Without good marketing strategies, great websites fall through the cracks of search engine results pages (SERPs) every day.
If a site has great content, why is it struggling to rank higher?
A lot of the time, the answer is poor work on search engine optimization (SEO) and digital marketing.
For instance, did you know that one of the best ways for your website to thrive is by building backlinks?
Well, PBNs are one of the ways in which you can generate backlinks for your website.
They basically work by linking a network of websites to another main website, which certainly improves your search engine visibility.
But let’s take it one step at a time and explain what backlinks are, how PBNs create backlinks and go over the pros and cons of using PBNs.
What Are Private Blog Networks?
So what’s link building and what are backlinks? How do PBNs factor into all of this?
Well, link building is a technique that improves the visibility of your website in the results pages displayed on search engines such as Google.
Successful link building can help improve the ranking of your website in the SERPs.
Some examples of link building are networking, broken link building, omnichannel marketing, and PBNs—but we’ll get to that in a second.
The main part of the link building is getting backlinks to your website.
Backlinks, also known as inbound links (IBL), are hyperlinks from other web pages to your own website.
Backlinks or links that lead from another website to your own are great for improving SEO rankings. If the Google algorithms detect backlinks from high-authority domain websites to your own, your search engine placement immediately improves. In fact, backlinks are the top-ranking factor for placement on Google!
Which brings us to PBNs.
Private Blog Networks help generate backlinks from high domain authority websites.
Basically, they help you get a huge amount of backlinks from a website that’s ranked high on any search engine.
PBNs purchase expired domain names which had—during their heyday—built domain authority.
PBNs are hosted on special PBN hosting platforms like PBN Hosting. Such platforms offer a single dashboard from where the site administrator can manage all the PBN sites they own.
Once a large number of these domains are purchased, content is posted on those websites, which includes backlinks to the main websites—in this case, your website.
Since the content of these numerous websites includes links to your website, the search engine algorithms interpret your website to include a lot of backlinks.
And as we already mentioned, backlinks from high-authority websites are key to good link building.
They are a primary factor in having good placement in the SERPs!
In a nutshell, PBNs includes a huge database of websites, and you can pay to get backlinks to your website from these other websites.
In the end, these backlinks help improve your website’s domain authority and search engine visibility (SEO rankings).
So why is there some uncertainty over whether you should be using a PBN or not? Why are PBNs considered a bit risky?
Let’s look at the pros and cons to answer this question.
Using A PBN To Build Links: Pros
Let’s first take a look at the pros of using a PBN for link building.
1- PBNs are very effective in building backlinks, which will allow you to quickly improve your site’s rankings.
Websites that use PBNs witness significant improvements in their SERPs rankings—and fast! Using a private blog network is one of the fastest ways to improve search engine visibility.
If you have a good deal of high-authority expired domains at your disposal, you can use them to build backlinks to your website and improve its SEO in no time.
2- PBNs can be inexpensive.
Although domains aren’t always very cheap in comparison to some other link-building techniques, using PBNs is on the more affordable side.
If you buy cheaper expired domains with decent pre-established authority and create a bit of content that links back to your page, you’ll be able to employ PBNs for less money while achieving better results!
3- PBNs can quickly generate lots of profit revenue.
PBNs can help you amass a good deal of revenue, and fast. As your website improves in rankings thanks to the effective backlinks strategy, you’ll begin to profit increasingly.
This can be from increased website traffic, which leads to either more customers or more money from ads on your page.
The popularity of your website can also increase your profit if you choose to sell some backlinks to non-competitors!
4- PBNs allow you to control search keywords.
PBNs allow you to control which keyword searches lead back to your main website. This will help you increase natural, organic traffic.
Using A PBN To Build Links: Cons
Now that we’ve looked at what’s good about using a PBN, let’s look at some of the potential risks and drawbacks of using them:
1- Although it’s meant to be cheap, PBNs can get pricey over time.
Theoretically, using PBNs costs less than some other SEO techniques.
However, in practice, and over time, as your website gains in popularity, you’ll end up needing to invest more in the domains you’re using for backlinks.
In other words, as your website becomes more popular, its mechanism will be prone to greater scrutiny by search engine crawlers.
This means that you’ll have to invest more money in better content on the websites that include the backlinks to your main site. And good content comes at a price!
2- It can get time-consuming.
If you’re building your own PBN, you’ll probably end up spending a lot of time creating posts for your PBN sites that link back to your main website. After all, it takes a while to set up a network as elaborate as a PBN.
A quick workaround here would be to go for managed PBN hosting, where your provider does most of the work for you.
3- Risk of penalties by Google.
The greatest risk of using a PBN is getting penalized by Google.
If Google figures out that you’re using a PBN, your site can get penalized or deindexed. In other words, your entire SEO empire will crumble.
Conclusion
PBNs can be very useful when building links, but they don’t come without risks either. Now that you know the pros and cons of using PBNs, you can now make an informed decision of whether or not you should use this for your website.
