it asked or answered (my apologies if it has been)
in your Cat/Dog/Fish example… where the second instance of linking to the home page (dog) is ignored… is this site wide or based on one page on the PBN.
Examples:
if I was to link PBN.com/dog to animals.com and then link again from PBN.com/cat to animals.com… one of those would be completely ignored?
Or does it only ignore duplicate links on the same page, i.e. PBN.com/animals links twice to animals.com.
All contstructs are on a per-page basis. If there’s another page on your site with “dog” as the first anchor to a page, then you definitely have a “dog” anchor.
Hey Matt,
would that also mean that a sitewide Link with lets say 1000 Subpages would give 1000 times the anchor into the dilution?
Negative.
Massive value in this article as always Matt.
Weird question: do you think linking to some money sites through link shortener would reduce the footprint if you were to just use the same PBN? Or would this look unnatural?
Thanks !
I think Google smart enough to see through them.
Matt this is DOPE man!
However I didn’t understand the part that talked about authority links and how you calculated it.
You said that having an authority link increases the link juice by 32% (Figure E, Configuration A), is that something you’ve tested?
And do you typically have a ratio of money/authority links that you like to stick to?
Also, what would be the maximum amount for homepage links that you would put on a given pbn?
Either way, killer content as usual!
P.S. I’m intrigued by the fact you built a software that actually prevents link clustering patterns. That’s a great idea for a seo product if you ever plan on releasing it.
Hi Shay,
Give the section a re-read. It isn’t that authority links increase link juice. But when you share the burden of authority links, you increase link juice efficiency.
Like everything else with PBNs, I vary it to a high degree.
Diggity Links uses 8, but up to 12 is perfectly fine.
Thanks Matt!! I just learned a whole lot.
Quick question. In your post your refereed to linking out via blog posts. Would it be a good idea to get a homepage link from your PBN for main anchor text and thin blog posts links for your subpages/deep pages.
Sure. I do it all the time.
Great work!
One question, Assume, if I use nofollow with all the links (authority sites and other except money site) that I’ve only used to look PBN more natural and increase trust, doesn’t it save link juice from passing to those sites and increase trust and authority?
What do you recommend? Dofollow for all links or dofollow for only MS links?
The belief is that if you nofollow your outbound authority links, you lose the benefit of doing it in the first place. Note: I haven’t tested this.
Hey Matt,
Great post. Thanks for sharing.
A few questions:
1. Diggity Links uses 8, but up to 12 is perfectly fine: what do you use as the minimum content length for having 8 OBLs?
2. If i am planning only Site A-> Site B, would it be better to 301 redirect it or to write a post and have a link in it?
Thanks man 🙂
1) Vary it up, but at least 400 words per article.
2) Personally, I’m not a big fan of 301s.
Didn’t keep this article open for a month 😉 Devoured it for dinner. Thanks!
Was it tasty?
Hi Matt,
Good article!
I really liked your site and found it helpful.
Does it really matters to have PB1, PB2, P3 pointing to a money site hosted:
a) The three PBNs in the same IP
b) The four ones.
Thank you!
Sorry Abel, but I don’t understand the question. Can you please rephrase?
Hey Matt. Dude awesome post.
Quick senario that I’m trying to figure out. So if the PBN has 100 LJP, and you post 5 articles each with 1 link to MS and 1 link to Authority site. Taking out trust, we are in theory sending 50 LJP correct? 100 LJP/5 Articles = 20LJP/acticle?
Thanks for the great content! I’m glued to my screen when something new comes out.
That’s correct, Jimmy.
this is my rule .let me tell what do you think -I have created pbn in gambling niche for my 2 clients.They have 2 money site ,one from cricket betting and another from soccer betting.
so whenever I write an article on my PBn I link to site 1 and site 2 +own YouTube video+PDF embed +1 authority site. (Random)
so tell me bro/dude is this o.k?
p.s I used random anchor text.
From what you’ve described, you’re likely making an OBL pattern.
Hey Matt,
Just wanted to pass on a quick thanks for all the value your providing!
I have a few things I’m curious about:
– If 80% of your PBN’s incoming link profile points naturally to the home page – will the most powerful Outbound links to your MS come from the PBN’s home page? Or is the LJ divided up evenly amongst the number of PBN posts and their outbound links?
– Do you use a 301 redirection plugin on your PBN’s to redirect broken links to the home page to increase its LJ output?
Cheers!
Hi Nigel.
1) All roads lead to your OB links. So even though the homepage links to innerpages, these innerpages in turn link back to the homepage. The only exit is your OBL.
2) Definitely not. Dangerous practice.
Best of luck.
Always a comes a great post with unique ideas and this is the best blog i ever read especially for building pbn’s.
Thanks Matt Diggy
Great post as always!
Quick question re: backlinks / anchors & timelines
Let’s say I have an ecommerce store with multiple products.
Each inner page (product page) will be linked to according to that product term’s anchor text diversity based on the top google results. For example, “Motorcycle helmet” to a motorcycle helmet page, “motorcycle boots” to a motorcycle boots page.
When you talk about backlink building and sending 1, 2, or 3 pbn links to your money site per week, is that for your site as a whole, or per inner page you’re trying to rank?
I’m treating each inner page as a fresh page regarding anchor text ratios but I want to nail the link velocity too. Thanks.
I typically only link with 1-3 PBNs to the entire site per week. Some projects with older domains and higher traffic can get up to 10 per week.
Thanks Matt!! I learned a lot. Can you also please write an article related to how to setup pbn’s, should we purchase auction domains or expired, the hosting we should select etc.
Thank you!! 🙂
Let’s see.
How does link juice work on a rolling blog? Does it gain all of the homepage link juice it’s duration on the homepage? Once it becomes a innerpage, does it lose that link juice?
Thanks in advance.
That’s correct.
Hey Matt! What’s your take on nav menu links to a money page that have anchor text in them? Would that anchor text over ride in-content anchor text b/c it sits above it? Or does Google somewhat ignore it and in-content always takes the cake?
Just curious since I have some money sites that have links to the main money pages in the nav menus.
The latter.
Another great one Matt! The one thing that always keeps me up at night are footprints. I try my best to keep track of everything but I’m always paranoid about leaving a footprint behind. Also I believe PBN’s are hands down the most powerful way to power up a website and move it up in the SERP’s for targeted keywords, and I always say, don’t stop linking until you get to where you want to be. Once again great post and I’ll be back for more soon!
I agree, Dillion.
So, do backlinks needs to be indexed to pass link juice/authority/TF.. or is that for relevancy?
Correct. If backlinks aren’t indexed, then they’re virtually ignored.
Matt,
My money site has links from UGC websites which aren’t indexed, but I can see them in search console. I guess Google consider noindexed links too, but I’m not sure that these links give benifits to the money site.
You’ve got me there.
offtopic question matt! may excessive blog commenting kill my site? I have done blog commenting manually. what will be the % passing link juice from blog commenting?
Thanks for your article. found some useful information.
Don’t worry about it unless you’ve spammed your anchors. Google likely ignores them completely. Besides, comments are nofollow.
Hi Matt.
Let’s say I have 10 articles on my pbn. Can I link from 3-5 articles to my money site and the remaining link to other authority websites ?
What I mean is how many articles pointing to your money site you should have on your pbn ?
The discussion in this article describes how link juice will be split up. Its entirely up to you. As for footprints, keep it random.
Hi Matt,
You should sell your “footprint detector” software. I was about to develop one, taking into account the order these links were added to each site. Why? Because it’s obvious that the 1st OBL will very likely point to the money site.
I think it’s not a problem to interlink your sites if you left no footprint of any sort (whois, theme, IP, DNS, SOA, etc.), if the articles are of decent quality and if they look good enough that a human being cannot really suspect them. I tend to add OBLs to sites that are not competitors (other peoples blog posts or articles on media sites or links to Wikipedia, etc.) and publish some articles without links. This way, even a competitor looking at some of my sites won’t be able to prove they’re part of a PBN.
Probably not. The software took a few thousand to develop and unfortunately just a few people like yourself see the value in it.
Is it your recommendation for every post on a PBN to have at least one OBL? That OBL will either be an authority site or money site?
Mix it up. That’s my recommendation.
Hey Matt. Do you consider homepage links themselves as footprints? I mean I virtually see very rarely real blogs doing outbound links from their homepage. In a comment above you said “The only exit is your OBL.” So why not use links from inner pages to the moneysite? BTW do your diggity links work for German sites as well?
Smart dude. This is definitely a diversity factor you need.
Do you do a lot of linking from inner pages of your PBNs if I may ask? I did it successfully in combination with some siloing so the PBN juice flows to my target page from where I link to the money site. “Successfully” means that I got measurable ranking improvements for pretty competitive keywords within 3 months of linking. Still it feels bad not to link from the homepage where the main power resides. I hope you dont mind that I ask all these question. I had a decent career path as a scientist before I got in the online marketing and I really have deep appreciation for your analytical and data driven approach. Most SEO bloggers just have opinions. I prefer your data. So thanks for all the value you provide here.
Not too often.
Linking to more than one money site is probably only possible if you have a lot of money sites right? I mean if you have just 3 money sites and 100 pbns you can only link to one money site per pbn because if you link to the same 2 or even 3 moneysites you will inevitably create a pattern. It is just combinatorics. Am I right here or do you know of a workaround? From the point of pbn-efficiency it might really be better to have a big bunch of money sites rather than just a few!!
You got it right.
I have multi niche site and 3 different posts in home niche category, my question is that can i make 3 backlinks in the pbn article for each url or use only one backlink at one time. For example I my post is about mouse,keyboard,laptop can i make 3 links in article for these 3 posts and publish on pbn is it good or not?
Sure, thats fine. Just don’t do it often.
If you’re sites are set up right, why would it matter if all had one link going to the same money site? I can see if they are lall on the same hosting or something.
That’s fine if it happens for one money site. But imagine if 30 sites linked to the same two money sites. Or how about 3?
Hi, Matt. Could you give your thinking about nofollow and sculpt link juice? In my e-commerce, I have pages such as: Contact, About us, Client Area, Shopping Cart and Links to social networks. These things almost every online store have. Would it be useful for me to use nofollow for all these links, and keep dofollow for everything else (products, categories, etc)?
Best regards 🙂
Nofollow contextual links that you don’t want juice to pass through.
Thank you very much Matt! 🙂
P.S: Thanks for update my links. I talked with Yone. You have a great team!
All good. We aim to serve.
CommentThanks so much man!
This article has almost covered everything pbn for me.
I was considering going further into building PBNs. But I was kind of stepping back every single time. I was afraid of doing it wrong and getting penalized.
Taking in mind that I was running just a one money site, I was really concerned. Now, I’ve started additional niche sites which I think would be great to give the PBNs a decent try.
Thanks again for all the information. The illustrations have made it way easier for me to understand many things and get to the point clearly.
All the best!