The success of a PBN hinges on the quality of its domains. By investing time and effort in finding the best possible expired domains, PBN owners can maximize the network’s effectiveness and, in turn, improve the search engine rankings of the central website.
In this article, we’ll share our personal approach to how we choose the best domains for our PBNs.
Key Takeaways
- A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a network of websites created solely to link out to another website and improve its organic search visibility.
- The main idea behind PBNs is to create low-effort websites, link them to your main site, and then let them be.
- By choosing high-quality expired domains with good domain authority and strong backlink profiles, your PBN can provide the main website with strong link juice, ultimately boosting its rankings.
- When choosing a domain for your PBN, consider factors such as relevance to your niche and your market, SEO metrics, powerful links to the homepage, consistent traffic history, a clean record free from penalties, and no redirections.
How PBNs work
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a network of websites created solely to link out to another website and improve its organic search visibility. The main idea behind PBNs is to create low-effort websites, link them to your main site, and then let them be.
Although these sites may not boost trust and authority directly, if they share the same niche, they can add relevance and significant link value. This is because they create the illusion of having few outgoing links while attracting many incoming links, improving the overall link profile.
What to Consider When Choosing a PBN Domain
By choosing high-quality expired domains with good domain authority and strong backlink profiles, your PBN can provide the main website with strong link juice, ultimately boosting its rankings.
It’s essential to choose domains carefully to avoid leaving footprints and reduce the risk of being penalized by search engines. This includes using separate hosting for each PBN domain to keep everything looking natural to search engines. (If you are searching for a good PBN hosting provider, read our Easy Blog Networks Review)
Factors to consider when choosing a domain for your PBN:
- Relevance to Your Niche: Opt for a domain closely related to your niche to ensure relevance and cohesion with your main website’s content.
- Target Your Market: Align the PBN domain with your target market. For instance, if your main site caters to the UK, choose a PBN domain with a .uk extension. (Learn more about ccTLD here.)
- Link Power to Home Page: Aim for a domain that ideally has powerful links pointing to its homepage, as this can contribute more effectively to your main website’s SEO.
- SEO Metrics: Some SEO metrics can give you helpful insight when you choose the right PBN domains. It’s important to note that high numbers don’t guarantee a good domain. However, SEO metrics are an essential indicator when comparing and evaluating multiple domains. The most important metrics are Domain Authority (DA), Domain Rating (DR), Trust Flow (TF) and Citation Flow (CF).
- Consistent Traffic History: Choose a domain with a history of consistent traffic and avoid those with significant drops, ensuring that it maintains its value.
- Clean Record: Prioritize domains with a clean record, free from any past penalties or issues that could affect your main website’s reputation.
- No Redirection History: Select a domain that has not been redirected in the past, as this can impact its reliability and effectiveness within your PBN.
- Reasonable Cost: Consider the cost of the domain, aiming for a balance between affordability and quality. Look for domains that fit your budget without compromising on essential factors.
Read this article to learn how to find domains for PBNs.
Quirk.biz’s Top Tips for Choosing PBN Domains
While all the factors we mentioned above are crucial, our experience has taught us that some of them have a more significant role in building a successful PBN.
Here are the top priorities we focus on when selecting domains for PBNs:
Powerful Links
When choosing domains for PBNs, we usually look for ones with more than 5-10 DR (Domain Rating). DR indicates the overall strength and authority of a domain’s backlink profile. However, it’s important to consider that in certain cases, such as specific niches or languages, a domain with a lower DR might still be valuable if it has 3-4 strong backlinks.
A Relevant Domain (without necessarily being in our niche)
The niche of PBN domains is significant, but it doesn’t have to perfectly align with that of the main domain. For instance, if your website focuses on tool reviews, you don’t necessarily have to seek PBN domains related to tools. Instead, you can consider domains related to repairs, home improvement, DIY, and similar topics. However, we recommend avoiding domains from vastly different niches, such as health, CBD, dating, software, etc.
Domain From Your Target Market
When looking for domains in the main site market, you should consider the following: if your site already has enough links from relevant sites in its niche or many links from sites in its country – it’s OK to compromise on one of these criteria and target a powerful domain in a slightly more distant niche or from another country.
When selecting domains, it’s important to ask yourself whether a website in the same country or niche as yours would naturally link to your site. The goal when building PBNs is to appear as genuine as possible, resembling real sites that would naturally link to yours.
Hint: You can connect nearly any niche of the expired domain to your site.
For example: Would it make sense for a repair website to receive a link from a hotel or hospital website? Yes, it’s possible that the hotel/hospital has published an article detailing their repair experiences with the company in question, expressing satisfaction and recommending their services.
Knowledge bomb: How do we decide how close or distant a niche is to ours? We can use this official Google resource: https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs/categories
These are Google’s Content Categories for the Natural Language API, and while we don’t have proof that Google categorizes content this way in their ranking algorithm, we think it’s a good starting point.
Here, they are broken down into categories, sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories, and you can get an idea of how far a niche is from yours.
Conclusion
In conclusion, when choosing domains for PBNs, it’s crucial to align with your overall SEO strategy. For those on a tight budget, investing time in finding affordable yet high-quality domains is key.
Conversely, if time or resources are limited, it’s better to invest in fewer, more powerful domains, even at a higher cost.
Larger brands should prioritize purchasing clean domains to avoid risking their reputation.
By tailoring the choice of domains to fit specific needs and circumstances, businesses can optimize their PBN strategy for maximum effectiveness and success.
