Private blog networks, simply called PBNs, are used to provide backlinks to other websites.
Most cheap SEO services sell spammy PBN backlinks and you can also find them on Fiverr, Upwork, or other freelance link buying and selling platforms.
Links from private blog networks are sold between $5-$50 or more depending on the niche, domain authority, domain rating, organic traffic, and other metrics.
Website owners, SEOs, and link builders buy links from PBNs because buying backlinks is comparatively easier than earning links.
Most private blog networks have the sole purpose of exchanging or selling links, their content is of low-quality and not useful for the readers.
People can buy links from PBNs using exact-match anchor text. Hence, low-value PBN backlinks are intended to manipulate Google search results and are counted as link spam.
Getting an inbound link from a collection of private blog networks can quickly raise the authority and organic Google rankings of a website. However, in the long run it leads to an unnatural link profile since they violate Google’s Webmasters guidelines.
Your website can receive a manual penalty from Google and lose all its rankings if search engines flag your domain as having unnatural links.
Should you build links from private blog networks? Let’s discuss.
A private blog network is a collection of domains that are managed by a single person or a business with the sole intention of selling links.
Most PBNs are built by buying expired domains, which already have a great backlink profile. People running private blog networks buy a set of expired domains, add some content to them and start selling links.
However, a majority of them do not add high-quality content and interlink all the sites in the PBN network, which ultimately makes the network lose its value and get counted as link farms.
Google simply ignores unnatural backlinks, so overtime, links from PBNs lose their value.
Buying a backlink from a private blog network is risky because they sell ‘link equity’, which is a violation of Google’s link spam policy.
Google might issue a manual penalty if you are caught buying backlinks to artificially manipulate your website’s search engine rankings.
In the words of Google:
“If a site has a manual action, some or all of that site will not be shown in Google search results.”
You can understand manual action in a way that Google has detected a pattern of unnatural or manipulative links pointing to your domain and has taken an action.
Therefore buying backlinks from a PBN is a risky affair. A better approach is to create high-quality content and link baits to naturally acquire inbound links to your website.
Here are some examples of private blog networks:
The above websites are used as PBNs to sell backlinks to bloggers, marketers, and website owners.
Yes, PBNs are a part of link schemes and violate Google quality guidelines because they are designed to artificially manipulate search rankings through controlled, non-natural backlinks.
Google says:
Buying or selling links for ranking purposes is not permitted. Exchanging money for links is a violation of spam policies for Google search.
While PBNs may deliver short-term gains, they are considered black-hat SEO and carry significant long-term risk.
Google classifies links from private link farms as “link schemes,” and sites involved in PBNs risk penalties like ranking drops, link devaluation, or even complete removal from search results.
The top advantages of using private blog networks are quick SEO rankings, higher domain reputation, increase in organic traffic, greater link equity, and easy link acquisition in competitive or grey niches.
Let’s understand these benefits in detail:
One of the most common issues in search engine optimization is that it takes time to show results.
The average time to see progress in SEO campaigns is 6-12 months minimum for moderate ranking keywords.
PBNs help to minimize this issue by offering faster SEO rankings.
Links from private blog networks are contextual, dofollow, and use your main anchor text. Hence, it can improve your website position in search rankings in as little as 1-3 months.
When you buy links from PBNs, they come in bulk.
Let’s say you brought 100 links distributed over a period of a few months. These inbound links raise your website authority and as a result the major SEO domain metrics begin to improve.
The top domain-level metrics that have a positive impact from buying links from private blog networks are Domain Authority, Domain Rating, and SEMrush Authority Score.
Please note: As a side-effect, your domain's Moz Spam Score might increase due to a rise in a number of low-quality backlinks from thin-content websites.
53% of traffic comes via Google search. That’s more than half of your total traffic coming from all other online marketing channels.
Backlinks are one of the top three Google ranking factors. Contextually relevant backlinks boost domain reputation.
You are able to drive qualified traffic from both AI and traditional search by gaining PBN backlinks because they help you rank for your target organic searches.
When buying PBN backlinks, check the organic traffic the domain gets. Zero to negligible traffic indicates spam and penalized websites. So, you should stay away from them.
Pick relevant domains that have at least some organic traffic, and whose traffic trend is stable or increasing. Taking this additional step when running your PBN link building campaign, can keep your website’s backlink natural and keep it away from rigorous manual penalties.
Page Rank still exists in the form of link equity.
Link power comes from dofollow editorial backlinks. The more quality backlinks your main money page has, the higher is the link equity.
Authentic PBN backlinks are niche-specific and target your primary anchors. Since they are editorially given and follow backlinks, you can quickly raise link equity scores by acquiring tons of relevant backlinks to your primary landing pages.
To ensure your website is not penalized, build a mix of dofollow and nofollow links. Do not keep all your links dofollow using exact-match anchors. Doing so will boost your site trustworthiness and keep your link profile healthy.
Acquiring backlinks is hardest in competitive niches. More than 41% of SEOs think link building is their biggest struggle.
In some industries like casinos, CBD, dating, drugs, and adult businesses, it is difficult to run regular link building campaigns because website owners avoid linking to grey niches.
For financial sectors like loans, credit services, and cryptocurrencies management companies, earning backlinks is challenging.
Private blog networks help in easy link acquisition for competitive markets. Since these networks are operated by a single individual or company, you can easily request backlinks in dozens to quickly increase your domain value in the eyes of search engines.
However, you should be cautious when building backlinks from PBNs in high numbers. Start slow and mix your link building methods.
Always look at your overall backlink profile so that it looks natural and not artificially manipulated. You should have backlinks from a variety of sources and use different anchors to stay safe.
The top risks of PBN link building are algorithmic penalties, reputational damage, loss of business due to website deindexation, and wasted SEO budget.
Now, let’s understand the top disadvantages of buying backlinks from private blog networks in detail:
Private blog networks are a part of black hat SEO because they manipulate search engine rankings by selling backlinks.
Google says that link spam is the practice of creating keyword-rich links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating SEO rankings by exchanging money for links.
Google has listed several criteria that qualifies any website for spam and manual penalties. These are unnatural links, thin content, user-generated spam, and exact-match anchors.
PBN websites give out sidebar or money keyword links and also have low-quality content. They also fail to qualify for strong EEAT (Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trust) signals.
Content that lacks personal experience or accuracy are seen as of poor quality and any backlinks from thin content websites are also of low quality.
Websites engaged in black-hat SEO practices might face search engine penalties.
Google penalties are broadly classified into two types:
The applied Google penalties can be site-wide, meaning it might impact the entire domain or partial Match, meaning it might affect specific URLs or sections of a site.
Google penalties are harsh and can cause nightmares to business owners because all or a major portion of their website traffic might vanish overnight.
Forbes Advisor received a manual action by Google for site reputation abuse. They had to lose 20 million visits each month due to the impact of the penalty. Besides loss in traffic, their business reputation was damaged.
Backlinks from private blog networks are risky because they fall under link schemes and if Google detects a large portion of low-quality referring domains in your link profile, it might take an algorithmic or manual action.
A penalty will ultimately result in a loss in business reputation and credibility.
Using PBNs can put your site in a position where a large portion of your rankings depend on manipulative links. If those links get devalued or trigger a penalty, you can lose all your organic traffic.
What actually happens behind the scenes is usually one of two things.
Also, not every site using PBNs gets penalized, and not every drop is total. The risk exists on a spectrum:
PBN backlinks can work in the short term, like for low competition keywords, but they lose value over time.
If Google devalues such links or the PBN owner removes or replaces them, you lose the benefit almost instantly.
Unlike earning links through content, PR, or partnerships, PBN links exist on someone else’s network. They can disappear, get repurposed, or even be sold to your competitors. In many cases, the same site is linking out to dozens of clients, which reduces the value of every link you paid for.
There is also an opportunity cost. The budget used for PBNs could have been invested in assets that continue to generate value, such as high quality content, digital PR, or genuine outreach.
Hence, you should avoid putting all your eggs in one basket and not use all your link building budget on PBNs. An intelligent approach is to keep some funds for link bait content or other link types like guest posting, digital PR, and niche edits.
The steps to build PBNs are to find some expired domains, check their link quality, host them on different providers, create unique designs, add quality content, and build links.
Let’s understand these steps in detail:
The first step is to find some expired domains with existing authority. You can easily find such domains on platforms like GoDaddy or ExpiredDomains.net.
Create an account, join the auctions and place your bid for your chosen domain(s).
The process is easy and you can quickly buy the best domains based on their base bid.
Please note: Do not buy any domain, until you go through the next step because not all expired domains are of high-quality. You need to check the link profiles of your chosen domains to select the best ones.
Once you have shortlisted your domains from the expired domains database, you should check their backlink data.
Check their Ahrefs DR, Moz DA, and SEMrush Website Authority Score. These link metrics can tell you about the reputation of the domain. The higher the values, the better.
Also, check if the domain is still indexed in Google by using the site: operator.
If no pages are returned by Google when searching for the domain name using the site: operator, then it might be deindexed. You should avoid buying deindexed domains.
Once you have finalized your domains, you should register them with different registrars. The best ones are GoDaddy, Hostinger, Squarespace, and BlueHost as they offer easy and faster hosting.
Instead of registering and hosting all your domains with one DNS provider, you should choose different website hosting services.
Also, multiple IP hosting is best for PBN SEO.
Your website should have its own set of unique IP addresses that are not shared with any other website.
Keeping your DNS, hosting, and IP unique will give the impression that they do not belong to the same individual or organization.
Most PBN owners make the mistake of replicating the same design for all their websites. It can give the impression that all these websites belong to the same company and the set of domains are created to manipulate search results.
The design should be based on your website niche. Invest your time and money to craft unique designs for each domain. You can easily create designs using AI website builders provided by hosting companies like Squarespace.
You can also create your website on WordPress using a fast and responsive theme.
Whatever you choose, ensure your website loads faster and has exceptional UX features. Site speed is important and is considered a Google ranking factor.
Moreover, mobile-first design should be a priority as Google has already moved to a 100% mobile-first indexing meaning it indexes and ranks the mobile version of the website.
Have a narrow focus on the kind of content and create micro-niche websites. These are easy to rank and topically relevant.
Instead of covering broad subjects, you can create a cluster of deeply related content that solves a narrow set of problems for a specific audience.
When you build a niche-specific site, you only link to genuine websites that fall in that category. Therefore, your private blog network will gradually have its own reputation in that niche, provided you maintain the content and outbound link quality.
Content is king and can make or break your private blog network.
You should avoid large-scale AI-written content for your website because they don’t add real expertise or value.
Instead, you should get writers having subject-matter expertise to prepare content. Doing so will keep your website EEAT-friendly having people-first content.
You can also utilize long-tail keywords to create high-quality and niche-specific content because it has less competition. By maintaining content quality in your niche, you will begin ranking for different keywords since your expired domain will already have some authority.
Please note: Keep the niche of your website the same as it was before the domain expired. This will preserve the topic and link relevancy of the domain.
Although it might be tempting to interlink all the domains in the private blog networks to enhance their reputation, you should avoid doing that.
Interlinking all your domains will give the impression that it belongs to the same parent organization and search systems can easily detect it as a link farm.
Also, maintain the quality of outbound links you sell in your private blog network. Do not just link to any website in any niche.
Here are tips to follow:
A natural link profile ensures your website is clean and avoids bad reputation.
When you build backlinks to your PBN, make sure the links have a mix of different anchors as provided below:
Also, ensure you acquire all forms of links, like dofollow, nofollow, UGC, and sponsored to keep your backlink profile balanced and natural.
Don’t Advertise Your Domain As ‘Selling Links’
Last but not the least, you should never advertise your own domain as a link selling website.
Many PBN website owners add a ‘write for us’ page on their website and mention that they charge $$ for link insertions or guest posts with one or two dofollow links. Doing so will invite trouble and Google might deindex your entire website.
Also, avoid explicitly promoting your domain name on link buying/selling platforms, like Fiverr, Upwork, and others. If your domain gets leaked and blacklisted, all efforts of maintaining a high-quality PBN site will be ruined.
The tips for using private blog networks are mentioned below:
Private blog networks built on expired domains have historical data.
Check the age of the PBN using a domain age checker tool and choose websites with at least 3 years of no-spammy history.
You will be surprised to know that many domains might have high domain authority and domain age, however when you will search for their indexed articles on Google, you can rarely find them.
Penalized sites also do not appear on Google by a domain name search or using the site: operator, which shows all the pages of that website indexed by search engines.
For example, when I search for Britannica using the site: operator, tons of pages are returned:
If the website is penalized, there would be no pages returned using the site operator.
There are several domain-level metrics that are a good indicator of the spamminess of the website. Here are the metrics that you should check:
Hosting a website on individual IP is costly so PBN website owners host several domains on the same IP. Although it is hard to find a website that has a dedicated IP address, if you can find one, that’s great.
You can check the IP address of the PBN using a service like iplocation.
Search engines can easily detect multiple PBNs that share the same IP or name servers. These websites are flagged as unnatural link schemes.
Most PBNs have little to no organic traffic. If you acquire backlinks from domains with zero or declining traffic, it might be a red flag that it could be abandoned or deindexed.
Although, declining or low traffic can be caused due to other reasons like seasonality, site redesign, content shift, or if the website is new, so you should carefully check the reason for low organic traffic.
The Ahrefs Traffic Checker is a great way to check the website traffic of any domain. It tells you the total organic traffic to any domain, along with the top traffic generating pages from that website.
You can also identify whether the traffic is declining or improving from the traffic graph.
Pick PBNs that have at least some traffic, such as more than 1000 organic traffic per month. Domains with traffic are mostly safe because Google still trusts them.
One of the prominent characteristics of private blog networks is that their content quality is poor.
Here are some checks that gives you a clear indication of the domain’s content quality:
PBN content can look “fine” on the surface, but its lack of genuine purpose, depth, and audience focus is what ultimately exposes it.
You should avoid private blog networks that sell links to grey niches. Not all PBNs do it, but most of them do. The only exception is that if you yourself are building links for grey niches then you can definitely pick domains selling links to casino, CBD, or loan sites.
Open 4-5 articles and look at all outbound links. If you notice links pointing to casinos, betting platforms, or loan sites, that’s a signal that the site is selling links to grey niches.
Pay attention to how those links are placed. If they appear forced, use keyword-heavy anchor text (like “best online casino” or “instant loan approval”), or feel disconnected from the topic, the intent is clearly manipulative.
Google tends to associate sites with the company they keep. If a domain is linking out to spammy or grey industries, it increases the chance that it’s part of a manipulative link network. Getting a backlink from such a site can dilute your site’s trust or, in worse cases, contribute to a penalty.
Find private blog networks that are niche-specific because they are mostly superior to multi-niche websites.
Go through the homepage, categories, and 5-10 recent posts. A genuinely niche-specific site will consistently cover one subject (e.g., only SaaS, only fitness, only finance) with depth and continuity.
In contrast, a typical multi-niche PBN behaves like a content dumping ground.
You might see articles about digital marketing, then health tips, then cryptocurrency, then travel, all on the same domain. It exists because the site is trying to accommodate backlinks for different clients. Even if each article looks decent individually, the overall site theme feels incoherent.
Topical relevance is necessary for identifying quality PBNs. Hence, you should always check the niche to stay away from poorly maintained link farms.
Yes, you can buy backlinks from private blogs because they are the easiest to build. However, there should always be caution when gaining links from PBNs since too many of such backlinks in a short period of time and using exact-match or money anchors can invite Google penalties.
The best approach is to adopt a mix link acquisition strategy where you build links from a variety of tactics and sources.
The alternative link building strategies instead of using PBN links are guest posting, press releases, broken link outreach, podcast link building, niche-directory listing, reciprocal links, and sponsored content links using the sponsored attribute. You should move away from low-quality private blog networks because it is risky and might lead to penalties.
A natural link is that backlink that you earn and not build. Link bait is a type of content that can earn natural inbound links to your website. Google and other search engines love websites that have natural organic backlinks to their domain. Earned links can be dofollow or nofollow. Dofollow links give the maximum benefit because they transfer link equity while nofollow natural links increase branded citations and pass referral traffic. You can think of natural links at the top-most hierarchy in the link building table, while PBN backlinks are somewhat at the lowest.
Digital Public Relations (PR) is one of the finest tactics to naturally build brand awareness, citations, and indirect backlinks. Unlike traditional link building, digital PR also shapes public perception about your brand and improves your brand reputation. One of the top benefits of links from digital news outlets is that it can give you high-authority editorial links. Branded content from reputed media websites presents your business as an industry expert, thereby increasing your authority in your niche. If you compare digital PR links with private blog networks then editorial links from media news outlets are of the highest quality, while PBN links are medium to lowest quality.
Niche edits or link insertions is one of the most successful link building tactics. Niche edits are contextual and editorially given with your chosen anchor text. There is no need to create new content and you can even get backlinks from high-ranking pages. Hence, they are faster and mostly dofollow, meaning they will pass link juice. The primary difference between niche edits and private blog networks is that niche edits are taken from high-authority and top-ranking pages, while PBN links are of low-quality and from pages that have very little chance of ranking on Google.
Broken or dead link building is a white-hat (Google friendly) tactic for earning relevant backlinks. In this tactic you find websites that link to 404 pages and send them an email sharing your content as a good replacement. Most website owners agree to the request since broken links degrade the user experience. The website owner is able to fix the 404 error and in this process you gain a niche-specific backlink. Compared to PBNs, dead link building technique is a great way to earn natural links by direct outreach.
Podcast link building is a new form of earning relevant editorial backlinks by interviewing a guest on your podcast and when the episode is published, you get a backlink to your website in the podcast show notes. You can get podcast links from the podcast hosting site (mostly nofollow), the podcast directory (again, mostly nofollow), social media websites (nofollow), or other websites (these can be dofollow) where the podcast is published. Instead of relying only on spammy PBN backlink building, you should make use of new link acquisition strategies to diversify your link profile.
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