Enemy Or Ally: Is Private Blog Network Worth A Try

Anna Pianka

Off-Page SEO Head at ABAKUS Internet Marketing

PBN is generally referred to as a number of web pages belonging to a person / company and set up to influence certain sites in the ranking (and, if possible, to generate additional revenue through advertising).

These pages are often created using cheap methods. The photos on the pages are usually royalty-free images or cheap stock photos. The visual part of the sites is often similar. It may even be that the texts of the subpages are the same length. Sometimes network operators copy texts from several other pages, slightly modify them and publish on PBN pages. This is done to minimize workload while avoiding pure duplicate content.

The contact details on the page are often displayed as a picture. It even happens that contact information is generated and the person doesn’t actually exist. The Internet offers imprint generators with the ability to select the country, city and gender to generate a fictitious address.

PBNs were formerly used on a larger scale as a link-building method. However, this has been leveling off for years due to the inferiority and content-related emptiness of the pages, which Google is increasingly recognizing. But you also have to point out that there are occasionally better-patched PBNs where the network is not immediately noticeable to the user or link builder.

Links from such sites are of no use and are considered to be inferior, they have negative or no impact at all. With larger and more elaborate PBNs, which often link for monetary reasons, it’s only a matter of time before Google downgrades pages, if that’s not already happening.

PBN can be recognized if a website is linked, for example, by similar-looking websites. Next you can find out if the pages that are linked to each other also have similar backlink profiles. Almost identical backlink profiles on multiple websites may also indicate a personal blog network. Clever PBN operators disable the crawlers of backlink analysis tools through the Robots.txt so that certain user queries in SEO Tools don’t bring results.

Links from such networks can still work. Here it depends on the actual linking domain and its quality characteristics. After all, it could be that somebody really took a page and upgraded its content, even though it belongs to a PBN. However, links from 98% of existing PBNs are inferior, tend to be harmful and therefore not recommended.

There are several ways to set positive signals through respectable link building. Google is designed to provide users with the best possible content in the search results. Search engine results are ordered by relevance. It depends on various factors. The major are the links to the website. Thus, the link building focus must be placed on thematically relevant pages with well-researched and maintained content. Diligence pays off, even in link building.