- 05 февраля 2021
In this article, we will use a practical example to demonstrate what PBNs are and how they work. You will be able to see how they affect the organic traffic of a particular project throughout the year.
Theory
A PBN is a network of websites that appear to be independent, but in fact, are owned by a single person or a group of people who do not disclose their ownership. A network of sites is used to place posts and links to the main promoted site with the same theme. The sites used for the network are recently dropped or newly registered, which means either buying-out a domain that used to belong to someone else and point to a site with a similar theme, or registering a brand-new domain and building your own site from the ground up.
Practice
A PBN network of topically relevant sites in combination with outreach, link building, and ON-PAGE optimization yield amazing results for certain projects. This can be seen by studying how this strategy is implemented in practice, step by step. Our main goal in writing this article was sharing our invaluable experience.
60,000 users per month - the result of a year’s work with PBNs
Strategies used for this project combined on-page and off-page optimization work. As a result, the traffic from organic search has grown from 20 to 9,000 visitors per day!
How the PBNs Were Implemented
February
Initial traffic data at the start of the project.
On-page
Set up Google Analytics Added Google Search Console Installed an SSL certificate
Traffic: 10-20 daily visitors
March
On-page
Fixed 404 errors (50 links) Deleted broken images (100 images) Changed region to USA in Google Search Console.
Off-page
Added 50 crowd links and 10 outreach links
Traffic: 50-200 daily visitors
April
On-page
Deleted duplicate Titles (100) Deleted duplicate Descriptions (100) Excluded duplicate H1 tags (100)
Off-page
Added 100 crowd links and 15 outreach links Ordered 20 backlinks from PBN homepages
Traffic: 150-500 daily visitors
May
On-page
Added missing Titles (35) Integrated missing Descriptions (35) Added missing H1 tags (35)
Off-page
Added 125 crowd links and 10 outreach links Ordered 50 backlinks from PBN homepages
P.S. Google's May update made its own adjustments to organic traffic
Traffic: 500-750 daily visitors
June
On-page
Fixed overly short Titles (150) Increased Description length (150) Deleted H1 doubles from Titles of commercial pages (34)
Off-page
Saw a drop in traffic and realized there was something wrong with the PBNs we rented. Gave it some thought. Gave it some more thought. Identified the problem (poor quality of traffic sources). Decided to build our own PBN. Initially, we decided to use a service for finding expiring domains, that are linked to from the sites in the top 100. Trying out bluechipbacklinks. Drop caught 10 domains. Building 10 sites. Simultaneously building our own project for finding dropped domains
Traffic: 400-750 daily visitors
July
On-page
Fixed overly long Titles (67)
2. Changed overly long Descriptions (34)
3. Filled empty Alt attributes of images (35)
Off-page
Found 20 more domains linked to from the top sites using bluechipbacklinks. Restored them. Placed backlinks from homepages and added a guest post on each site.
Traffic: 400-500 daily visitors
August
On-page
1. Created an AMP version of the page using Google tools
2. Added canonical and hrefland attributes
3. Set up HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)
Off-page
Got 10 PBN sites, 30 crowd links from bluechipbacklinks. Test-launched the Getbot project for finding and catching dropped domains already included in the Top 100 after expiration, i.e. recommended by Google by default. Hooked our Getbot project up with a semantic kernel of 23800 relevant search queries and started tracking. Drop caught 30 domains in a month. Restored them. Added backlinks from homepages + a guest post. Picking up steam :)
Traffic: 350-450 daily visitors
September
On-page
Compressed images to 75 kb. (235) Set up browser caching for desktops. Set up browser caching for mobile devices.
Off-page
Drop caught 60 domains with our service. Restored them. Added backlinks from homepages + a guest post Strengthened the first 30 domains with Tier 2 links
Traffic: 500-1000 daily visitors
October
On-page
Fixed the font sizes Fixed the line spacing
Off-page
Drop caught 100 domains with our Getbot. Restored them. Added backlinks from homepages + a guest post. Strengthened the previous 60 domains with Tier 2 links
Traffic: 500-1300 daily visitors
November
On-page
1. Configured browser caching for desktops
2. Made use of page compression on mobile devices
3. Optimized the loading of visible content on mobile devices
Off-page
Drop caught 120 domains with Getbot. Restored them. Added backlinks from homepages + a guest post. Strengthened the second batch of 100 domains with Tier 2 links. Strengthened the previous 100 domains with Tier 2 as well.
Traffic: 800-1800 daily visitors
December
Off-page
Drop caught 115 domains with Getbot. Restored them. Added backlinks from homepages + a guest post. Strengthened the previous 120 domains with Tier 2 links
Traffic: 2000-9000 daily visitors
Important Nuances of Working With PBNs
Use topical or semi-topical domains Have no more than 3 domains on one account Use different hosting services for your projects. Popular ones are better, because the chances of detecting a network are lower on a large service. Build sites on different CMSs and do not use identical plugins. Don't implement changes on different sites on the same day.
If You don’t feel like figuring this all out, visit our market. There we have sites, links, and we can find a domain for you as well:)
Epilogue
It is important to understand that using a tool like PBN does not negate the necessity of site optimization. Google still likes fast, high-quality, well-optimized websites.
As evident from this case study, a competent implementation of a PBN yields excellent results that are clearly worth the effort.