What you are about to learn is the result of a long road of testing. Testing that ultimately allowed me to fully understand a fundamental component of backlinking, and in particular, ways to make PBN links much more powerful than ever before.
Let’s assume you know the basics of how to build a PBN.
You know the proper place to acquire your domains and how to set them up accordingly. You know where to host your PBNs. You know how to test each site before adding a potentially poisonous domain to your network.
These are the fundamentals that should be fully understood before you can expect to leverage the knowledge you’re about to learn in this article. Assuming that you have a firm grasp on the essentials of PBNs, let’s move forward.
We’re about to take your PBN game to the next level.
The concept I’m about to show you is fairly simple in theory, but if it can be implemented in an intelligent way on your sites, you’ll be able to rank much more consistently and with less domains.
It All Started with a Theory
That theory is…
A PBNs ability to rank other sites is completely dependent on its own ability to rank.
Or in other words, healthy domains that have a good chance to rank on their own are the domains that you should use for your links.
This theory might seem simple to you, but if you think about this a bit more, you’ll start noticing evidence of this everywhere.
Examples
1. Clean Backlinks and Natural Anchor Text
One of the main criteria we use when considering a domain for purchase as a PBN is its backlink profile.
A potential PBN-candidate passes this test if it has a powerful backlink profile coming from authoritative sites, with a naturally diverse anchor text distribution.
Non-coincidentally, this is the same criteria you want for your money sites. And let’s not forget that SEO’s still use expired and auctioned domains as money sites.
On the other hand, a site with a spammy backlink profile and non-realistic anchors will never rank on its own, and certainly should not be used as a PBN.
2. Social Proof for PBNs
In the last year people have also started creating social profiles for their PBNs. Semantic Mastery’s IFTTT SEO Academy teaches this in particular (learn more). As such, people are reporting less de-indexes and higher rank-ability from their networks.
3. Pretty Sites Rank Better
We’ve known this for years. PBNs that have plenty of rich media (videos, images, etc.) will outperform purely textual sites.
It’s no coincidence that every how-to-make-a-PBN guide suggests that you periodically embed YouTube videos in your posts.
4. Changing Hosting Temporarily Kills Link Juice
This one might not be so obvious to you especially if you’ve never experienced it. Have you ever changed hosts on a money site and noticed that sometimes you temporarily drop in rankings for a few weeks?
Something similar happens to PBNs. In 2015 I completely migrated my entire network to premium hosting. Best move I’ve ever made, by the way. During that time, there was a solid month where most of my sites were delivering poor link juice. I’d keep adding links and there would be no movement in the SERPs.
This is just another example of how link juice delivery behaves similar to rank-ability. I can think of dozens of more examples and I’m sure you can too, but let’s move on and see how this knowledge can be used for SEO.
Case Study: Wayback Installations vs WordPress Rebuilds
Armed with my theory, I thought I’d run a quick test to answer an open question that the SEO community has long needed an answer for.
If you’re not already familiar, Wayback installations are an alternative way of setting up PBNs. Instead of installing WordPress, creating original content, and theming a site to your niche, you instead take an old snapshot of the original site from Archive.org’s Wayback Machine and install an HTML version of it. This can be performed with tools like the Wayback Machine Downloader.
Wayback installations are very convenient. They’re quick to setup, require no content to be generated, and theoretically have a less chance of deindex since it’s the original site that is being installed. From an ROI perspective, Wayback’s are awesome.
On the other hand, you typically end up with very thin sites with only a few pages of content. It’s also very common for tons of links and image-calls to be broken.
From my theory’s perspective, WordPress installations should outperform Waybacks. They’re more fully built-out and shouldn’t contain 404 errors or blank images.
The Test
I took 50 WordPress PBNs and tested them against 50 Wayback PBNs, all with similar metrics. To make things fair, sites in the Wayback test group were setup with the best Wayback Downloader installations out of the 100 testcases. These installations had the largest number of working pages and non-broken images.
These 100 PBNs were then independently linked to 3rd party test sites and monitored over 6 weeks. The testing technique I used is same that I use before adding PBN’s to my network.
Results
WordPress slayed Wayback in every category.
Average Ranking Increase
Winner = WordPress
You can expect an almost 2x better result with WordPress PBNs.
Number of Sites That Caused a Ranking Increase or Decrease
Winner = WordPress
The chances that your PBN does what you want is much higher.
Average Crawl Time after Placing Links
Winner = WordPress
Your links will be picked up by Google significantly faster.
If you’re reading this and you’re someone who uses Wayback’s, you shouldn’t abandon them straight away. There’s obviously an ROI balance that needs to be considered. But if you’re one of the types that wants quality over quantity, then stick to WordPress for the majority and mix it up now and then.
These results might be incredibly helpful for you and I’m very grateful that I could assist you… but that wasn’t even the big reveal of the article!
Read on, my friend…
The Next Generation of Blackhat SEO: PBN’s that Rank
Yep, I said it. You want to rank your PBNs.
The next level of PBNs involves sites that rank naturally in the SERPs and actually draw traffic.
I’m not talking about fake traffic. What I’m referring to is real, natural traffic flowing to your PBNs.
There’s been a lot of conversations lately in high-level SEO circles about the increase of “traffic” as a ranking signal. I’m sure you’ve seen sites with absolutely terrible SEO sitting in the top 3. Why? Because traffic they’re generating is keeping them there.
Going back to the theory that sites which have ranking signals can provide more link juice, let’s imagine what would happen if your PBNs ranked and had traffic themselves.
- Well first off, your links are justified. People are actually reading the sites that are providing your juice, so the ranking increase makes sense.
- If you have links coming from sites that are receiving traffic and some of that traffic actually clicks those links, this is where turbo-power link juice comes from.
- Your referring domains are now ranked. I think we can all agree that links from sites that are already ranked in your niche is significantly stronger than links coming from completely unranked sites.
- Lastly, let’s not forget this nice bonus, some of your traffic is bound to convert once it gets to your money site.
A: Dude, stop doing 2012 SEO. Your PBNs should look beautiful anyways. You should already be building PBNs with the primary aim of passing manual reviews.
Besides, the people clicking on search results are the general public. To them, it’s a normal site.
In summary, getting traffic to PBNs will not only justify your backlinks, but it will boost their power as well.
Let’s see how it’s done.
How to Create a Traffic Delivery Network
Instead of thinking about your network as a set of sites whose sole purpose is to deliver link juice, start to shift your paradigm into creating a traffic delivery network.
Ranking an expired/auction domain is much easier than you might think. Remember, these are aged domains with tons of power and authoritative backlinks. Just a couple of years ago it was en vogue to use expired domains for all money sites.
These sites already have link juice flowing to them. We just need to optimize it by creating complete sites that can utilize that link juice properly.
1. Longtail targeting
Remember, we don’t need a ton of traffic to these sites. We’re not trying to rank for big ticket keywords.
So instead of writing articles with titles like “What is Garcinia Cambogia?”, instead make them something like “Can Garcinia Cambogia Help You Lose Baby Fat in Three Weeks?”. If you write enough posts going after longtail, eventually you’re going to rank for something and draw in traffic.
2. Elite onsite SEO
This is probably the most challenging part of the process.
- Structure the theme of the article to target your longtail topic and make sure that it’s placed into your critical onsite SEO spots: URL, Title Tag, H1, etc.
- Use niche-specific target keyword densities, structural markup, and silo when needed.
- Add schema and review stars.
- Create relevance through interlinking
- Utilize outbound authority links
- And don’t forget fresh content
It’s completely worth it to train your staff on the basics of onsite SEO.
3. Setup IFTTT syndication
As discussed above, setup IFTTT to syndicate your blog content to your social fortress. Every time you create a new post, it should be shared on your Facebook page, tweeted on Twitter, and pinned on Pinterest.
This will create social activity that will help to justify the existence of your newly recreated website.
4. Make your sites look amazing
Set the foundation for an easily rankable site. Install a nice premium theme, add plenty of images and videos, and fill your site with readable content. Instead of ordering the $2 Iwriter articles, get the $5 ones and have an in-house proofreader.
Build your sites with the goal of passing a manual review. If you’re creating your sites with this paradigm in mind, ranking and drawing traffic is a natural side effect.
While this all might sound like a huge undertaking, these are the kind of results you can expect…
Results
I have a real, affiliate money site in the beauty niche that brings in about 1100 visitors per day. This is the same testcase that you might have heard me talking about recently if you follow me on Facebook (case study coming soon).
First, check out the current rankings and massive search volume for this site.
Here’s the crazy part… this site is ranking for these high search volume terms with only 14 PBN links. The network isn’t super powerful. Their metrics average around the range of DA 20-30 and TF >10-20. But all the sites have all been optimized for ranking and you can clearly see that their power speaks for themselves.
Now check out where the referral traffic is coming from…
One TDN Site Generates More Traffic Than a 1000-Fan Facebook page
(Daily Referral Traffic)
About 9.4% of this site’s daily traffic is coming from the referral traffic. Over half of that is coming from the PBN. Not only that, but the number one referral traffic source is one of the PBN sites, which brings in more traffic than a 1000 (real) member Facebook fan page. How about them apples?
And for the finale… the very same traffic, just coming from the #1 PBN to my money site makes me on average 2.1 conversions per day. That’s $96/day. This single PBN is actually performing pre-sales for my money site.
Conclusion
If you want your network to deliver next-level power, treat them like money sites. Get them ranked, and you’ll be part of the next generation of grey hat SEOs.
Completely agree, we’ve been testing the power of dropped domains by seeing where they rank for the meta title of the domain reg’s holding page and building out a site accordingly.
Solid start, Chuck!
It will be very awesome if you cover these 2 problems by a case study:
1- 301 to the homepage as a short 404 under google eyes.
2- Old backlink will be gone if expired domain change to different topic.
Thanks. Will note that down.
Hey Matt,
Yet another awesome share.
One of the reasons that I think why the WordPress sites might have outranked the Wayback archive ones is that they are super niche relevant to the money site while Wayback restores might not be that close in terms of topic relevancy.
Anyways, keep up the good work and keep sharing those insider secrets with your readers. 😉
This awesome . Start out with pbn turn it into a money site.Can’t wait to try this
Excellent post. Thank you, as always Matt, for your willingness to share such helpful information.
While I was still absorbing the knowledge you shared on the webinar…you have dropped another bomb..you did mention something about TDNs on it and here is the in-depth study. Thank you for sharing your testing results.
Was expecting this post for so long now!
Thanks for providing the results for the tests, that’s awesome.
Would be nice to see you blog more frequently with info like this.
How much $ do you spend for one TDN per year?
finding the domain, buying it, hosting, design, content, time involvement from your staff, powering up your TDN link’s profile etc.
Thanks,
Vincent
Good question. Probably about $50.
Hi Matt, would you consider Namecheap hosting as a premium one?
Sure.
$50 total for domain, buying it, hosting, design, content, time involvement from your staff, powering up your TDN link. I am curious what is your breakdown of the costs. Considering content can be expensive, 10 articles alone can cost $50…
Much more expensive than than that. I haven’t boughten a domain for less than $100 in at least a year.
Great work Matt and very interesting. The idea of building a kind of network of Money Site PBNs is a powerful one and worth much deeper investigation. Keep up the good work champ.
Thanks Terry, much appreciated.
PBN’s still work but I believe you have to be careful with them.
One day, Google will find out how to detect them
amazing article matt (y) waiting for your next case study
Traffic, traffic, traffic! Make those PBNs send you traffic and you’ll be on your way. Thanks for sharing man! Amazing post as usual.
Great article Matt. Alternative title to start a controversy and get social shares – PBNs are truly dead – money sites are the way to go!
Essentially we need to give up on quick easy fake sites and build real websites that link to our shall we call it primary money site.
Dale.
Just my thoughts on PBNs – quality, not quantity.
Pretty awesome post Matt. Didn’t expect this post to come in so soon after the webinar when you mentioned it.
My question is…
I take it the sites are very closely related to the target money site.
Do you research and rank for new long-tails on each PBN site? Or do you just dominate the first page for the same ones? 10 site PBN = whole 1st page taken 🙂
I typically hit longtail keywords on my PBN that my money site won’t be going for. More angles.
Hey Matt,
Yeah I get that. What I meant was keywords on PBN sites themselves. Do they target different set of long-tails each?
Not necessarily. The main goal is traffic, and that can be accomplished however you find most efficient.
Interesting case study between WP and Wayback. About how many pages did each WP site contain? Meaning is a WP install with only a few articles still more powerful than a Wayback restore with the same number of pages? I don’t see why Google would care unless you are saying it’s because of the articles relevance. Thanks.
WP sites have about 10 on average. Waybacks have anywhere from 3-50. Not sure why exactly WP is slaying Wayback, but the data speaks.
Great post. Were the PBNs you tested from auctions or totally expired?
Mixed.
I’ve believed the theory that traffic + authority back links preferably related to your niche is the most powerful metric above all for years. I mean it’s only logical. PBNs should be microsites, I know people who have been doing this for years. It’s definitely important to make the most out of your PBNs as possible as they are valuable assets in their own right, and you can even monetize them if you rank them for something profitable, i.e long tail money keyword.
i can see “TDN” catching up as a frequently used phase in the seo community 😀
Also matt, I have been trying to get a site selling adult products in my country.
While the competition is fairly low, its hard to find QUALITY domains in the adult niche, also the amount of seo information when it comes to adult niche is fairly low . Is buying high quality travel domain and posting articles like ” cheap toys to carry while travelling” for example and pointing sape links to the pbn a good strategy?
I can’t think of anything else. Please help 🙂
I should proofread my writing more often
Not really. The reason you buy expired domains in the first place is for the naturally occurring white hat links going to them. Add SAPE to it and you’ve just lost that.
Awesome.
In terms of the IFTTT set-up and social properties for each PBN, do you train a VA/staff to do this for you or do you use a service? – Any link/recommendations appreciated.
Cheers,
Tom.
Hi Tom, I do everything in-house.
Very insightful and it does make a lot of sense.
For someone who doesn’t build a lot of PBNs and who doesn’t have the resources to outsource his PBN building would you rather build more PBNs “the old way” or build fewer PBNs and link out less frequently (because they take longer to setup), but make your PBNs quality websites (= TDNs) instead?
Make them quality and you’ll be able to rank with much fewer PBNs.
Another epic post! Makes total sense. Thanks
niche thanks for sharing. i use small pbn with web.2.0. i create quality content and rank to my money site…
Awesome, Matt. You always give surprise to us. I believe Google does hate you, LOL!
BTW, you suggest to place longtail keywords to PBN. The domain usually has good metrices, we buy it, change orignal topic, place niche related content, target to a longtail keyword. But this site will be easy into sandbox. Just like we used to do in the past, rank KWs asap with old domains, it’s not work after sandbox algorithms.
Could not agree more and we tested dormant links vs trafficked links a while back and you are spot on as always. We actually do a branded IFTTT and two LSI longtail IFTTT rings because then we actually try to rank the web2 properties for long tail easy keyphrases relevant to the niche which are sent to the pbns to give freshness of links, traffic and hopefully then follow the article outbound links through to the money sites. There is so many various ways to drive traffic and when running tools on the web2 properties where your actually IFTTT are naturally following, liking and other and sharing other profiles in your niche you are actually driving traffic even without searches in google but direct from people in tumblr, weebly, pinterest, facebook and twitter etc. So many places you can drive this from and end of the day improving rankings is awesome but traffic is the most important factor to consider. Another class article shared and look forward to meeting up in November pal 🙂
Good stuff. Thanks for stopping by and contributing, James.
Awesome article Matt.
I was never into waybacks even though they are much cheaper. WP is the future and anyone making a blog or site these days would choose that over html site. On top of that, even a handful of conversions from your TDN can pay for expenses you had to build it.
You hit the nail on the head.
Great article Matt, my method is testing a PBN is pretty simple, I will write a quality article, add an image or 2, a video and use a longtail keyword, if it hits the top 5 pages I know it’s clean and will work well. I’ve done with for a while and it’s never failed. If the site doesn’t rank I drop it. I agree if the site is a “goer” using IFTTT is the next logical step, as you rightly say, if you’re links don’t tally up with the traffic google knows something isn’t right and legit traffic from whatever source warrants the backlinks.
Great approach. Thanks for contributing, Mark.
Another best post by Matt. Thanks a lot
I’ve some concerns, making a 20 or even 30 PBN sites that will actually receive decent a traffic isn’t difficult for me.
But if I’ve 5 different niches such as Games, Health, Financial etc then how I can use all my money website on those 20 Traffic Delivery Network sites, it will not triggered spam if the website is getting traffic on games and I put health post on them? Do you get me, Matt?
Keep your PBN’s niche specific. Personally, each of my PBNs will only point to one money site.
Hi Matt,
great article as usual! I got a very basic question, though:
Should I create different webmaster tools accounts and analytics accounts etc for each of my money websites, even if they are in a completely different niche? If yes, do you use proxies when entering these different account?
And let’s say your have all PBNs on different hosting providers, is there anything I should consider? Like using proxies?
Thanks
For money sites: you absolutely should use different gmail/WMT/analytics accounts for each of them. There’s been too many horror stories of a person getting a money site penalized and losing all of their sites in the same account. And yes, use different proxies.
For PBNs: Some say you should use different proxies when setting them up and logging into them. Some ignore that. I always err on the side of caution.
thank you for your answer! There are a lot of proxy providers out there… Could you name 1 or 2 providers which you can recommend or recommend a minimum price what one should at least invest to get a good proxy and not a scam?
Squidproxy isn’t bad.
Hey I tried squidproxy and when I check them on https://whoer.net/ they get 90% anonymity. Is that sufficient or do I need 100% for google webmaster tools etc.? Another question, do you create different adsense accounts for the different money sites, as well? If yes, how do you do that? Because even if you use fake names etc. you somehow have to get the money out of adsense…
Squidproxy words well for me.
No, I don’t mess with AdSense.
one more question here: the email you are using for adsense is one you are not using for any WMT, GA or googlemail accounts or do you have other accounts assigned to that mail, as well? So currently I am using the same gmail address for adsense, WMT and analytics. If I add new money sites with different gmail addresses for MWT and analytics, what do I do for adsense?
Sorry, wish I could help but I don’t do Adsense.
Great stuff dude!
Awesome post as usual Matt, really appreciate it.
How many published pages do you usually wait for a TDN to have before linking out to your money site?
Thanks
Roughly about 8+ indexed pages on the site.
Hey
Awesome stuff as usual, would you say that doing this overpowers the earlier method of testing the quality of the domain by linking to some other site?
Would you do either one or both? If both then how ?
Thanks
Hi Ayush, they’re mutually exlusive.
Thanks for the reply,
I am just trying to understand the timeline. I want to build 5 PBNs and so this is a bit confusing.
1. First I test them with your earlier method and then add more posts to turn into a tdn?
2. Or I start off testing it as a TDN and if it ranks which would mean it’s good so no need to test and can link to my money site?
3. Or you have two separate lists which you separate and decide what to turn into TDN and test by linking?
Just confused about the setting up timeline.
Thanks
I go with #1. For a test, all you need to do is restore a wayback. If unfortunately you find that the domain is a no-go, then its not as big of a loss.
Just what I was thinking. First test it and if its good to go invest more time in it.
Thanks for the help man.
Such freaking awesome info… I have two questions that keep dancing in my mind.
1. I was thinking… (I figured you were talking about the waybackdownloader html) The waybackdownloader has a service where they integrate with wordpress for a little bit more money ($30) http://waybackdownloader.com/pricing/ Would you say it’s ok to use them for all the pbn’s now?
2. Do I have to keep buying new proxies every time I create a new site for my pbn? I’m asking because people keep talking about not having footprints. The last thing I want to do is to buy a pbn domain from the same ip as my money site and I get flagged (footprint detected).
1) I’ve never tested it so I can’t really comment.
2) Not really. I don’t go to that extent. Just don’t use chrome and block your google fonts.
Hi Matt, another great article thank you! Don’t you plan to write something about finding domains?
Not likely. I’m sourcing domains probably a lot different than most people have access to.
Hey Matt,
For the wordpress sites, did you get new content written, or did you take the content from the wayback, and use it to build out the wordpress site?
Thanks,
Mike
New content.
HI Matt,
Awesome share thanks!
I have a couple pbns(4) for same niche that rank into 3 and 4 page of Search with inner pages.These pbns link to the same client MS.If i want to boost them could i create 1 expired domain with 4 relevant articles and link for each one to the 4 PBNS ? Is that a footprint ?
I don’t do any tiered linking with my PBNs. Focus on onsite and longtail instead to rank PBNs.
Great article.
I have building out my PBNs for a while now. Ever since Google cracked down on PBNs.
What I have found very successful is making my PBNs into magazine sites. That way I can legitimately have different types of articles and content and I don’t have to worry about branding them any certain way.
I mix the content with original and cut-n-paste so it looks all natural.
One of my PBNs garners over 1500 visits a day by hitting multiple long tail keywords. In fact I am thinking about selling advertising on the site and collecting emails from this site.
Just my two cents.
Hey Jay… Can you explain how you set those up? I was wanting tinted the same thing.
Can you supercharge a 301 redirect with social signals and will building links to a 301 pass through same as a reverse silo since you are redirecting one link and getting juice from hundreds/thousands of links.
Hey Chris. That’s essentially correct. Building links through a 301 is theoretically the same as tiered link building. However, social signals will not pass any juice.
Social Signals don’t pass juice but accordingly. This is what I meant https://diggitymarketing.com/case-study-do-social-signals-really-boost-pbn-links/
If you add social signals will it give a positive ranking effect since you are reviving the 301 same as a pbn.
Could the lower rankings from Waybacks be due to the broken links/images, bad on-site, etc?
Definitely.
Awesome post Matt! Couple of questions for you, have you ever tested running Facebook ads to get some traffic to your PBNs as well? Does that help at all?
Also, what’s your take on blocking bots? I feel like if you’re building really high-quality PBNs, that really look like money sites, there’s really no reason to block them. Unless you’re in a very competitive niche and your competitors keep trying to take your links down?
Would be great to know your thoughts on those two questions.
Keep up the amazing posts!
1) Yes, FB ads works like a charm. But I’d rather run them straight to the money site.
2) I block bots simply because of competitors reporting, as well as being able to reverse engineer my SEO.
Thank you for the great article. I have a small PBN(5) for local seo. I have opened a gmail account for every 5 of them. Is it a footprint to connect each one of my PBN’s with google tools like webmasters and analytics via their own gmail accounts? Especially when I’m connecting let’s say for PBN n1 pbn1@gmail.com, and after pbn2@gmail.com and so on… from the same IP? Appreciate the answer 🙂
There really should be no need to use any G products other than YouTube. But the part about the IP, doesn’t matter.
So basically the “next generation of blackhat SEO” is white hat SEO, more or less anyway?
If you are building networks of thematically similar sites, linking to one another only when relevant and valuable to the user, engaging in social media networks and driving real traffic that actually converts aren’t we just talking about good ol’ fashion, roll up your sleeves and grind it out white hat SEO?
Sure. But the question is about ROI. How much effort to put into sites that don’t directly make you money? You need to find the minimum viable product (MVP) that gets results in the form of traffic.
Great stuff Matt! If I already restored a PBN site using archive.org and placed a link to my money site, would it make sense to redo the site using WordPress, make the content more relevant to my niche, and then link to the same money site? Or would you leave it as is?
Waybacks still get the job done, but WordPress gets the job done better. As mentioned in the article, its a question of ROI.
Hey Matt,
Do you think that you would have had similar results by getting the PBN’s ranked even without the traffic?
That would require some kind of test to answer accurately. A test that’s likely impossible to put together. 🙂
I will try this 100%!
But if my PBN got deindex do I have to remove the links to my money site or it doesn’t matter?
I would definitely remove them.
Hey Matt,
One question I forgot to ask is in this case study, did you rank the Homepages of the PBN’s or the Internal Pages of the PBN?
Homepages.
Homepages link is better than inner page link, how about a risk?
Sorry, I don’t understand the question.
Hey Matt, I do have an additional question for you, do you think their is any inherent benefit in ranking the homepage as opposed to the inner page or does it come down to preference?
Homepage gets an advantage because it will typically attract more links (white hat) than an inner page. But theoretically, they both have an equal chance to rank.
Hey Matt!
Do you link to your money site differently from a TDN than from a PBN? In order not just to pass link juice but also traffic.
I’ll write the content a little bit better as to bait a clickthrough, but without sacrificing naturalness.
One question Matt, for the case study using Wayback sites, did you do anything to the sites as far as fixing links and taking out the Wayback links? Or did you just download the file and upload and that’s it?
I have a bunch of html sites using Terry’s builder as well. But after rebuilding them, I go in and change all of the broken links. Many of the sites do rank and are really strong. Plus there is a bit of diversity as far as platforms for the PBN. Plus one site less I need to worry about getting hacked.
And you’re right. I’ve been using this strategy for a long time. Not only are these sites more powerful, but as a PBN link seller, you’re able to charge more for these links because they’re really “guest post” links.
Great article! Thanks!
Hey Bill. Thanks for the kind words. To answer your question, the waybacks all get cleaned up. Images are corrected, links are fixed, footprints removed.
Got it, interesting! Thanks Matt!
Amazing article Matt,
Do you think if you would put amazon links on the PBN it would generate more sales (Keeping the footprint problem aside)?
Also, I am making a network of websites, They all are linked to each other but they are all good, unique content rich websites which are getting a lot of external backlinks. I am not making it a PBN network, rather I plan to keep the footprint open with common GA code, AZ code, same server,etc and show that I own all the sites. What is your take on it?
Also, for the PBN where you get the most traffic, how many links are there from the PBN to the money site?
Thanks and keep up the good work 🙂
Hey Russel. I monetize PBNs in special cases. Normally I look at user behavior and see how they’re interacting with the site. If they’re buyer oriented, then I’ll toss up Amazon or Adsense.
To answer your second question, normally I just link once to the money site. Maybe twice.
How do you avoid footprint issue
Very very very long topic, my friend.
Hey Matt,
Thank you so much for the informative article. I definitely think that TDNs are the way of the future.
I have just one question for you –
When we’re striving to build these blogs into real sites. Do you think it’s possible to link more than the usual number of times to our money site? On a normal PBN site, you wouldn’t want to link too many times, but in this case where we’re building a “real site”, would it not be natural to link to authority sites multiple times, even if it’s always the same few? Especially when you’re constantly pushing out quality and fresh content on these TDN blogs.
Any input would be greatly appreciated. I’m just trying to figure out how far we can push the value of these TDNs since they require much more effort than usual to build.
Thank you again for sharing, I really appreciate it!
Best regards,
Nicholas
Sure. Just ask yourself if it seems natural. If it could happen in the real world.
People blog about what they know about. Someone who is really into crossfit and has a blog about crossfit… he’s very likely to link to crossfit.com multiple times.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m getting at. I’m just wondering for our case, we’d want to link to our money site and pass that off as the authority site. You’re saying that as long as the content is relevant, it’s perfectly natural to link to our money site multiple times?
Appreciate your responses, Matt
It doesn’t need to be an authority site for someone to link to something repeatedly. It can still happen in the real world, so hence, its fine to do.
Nice post and it’s very useful for SEO, from now i will follow your all post. Thanks for posting useful information
Awesome stuff man. I found you though Facebook groups and now i can’t stop reading your posts. Questions: what software do you use to track your rankings? Any you recommend for a person on a low budget (at the moment).
Thanks in advance Matt!
Hi Alex, I use ProRankTracker, SERPfox, and SERPWoo. All have free trials for limited amounts of keywords.
BOOM!
Kickin’ ass w/ PBNs in 2016 – and yes, it is a lot of work but if it adds that much value to PBNs. we should go for it.
Got a question to your statement “14 PBNs ranking high volume KWs”: are those 14 PBNs all topical relevant (TTF) or more generic kind of PBNs?
thank you!
Non-relevant with regards to TTF.
Hey Matt,
I wanted to share some thoughts about recreating old Archive.org content and I am interested in your opinion on that term.
1) So there was a lot of talking about recreating old sites / content from archive.org… because in Google’s eyes those 404 to 301 redirects are seen as soft 404 and so thats not a good way anymore. Also there was some talk about legal problems from recreating the old content, like DCMA complaints or something like that.
So my idea was to recreate like 5 to 10 of the best old subpages. Best from the power of links or the number of backlinks pointing to them. To not getting some legal trouble my idea was to cloak the old content (text and pictures) only to Googlebot. For example with reverse DNS or just with user agent.
But its said that Google counts those 404 to 301 as soft 404 because of the wrong user behaviour… so will it trick the algo if only Google sees the old content, but not the user? He just might see a 404 or something else.
2) When I have an old PBN about physics and I recreate some old pages that had content about Physics… and then my whole new PBN is about Casino. Would it not be better to recreate the old URL structure and then just put some new Casino content on the old urls that have backlinks? Any idea how Google would see that?
Thanks for reading my comment, I am really interested in your opinion.
Bye
Nils
Will discuss this in my next post. 🙂
Hi Matt,
This is an eye opening and awesome content! Which caused me to have some questions 🙂 Hoping you can point me to the rigth direction with those.
1) Should the main article in PBN (that has money link in it) need to be around mix of the domain’s old theme & money site relevant?
Example: If domain’s previous theme was about “Sewing” will you write the title something like:
“Get rid of the fat you gain while sitting and sewing with the help of Garcinia Cambogia in Three Weeks?”
or do you think it’s not necessary and you just focused on money site’s theme:
“Can Garcinia Cambogia Help You Lose Baby Fat in Three Weeks?”
2) For the filler articles in PBN, do you write them as mixed theme (sewing + health), or just focused on money site theme or more leaning towards to old site’s theme?
3) Do you think the relevancy of the traffic coming to PBN is important for powering up the money sites?
If my PBN gets some traffic around the old theme “sewing” does it count as powerful as getting traffic from long tail Garcinia keywords (for the money site in weight loss)?
I think it can be fairly easy to rank the site on it’s old theme for lot of long tail keywords vs the new theme? But not sure the effectiveness.
4) Do you only link out from homepage of the PBN or link out from inner pages too? If so have any ratio and according to what or just randomly?
Thanks a lot Matt, learning a ton from you. Looking forward to your upcoming article about PBNs!
Best,
Malin
Thanks for the nice words…
1) Having PBN domains coming from the niche you’re going after helps, for sure. But as far as trying to repurpose based on article bridging… I can’t imagine that would help much. Feel free to test though.
2) Same as above.
3) In my case, my PBNs are from niches that aren’t similar to my main topic. Seems to work just fine.
4) I make blogs, so there’s going to be a link from the home page and also the inner article page.
Hey Matt,
I read your posts and comments like every few days to get as much from them as I can and then I implement them on my site. Don’t stop testing and writing 😉
One thing I don’t quite get is:
Above you answered that you rank the Homepages, but in the last comment you said that you make blogs.
So on the homepage there are few full posts and one of them is highly optimized for a longtail you target. So in order to rank the homepage you just set website SEO title optimized for this longtail too?
Otherwise, only this optimized post (inner-page) will have a chance of ranking for this keyword, am I right?
Keep in mind, for my money site networks, I only link out to one money site. So I can indeed have multiple posts, but they’re all very focused on what I want to rank.
I probably just overcomplicate the concept. I think I have 2 options:
1) Right now I have a single optimized page set as a Front Page and a Blog page set as a Posts page with 5-10 very related posts and linked to this Front Page with a mixture of URL/partial/exact anchors of the long tail keyword I target.
2) Is it better to just optimize homepage title, h1 for the long tail keyword and keep the front page as a blog style with full posts very relevant to this keyword (same linking to the homepage as I mentioned above)?
I’ll probably test 2 concepts for myself, but curious of your opinion.
It’s possible that this won’t matter as much and both ways should work fine 😉
Either works. At the end of the day, this is a numbers game. Not all PBNs will rank. The idea is to do your best job at the attempt and monitor the results. Sometimes static homepage works. Sometimes the blogroll works.
I have been wondering what other people have been seeing for index rates for Wayback site vs WordPress. WordPress is awesome and structured great. Makes sense they index faster and outrank old dead sites.
Great post Matt.
Thanks, Travis.
Hey Matt, just want to say thanks I’ve implemented this to my old pbns and saw a good increase after them without directing any new link to my site!
However there is one thing that makes me worry about my PBNs all the time. I’m giving links to my money sites via the homepage of those pbns 8/10 times. But wondering what are your thoughts on that in terms of footprint?
Don’t you think Google may detect all the links coming from homepages that attached anchor text with money keywords?
Would like to hear what do you think and the way you approach to this? Thanks mate!
Mix it up. You can send some inner page links from PBNs as well. Or you can send citations: https://diggitymarketing.com/local-citations-for-affiliate-sites/
Matt,
Great article. You’re master when it comes to PBN Links. I’m hoping to use your PBN links for my next niche site if I’m lucky you are accepting new clients at the time. Only a few high quality links from https://rankclub.io/the-link-service/ are much better and safer than those cheap low quality links found everywhere on the internet.
Looking to see how SEO will change in 2017
Thanks, Dennis.
Hi Matt,
When you pick long tails to rank, does the amount of searches per month matter?
Not really. We’re not looking for boat loads of traffic. Just enough to justify the link. Which isn’t much.
I am the owner of Waybackmachinedownloader.com. I feel this article gives Wayback Machine downloaders a bad reputation. I see you used our competitor for your research, which resulted in some mediocre SEO performance. The results would have probably been better with our software, since we:
-Redirect www to non-www (or vice versa) to avoid duplicate content.
-Remove broken images
-Create a sitemap.xml to improve crawling speed (this is one of the points you make in the article)
-Have an option to decrease the number of outbound links. This is to avoid the link juice being diluted over all outgoing links.
All those things are good for SEO and none of them are offered by the service that you used for your research. We are also cheaper. Our large customers pay about $1 per site recovery, which makes it very economical in comparison to building PBNs with WordPress
Google should not be able to see the difference between a recovered WordPress website and an actual WordPress website. Both return HTML pages. The difference from your research must be caused by either the bad SEO done by the original website, or by the mediocre recovery method from our competitor. There is no technical difference for search engines between static HTML websites and WordPress. Google can’t scrape dynamic content.
Alright, so far the shameless self-promotion 😉
If you want to try our software, contact me and I’ll give you free access for a few weeks, so you can test our tool.
Definite self-promotion, but some points nonetheless. Will ping you if I get back into using waybacks.
Few times ago i read this amazing article and tried to create some traffic generating pbns. I took 5 pretty good domains (ahrefs DR 35-55) and create wp blogs (from 5 to 20 pages) for different themes, target keys have just 100k-500k search results. Now i checked this sites and get some strange, but identical results.
Google gives 1-5 unique visitors per day for each site. And main pages aren’t on search results on target keys, even at first 15 pages. But all secondary pages have pretty good results, they on 1-5 pages. What is this and why?:)
P.S. And, as always, sorry for poor english. Your blog is one of the reason to improve it.
Impossible to say without personally taking a look. There’s too many variables involved.
do you power up your pbns?
By linking to them? Absolutely no. But I’ll power them up by other means.
Hi Matt!!
You know, I’m wondering… Say I make my PBN get some nice traffic, but all this traffic is going to “Page A” inside the PBN site.
If I post my link on the HomePage or in a different inner page (Like “Page B”) none of which get any traffic DIRECTLY… Is my PBN links still going to boosted by the traffic the PBN site is getting as a whole??
Or the boost applies ONLY if the page that has the PBN link is THE ONE getting some traffic?
What’s your gut feeling, Jorge?
Oh Matt… You’re the best mentor ever 🙂 Making me re-think stuff over and over and analyze things several times in my head 😛 haha
Well, I’m going to go with “YES, any PBN link is boosted as long as is placed inside a PBN site that gets traffic as a whole, like a real money site”
But please feel free to slap me in the back of the head if I miss this one, with all confidence 🙂
So… Did I get it right?
You’re right. :p
Hi Matt,
I’m curious about if I make my PBN generate traffic with articles that are topically relevant to my money site but the PBN itself doesn’t that much relevant. Do you think it will cause the same positive effect? Thanks so much for putting this out!
Traffic is traffic. Besides, if your “PBN generates traffic with articles that are topically relevant to (your) money site” I don’t see how it could not be relevant.
I meant the backlinks & previous content in those PBNs when they were normal sites before I bought them. Such as a PBN site which was about cars but I will re-theme it around home improvement niche and then it will rank for non-commercial long tails for home improvement related terms via the power of that domain.
Was wondering if that looks suspicious by any means in Google’s eyes or will get diminished results because of the unmatching backlink & content history? Had any experience like that?
Thank you so much for answering those silly questions 🙂
Quite possible, but impossible to accurately test. I always keep my PBN’s themed along the backlink relevancy.
Awesome article, i am looking for the backlink guide , finally found it in your blog() . thanks for sharing this .
Hello Matt, when rebuilding your PBNs in WordPress do you also rebuild the URL structure of what it previously was?
We all know that HTML Wayback Downloaders will download the whole website, then all’s you gotta do is upload that baby and its up and running….
With a WordPress install however, you’re starting from a clean slate that means no inner pages….so do you manually add those pages back?
Check this article.
Hello Matt,
what is your opinion on PBNs containing my target KW in the domain name? Eg. My main KW is “ocean fish” and I get a PBN named best-ocean-fish-ever.com?
Is there anything I need to be cautious about?
Clean EMD PBNs are about as rare as black swans. That said, if you can get them, they’re awesome.
You do a comparison of wordpress vs wayback html —
wayback will restore an html site to wordpress, I am sure you are aware of that —
so in your test have the wordpress sites been restored to the wayback version
if not —
Since the wordpress out performed the html — wouldn’t restoring the wayback version to your wordpress site — the way to go in your opinion.
What I am doing is having the wayback restored to my expired domain’s wordpress install – moving the existing menu to the bottom so urls and content do not change — and then build me new silo’d content on the new top menu — and then interlinking them or siloing them all —
The reason I am doing this is because in the past I have never been able to maintain the juice of the expired domains — after 6 months all the power has always disappeared and I am looking for a way around that happening
Sounds like a lot of work. I simply go wayback to html for the time saving benefit. If I was more focused on retaining power, then complete WordPress rebuild is the better option.
Hello Matt ,
I have been following your advice making traffic generating PBN and yes they are more powerful than some thin content PBN made for links only . I do have a question do you hide those PBN from back links Crawlers like ahref , majestic and other to make them safe from your competitors or you just leave them as it is ?
I am not blocking crawlers right now what do you suggest ..should I block them or not ? if yes then what method is effective a robot file or htacesss .
Just wanted to be sure if this doesn’t leave any footprint behind
I block mine through a mix of .htaccess and a proprietary solution.
WOW . Same thing I’m doing these day. I set up Web 2:0 properties then target them for long tail keywords and ranked them.
Hi Matt, thanks for the awesome share!
Does the traffic to the PBN need to be Google only, or any kind of traffic? And if any kind of traffic will do, what about fake traffic visiting the PBN post and clicking through to the money site?
Thanks for the reply!
Google traffic, because that’s essentially the only traffic that Google can see (or estimate) unless you’re using Chrome or analytics.
And don’t even bother trying to fake traffic.
Matt, knowledge is superior as always. Building out the pbn’s to give value to a visitor is definitely the way to not only generate sales and traffic from your money site but can also bring you referral traffic and even sales on your pbn’s. The right sites and promotion is key.
Thanks for the tips.
Appreciate the kind words and concurence with my approach. 🙂
If we continue to create articles, can we get good traffic for our site ?? Or have to use SEO..
Just how quality content doesn’t work for money site SEO, it also doesn’t work for PBN.
Nice information you provide, but I am a little confused with SEO to get good rankings in the google search engine. Actually if we use PBN can we improve our site on the first page of google?
That’s the word on the street. 🙂
Thank you for the information you provide. I am currently doing some ways to improve my site rank better in the google search engine. With this information, I am a little helpful to use PBN better.
Hey Matt quick question. I know a guy that is ranking really good in a health niche with PBNs that are created on fresh tld domains on T1 (.info for .88$ I guess). With no existing link profile at all. You will find 3-4 posts where 1 contains a link to the MS. Then those T1 pbns are spammed with web20 (probably rankerx) on T2 and gsa on T3. Can you tell me how is that possible? Shouldn’t such domains have no impact at all?
There could be many variables involved that you’re not considering, such as hidden PBNs. That said, I can’t imagine how fresh domains backed by tiers of web2 and spam would work in 2017… but I definitely could be wrong. I’m not much of a black hat anymore.
Hi Matt,
You have said, that usually you try to rank PBN’s homepage . Does it mean, that you always link to a money site from PBN’s homepage and don’t use inner pages (posts on WP) for linking?
Thank you for your articles! I have learned a lot of things from you.
I use both. But if you link from a PBN homepage and you have the blog on a homepage, then you cannot avoid sending an inner page link as well.
Would you say that recreating old niche PBNs into a totally different new niche still work fine nowadays? Doesn’t google know that the old links were coming to a site that was about sailing and the new website is about real estate?
As of today, yes, it’s ok. That said, I still go niche-relveant to future proof myself and my network.
Hi Matt; Thank you for all these precious information on this blog.
I have one general question for you! Actually I have 3 questions in total 🙂
After reading for years over years, it is now time for me to experiment but I am stuck on a very basic thing; and a couple of more things..
When we set up PBNs for ranking, I understand that for each and every keyword we should create another PBN which would take a tone of time and money of course. So my question is, are these backlinks from good PBNs to a spesific sub-page aimed for a spesific keyword also useful for increasing the overall ranking ability of the site so should we wait for a general increase of the rankings of the website OR they work for the aimed kws only so we should be picking up the ones that are relatively easy or at least possible to rank and also the most profitable ones? I pretty much understand the whole concept except this basic detail. After a clarification about this issue of mine, everything will be more clear in my mind so than I can take action.
My second question is; How about giving backlink to category ot tag pages with a mix of naked url and kw anchor text? Would they work for increasing the rankings of all keywords under the mentioned category/tag? Or they look unnatural?
Lastly how about a backlink http://www.sitename.com/feed/.. Would it work?
Thank you..
You’ve gotten it wrong, my friend. You don’t need to setup a PBN for each keyword. A PBN linking with anchor text “best jump rope” helps to rank “top jumping rope”, “best jump rope for children”… etc. Best of luck to you. Keep testing and the answer to these questions start to show up much easier.
If your PBNs are getting traffic, do you ever link out to products and affiliate offers from articles that aren’t linking to your money site? As long as they aren’t using the same affiliate tracking ID or anything that would leave a footprint, wouldn’t it just be another chance to cash in? Just thinking aloud.
Thank you.
Absolutely. Monetization is one of the biggest things you can do to your PBNs to protect them. At the end of the day, nearly every website exists to make money. When a reviewer sees a website that has no monetization, that’s fishy.
Should I link the PBNs to my homepage or the inner pages
Which pages do you want to rank? Send them there.
PBNs are very much important in SEO. Would you say that recreating old niche PBNs into a totally different new niche still work fine nowadays? Doesn’t google know that the old links were coming to a site that was about sailing and the new website is about real estate?
I have sites ranking completely off 100% unrelated PBNs.
Hi Matt,
I have a quetstion about IFTTT, let’s say I have 25 networks is that will be a footprint if 25 domains are all having IFTTT networks?
How should I test the PBNs power at the beginning? starts linking out with 5 or 10 or 20?
Google shouldn’t be able to detect IFTTT, but they might care about a pattern if you have the same exact social sites connected.
What do you use / who do you use to set up social profiles(IFTTT syndication) on PBN’s?
We do it in-house.
nice post btw I’ve some concerns, making a 20 or even 30 PBN sites that will actually receive decent a traffic isn’t difficult for me.
But if I’ve 5 different niches such as Games, Health, Financial etc then how I can use all my money website on those 20 Traffic Delivery Network sites, it will not triggered spam if the website is getting traffic on games and I put health post on them? Do you get me, Matt?
You’re over thinking it.
I’m late to the party but how do we track the traffic? I’m assuming your not using GA.
Clicky… or even just using estimates from Ahrefs or SEMRush will suffice.
Great post. I agree that producing PBN or real websites with traffic is the way to go. You need alot less links from sites with real traffic. I have been optimising for voice search and have had some great results and traffic to sites.
Hi Matt,
I’m new in creating PBN links, the main reason of attraction toward PBN is it boost up the ranking process if done right, but on the other hand, if it is not done right then how much it affects our site?
The wrong PBN can have a toxic effect on your website. Testing is the only way to know for sure.
Do you think that you would have had similar results by getting the PBN’s ranked even without the traffic?
Ranked for keywords with no search volume? Every website can be “ranked” for some random keyword without traffic.
Hi Matt,
Wow some awesome tips here, I must say I am guilty of throwing up PBN’s with little work. Think in the future i’ll be optimising and adding an IFTTT network. Thanks
>Wayback Installations vs WordPress Rebuilds
There is another option. You can restore a website from archive.org here – https://en.archivarix.com/ and install it on your server with CMS. Not so powerful like WordPress but it is better than use plain html files.
Great post Matt! Thank you for all these awesome insights.
I have a question:
Do you resurrect old pages with good links and then do “niche edits” on them ? I.e. adding a link to your money site from these pages? Or you consider this a dangerous practice nowadays?
That’s definitely possible.