What is a PBN?

In the last few years, the PBN has become one of the favorites techniques of SEO specialists around the world. It has allowed many sites to significantly increase their ranking in search engine results, sometimes very quickly. But lately, this technique has been on Google's radar and SEO experts who use it are being forced to be more and more cautious. So what exactly is a PBN, what is it for, where does it come from and how does it work?
Private Blog Network

January 21, 2021

lsandil

Where does the PBN come from?

Over the years, our search engine algorithms have become more sophisticated. If at the beginning it was only able to analyze a page indexed on a superficial level, based on only a few criteria, it can now measure every line of code, every byte and more or less everything that happens on it.

Thus, the methods used by the referers have had to evolve too. And while those adopted by the White Hats have always respected the Guidelines imposed by search engines, others have always tried to bypass them. They scan each new update of the algorithm in order to detect flaws and then exploit them for their own purposes.

The first PBNs were created precisely because of the appearance of a new analysis tool at Google. Indeed, when PageRank was introduced, Silicon Valley’s flagship search engine took an interest in the number of incoming external links, the “backlinks”, as an indicator of popularity and therefore a quality factor. This is the new ranking criteria and some referrers quickly find out how to use it…

How does a PBN work?

The PBN (Private Blog Network) is a network of websites whose goal is to send a maximum of links to the “money site”, the main site of the network. With a functioning quite close to Linkwheel and other pyramids of links, it is above all a technique aiming at abusing the robots of the search engines.

Indeed, creating a network of websites whose only objective is to send “linkjuice” to a single site is considered as an illegal practice by Google and its companions. Thus, using an SEO strategy that relies on the use of PBN can involve significant risks. But we will discuss this subject in a future article.

What types of PBN?

In any case, not everyone likes PBN. The most criticized by the SEO world are often those that are fully automated. SEO buy expired domain names and generally install blogs with terribly poor content, but always optimized for search engines. Automatic translation, publication of press releases, etc. It’s all there.

As a result, these networks are considered polluting because of the space they monopolize and the super limited content they offer. Although this industrialized method is fairly simple to set up, most of the time it brings results only in the very short term.

Conversely, other SEO agencies sometimes produce excellent PBN, which include a complex mesh of blogs, forums, classifieds and other sites of good quality, built ethicaly. However, regardless of the quality of the content, this remains a technique associated to the Black Hats and penalized by search engines.

To conclude, it is a relatively time-consuming method that can induce important implementation costs. And if PBN has been in recent years one of the most successful techniques of SEO strategies implemented, it will be increasingly risky and complex to implement an effective one in the future.