Developing PBN

Would you like to own your own private blog network?

You should understand already how your very own blog network could be the most powerful and reliable tool at your disposal, so why I wonder, don’t you already have one?

Are you worried that it will cost you thousands of dollars and be a complete pain to manage? Do you lack the geek skills required to actually set one up from scratch?

Well fear not. With a little forethought, outsourcing and clever thinking – it can be done fairly simply and for less than five hundred bucks – and if you follow this step by step guide, then you could soon be easily ranking for low and medium competition keywords with the added bonus that you no longer have to worry about any Google updates.

PRIVATE BLOG NETWORK - QUALITY CONTROL

To make our network of sites look real, we’re gonna do something unusual – we’re actually going to make real sites…

Each site that we build for our network will have an aged domain with good domain authority, a unique logo, unique and useful articles, a different theme and some core plugins installed to make the site usable.

Free Idea: Got some friends or family who want to learn about making and maintaining websites? Give them each a site so they can learn about being a webmaster. Publishing articles, updating plugins, changing themes and moderating comments.

Here is the checklist of steps that we are going to do for each site. You’ll want to complete each step in order to build each site on our blog network.

Planning is KEY - Fail to Prepare, Prepare to Fail.

CHOOSING A DOMAIN NAME​

We will be utilizing expired domain names for our network, domains that have existing back-links and domain authority. Remember we are creating a high quality network of sites, so the domain names themselves should also be decent.

We don’t want to be buying domains that are obviously junk, or ones that have porn or pharma type words in them. We don’t want anything that will make the domain name stand out negatively, and I personally only ever consider .com, .net or .org extensions, as well as country specific ones if they come up and you can register them.​

WHERE TO FIND EXPIRED DOMAINS?

Visit Expired Domains and sign up for an account. These guys publish daily lists of domains that have just expired, and you can use their filters to find a good domain.

Do a search for all the .com domains that have dropped in the past 24 hours with 100 links minimum. Here is a snapshot of the settings I use.

On the second tab of the search form, make sure you select “only available Domains” as there is no point spending time researching a domain if it is unavailable.

I generally then order the results by the DA (Domain Authority) column, which show how authoritative Moz thinks the site is. You’ll want to look out for domains that have a DA of above 20 and more than 10 linking root domains.

The higher the DA of your blog network’s sites, the better for ranking your money sites!

Have a scan down the list and pick out a few that take your fancy. No need to spend too much time worrying about the actual text of the domain name, it’s the domain authority that we are after, not a catchy URL. Once you have picked a few head on over to Open Site Explorer to check the DA of the domains you are looking at.

Remember to check both the domain.com and www.domain.com versions of the domain you are interested in.

The higher the DA the better (it’s far more important than Pagerank, which hasn't been updated in months, and is basically dead).

UPDATE: Google has confirmed that they will no longer be updating the toolbar page rank, so as mentioned above it’s properly dead, so feel free to ignore it.

You’ll ideally be looking for domains with a DA of 15 or higher. Once you find a good strong domain, you need to check out the back-link profile. Checking the existing back-links can be done easily at Ahrefs, Majestic or Open Site Explorer.

This is a very important step, and you’ll want to make sure that the back-link profile is genuine and not a load of crap, as a crap back-link profile could cause the domain to be penalized, and we don’t want that.

This method of finding a domain name requires a little bit of effort, but can pay off. If you are short on time and don’t mind paying up for domain names, then you should look at the following resources, which will potentially save you time, but will cost more.

• Domain Jawa
• Domain Boy
• Hammerhead Domains
• godaddy auctions
• private sellers on BHW, WF, DP etc – but be extra vigilant

Please be wary about buying domains from Godaddy Auctions, not only are the auctions very well subscribed (pushing the price higher) but it has recently come to my attention that Blackhat guys are sending extortion emails to people asking for money to keep their domains private or they will be forwarded to various members at Google.

From what I have heard the scammer watches Godaddy Auctions, waits for a domain to be won and for a new site to be placed on that domain, and then they email the owner.

Don’t forget though no matter where you buy your domains from, you have to exercise caution, and perform your due diligence checks, otherwise you are just wasting your time and money.

When you purchase the domain name, you’ll want to enable whois privacy. This is an extra step required to ensure the anonymity of your blog network.

If you are purchasing an available domain, then I can whole-heartedly recommend Namecheap. The domain itself will be about $8 and they include free domain whois privacy for the first year, which is a great deal.

If you want to buy through them, clicking my affiliate link (here) will earn me a few pennies for every domain you register. I’d be very grateful and might even print and laminate a small photo of you in your honor for every domain you buy…​