After obtaining juicy domains, we have to set them up, and more importantly, make sure that our PBNs look ‘legitimate’. What this means is that these websites must look exactly like any regular website that you may come across while browsing the web. Sites that will alert Google to identify them as PBNs have properties such as a generic blog structure, generic posts, and pages, or just look ugly. Furthermore, the sites must have as little footprints as possible linking them together, as many of these PBNs may be used to link to the same moneysite. All this results in failing a manual review and thus deindex and the loss of all the money spent on these domains.
We will now share our PBN setup process that has resulted in less than 5% of our sites being deindexed in the past 5 years of operating our network.
Hosting the Sites
We use hosting with different IPs and nameservers
After hosting the site, we install WordPress into it in order to move on to the next phase of PBN setup.
Site Persona and Plugins
After the WordPress install, we generate a random persona to be the ‘site owner’, with a random name and address to be used for the site. This makes the site look much more real, that someone is actually managing the site. We also make sure to choose a niche that is similar to the name and relevant to the past history of the domain.
For Plugins, we make use of the Link Privacy Plugin or HTACCESS to block bots effectively and stop your competitors from finding your links. The plugin also does not count as a footprint as it is hidden as well. We also use a list of different plugins for each of our sites, which includes the following:
- Contact Form
- Image Optimizer
- Social Share Buttons
- Social Media Plugin (Such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest)
- Privacy Policy Plugin
We switch between 4-10 different kinds of plugins for each of the categories above. We always randomize the plugins we use to reduce the footprints left by the PBNs.
Site Appearance (Theme and Widgets)
To reduce the footprints left by our PBNs, we also randomize the widgets we use and try never to use the same theme more than once every 100 sites. The themes that we prefer to use on our sites are either magazine or blog style themes.
According to the niche chosen for the site, we also create a unique logo as well as a favicon for the site to make it look like a legitimate entity or business online.
For site widgets, each theme has unique widget placements, and we make full use of the unique theme options whenever possible. We pad up the sidebar as well as other parts of the site such as the footer and middle sections with naturally occurring website features. A list of these widgets can be seen below:
- Advertisements (We try to use around 3 advertisement banners, which are header ads, footer ads, sidebar ads and middle page section ads, related to the niche at hand)
- Author Bio
- Recent Posts
- Categories
- Search Bar
- Social Share Buttons
- Social Media Widget (For your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest Feed)
For the title of these widgets, instead of using the generic titles such as ‘Advertisement’, we mix it up sometimes, using words such as ‘Buy Books Here’ or “Sponsored Ads”.
Pages and Posts
These are the different types of Pages that we use in our blogs:
- About Us (We usually write about 200 words of content on this page to make it seem more legitimate)
- Contact Us
- Terms of Service
- Privacy Policy
- Category items (eg., in a Tech blog, it would be Computers, Internet, Gadgets, etc.)
- References/Resources
- Other relevant pages such as Tips, Events
As for posts, we always make sure that we create 4-5 different categories for the niche we chose for our PBN. We do this by searching for popular blogs in the niche, and copying some of the categories that these blogs have. We also change the default ‘uncategorised’ category to a different name. After this, we populate the blog with 1-2 posts per category, including the default category.
Each of our initial posts has at least 2-3 images and videos, all taken from stock photo sites. We make sure that these posts also have a unique featured image.
Conclusion
Written above are the most critical parts of our PBN setup process, to ensure that each PBN looks legitimate and ready to pass any manual review at any time. We believe in taking as little risks as possible for our network to provide cost-effective, authoritative links to all of our customers and for our use.
Now that you have learnt how to set up a beautiful PBN, the next step is to do PBN testing on your new setups. Otherwise, if you would still like to find out how to source for awesome domains, click here to read about finding PBN domains.