What is a Private Blog Network?

A Private Blog Network (PBN) refers to a network of websites used to build links, helping you increase your site’s domain authority in search engines. Blog networks is often seen as the most effective way to build link juice towards your site and boost your rankings.

In simpler terms, the network of websites links to the main website often referred to as a “money site.” They are then backlinked to the money site, which increases their level of SEO credibility in the eyes of Google. In the end, it leads to direct growth in organic rankings, traffic, and most importantly, income.

In most cases, PBNs are built on domains that are long expired, given that they still retain a super-strong backlink profile, which builds-up over time. One thing to note is that these peripheral sites should not be linked to each other, or you will found out by Google and get de-indexed or penalized.

The advantageous thing about having such a network is the fact that you get complete control over the sites since you would have purchased the sites yourself. This means that you will be able to adjust them however you deem fit to boost your SEO rankings.

How PBNs actually works

To understand how PBNs works, you first need to have a basic understanding of the importance of backlinks and authority. In simple terms, a backlink links your site to another website. They are constructed organically when your website provides authoritative or foundational content – so much so that a different site, in essence, mentions your site via a link. So, what this link does is to signal the search engine that your site is an authority in your field, which in turn, influences the ability of your site to rank higher. The more the links, the greater the authoritative signal.

The way PBNs function, you either buy a number of expired domain names with an already established authority, or buy and register several domains at a go, and establish their authority. After that, you utilize these domains to post content, which includes links back to the main website.

To help you understand better, here is how a PBN link campaign looks like in a representational equation;

Expired domain #1 + 5 links to main website

Expired domain #2 + 5 links to main website

Expired domain #3 + 5 links to primary website

= +15 authoritative links to the ‘money site’, which increases your rankings, and eventually traffic and conversions.

The benefits of Private Blog Networks

When managed in a sustainable and valuable manner, PBNs can benefit you in a number of ways. They include;

Increase ranking – the use of backlinks in the network boosts your site’s authority, which in turn, increases the site’s ranking in the search engine. Link building enhances the site’s credibility in the eyes of Google.

Direct control – the most frustrating aspect of link building if the fact it largely out of control, which means that you will be relying on natural link earning tactics and publisher approval, which are inconsistent at times. But with a Private Blog Network, you are in charge of everything, so you can do anything you deem appropriate to take your business to the next level, including higher ranking.

Time savings – yes, building a PBN is time-consuming, but once established it saves you a lot of time that you would otherwise spend on relationship management and guest posting.

Outreach reduction – if you are one of those people who don’t like the idea of outreach in link building, then PBN is your ideal strategy. With a wide enough network, you can expect to cut your outreach down to a bare minimum.

The risks of Private Blog Networks

  • Significant fall in rankings
  • Loss of credibility
  • Being de-indexed by Google
  • Difficulty regaining SEO status on the search engine
  • Penalties issued by Google
  • Further legal action may also be taken against your site

How to identify Private Blog Networks

Search engines are continuing to develop more thorough and efficient ways of detecting inauthentic SEO practices, enabling black hat SEO strategists to become more sophisticated and versatile. What this means is that you need to do your research right before you decide to interact with other sites, receiving and giving backlinks to them. Today, PBNs have become more sophisticated themselves, and are now harder than ever for site owners to spot them. This is mostly due to the fact the sites span from different topics, industries, and layouts. Now, let’s make things easier for you – when determining if a site is part of a PBN, pay attention to the following:

Hosting – sites that stem from the same IP address should be a cause of concern.

Link profile – this is the makeup of links pointing to a particular page or site. So, when you notice a site that has the same backlink, that alone should be a red flag.

Site design – do the websites use a similar color schemes, design, or navigation? If yes, then you should know that there are copied.

Duplicate content – copy a paragraph in the search engine to see if the content exists on other sites. Also, lack of external links, new content, or just a small number of third party links are also indicators that the site is inauthentic and is only used for links or façade.

Site ownership – you can check the site’s owner on WHOIS database for the contact information. If you find this information hidden, then that should be a red flag as well. And if notice that the site owners are the same, then know that the blogs are connected.

Risk proof strategies on how to use PBNs effectively

When planning to build a PBN, you need to keep the following in mind;

  • Avoid, at all costs, any domain that was used for spam or any other obvious link building in the past.
  • Ensure that the site feels and looks like a real website, by using a nice theme, having an about us page, privacy page, and ensure that you publish new posts regularly.
  • Don’t register your domain on tools like Google Analytics or webmaster. And if you must use a unique account – don’t use a similar account as your primary site.
  • Limit the number of primary sites that you link to – linking to only one money site is the most ideal situation, as it will reduce the risk significantly, and therefore, keep you far away from trouble.
  • Don’t share your network – it is for sure very tempting to leverage or share your network with a few of your friends, which is a great risk. Yes, by doing this, you will be doubling or tripling the number of links, but remember that you will be contradicting the previous point on limiting the number of money sites.      

Smart tips for building a PBN

For you to stay out of trouble with Google, there are a handful of rules to follow when building a PBN. They include;

Be smart – if you want your sites to give you a good return on investment, then you need to ensure that you build it properly for them to resemble a normal site, not an attempt to get links. The private blog network sites need to be in the same niche and should provide relevant information to your money site.

Further, use different domain registrars as you don’t want to create footprints. See, when you buy all your domains from the same, or through the same registrar, there is a chance you will be caught, and you might lose all your domains in the process. The other thing is to diversify your web hosting strategy since linking your site hosting to a single IP address may make Google suspicious. So, it makes sense to use different ones. After all, you are covering your tracks, so everything needs to be perfect.

Focus on quality – of course, you don’t want to use a spammy PBN site that has lots of backlinks irrelevant to your main money site. Also, you need to keep off any kind of suspicious content as it might put you in trouble. That being said, you need to come up with unique, valuable, and relevant content for your PBN sites. Don’t spin your content, as Google has ways to pick something like this up. Ensure that all the sites in your PBN look and functions legitimately. In addition, make sure that the websites conform to all the review requirements, by having sections the about us page, contact us, and privacy policy.

Do your research – yes, there are so many metrics used by marketers to assess the quality of the domains you are about to buy, but the thing is that it is always recommended that you go in and check all the backlinks by yourself to ascertain whether they are of high quality.

Don’t overdo it – so, here is the thing, trying to do too much too soon, and probably too often, is one of the surest ways to get caught by Google. PBNs are a shortcut, yes, but they require a lot of strategic effort, and cannot be fixed quickly.  

PBN Hosting providers

HostPapa – this is one of the best PBN hosting in the industry. They have pocket-friendly prices, and excellent uptime, and have a straightforward verification process, not to mention their customer service, which is laudable.

A Small Orange – even though this provider doesn’t provide different IPs for the reseller services, it does have a simple interface, support personnel, and a super-fast verification process ready to offer you the best of assistance. They’ve got impressive security, making it your ideal PBN hosting provider.

HostGator – nowadays, this provider is everywhere – it’s in every single place, and it’s for a good reason. HostGator has an easy-to-use interface and supports live chats, which facilitates continuous consultation processes. Its security is guaranteed as well, which is all you want for your PBNs.

SiteGround – despite having a small IP database, and a not-so-inspiring customer support, SiteGround is one of the most reliable, secure, and stable hosts you will come across in a certain price range. It is totally worth trying.

Other providers include: Bluehost, iPage, JustHost, HostMetro, Fat Cow, and Green Geeks.   

What is Easy Blog Networks?

In simple terms, Easy Blogs Networks (EBN) is the most used, and one of the oldest PBN hosting solutions, which aims to automate the setup processes when building a PBN. It does this by diversifying your PBN’s hosting and IPs. The EBN platform certainly does have a lot of whistles and bells, which enables it to quickly set up and scale your network. The platform has great aesthetic and it’s quite appealing. Plus, their purpose is described quite clearly – to build, host, and automate blog networks.

The platform also helps its users to address any problems that may appear during the process and the overall PBN maintenance. For those who have a larger business, and are looking for a quicker and faster PBN solution, then EBN is the ideal solution to consider. The fact that EBN was created for the sole purpose of hosting PBNs made the platform so popular.

The overall EBN system and approach are designed in a way that they can adjust to the needs of PBNs. If you have a number of PBNs buying several hosting accounts can take so much time, and is in fact, highly impractical. But with Easy Blog Network, you can place every site you have on a different host randomly.

Platform features and attributes

There are quite a number of great features on the EBN platform that are designed to suit your PBN criteria perfectly. Here are some of the features:

  • User-friendly and innovative dashboards
  • Easy to support for SSL
  • Automatic WordPress, plugin and theme updates   
  • Very simple set up
  • Neatly developed software
  • Free migrations
  • SEO metrics
  • Indexation check
  • Internal mailbox platform
  • Automatic nameservers

It is important to note that EBN functions on websites running on WordPress only. Yes, this may sound limiting, considering how vast the internet is and with a plethora of content management systems, however, considering the fact that WordPress dominates Google’s SERP, is responsible to powering 35% of the web, there are over 1 million registered WordPress domains, and that’s by far the most used content management system, you can clearly see why it is favoured over other content systems in EBN.

By EBN specializing in hosting PBNs, means that the platforms developers have to put in the extra effort so as to ensure that they come up with adequate solutions and to include the features so as to make the overall experience and functioning better and easier respectfully.

EBN do have a high-quality server configuration, which means that they look after everything, so you won’t have any costly security plugins. Their autopilot maintenance is carefully designed and is user-friendly. The platform also puts so much effort when creating each blog so as to ensure that the blogs look as unique as possible. They also try to come up with different themes, different usernames, and also installs distinct plugins.

Using EBN is just as its name indicates – fairly easy – as all you have to do is to key in your domain name. EBN will handle the rest for you.

Hosting providers

EBN uses a number of hosing providers, including:

Amazon web services – this provider was launched in 2006, and it has spread across 190 countries where it has acquired over a million customers from fast-growing start-ups, large enterprises to government agencies.

AccuWebHosting – it prides itself on offering innovative technology plus a world-class customer service. This led to the company being listed as the leading hosting provider in Microsoft Hosting Gallery.

DigitalOcean – launched in 2011, this provider serves over 160,000 users and has a daily growth of over 1000 users. It is based in the United States in New York, but it has data centres in Asia and Europe.

Dreamhost – since 1997, when it was launched, DreamHost has over 400,000 customers and hosts over 1.5 million domains. The provider boasts a 100 percent uptime, helping it maintain the PC Mag’s ‘Editor’s Choice’ title for 5 consecutive years.

Heficed – founded in 2008, Heficed scales across the world with top-tier, ISO certified data centres spread all over. It has customers in Europe, North and South America, and Africa.

HostVirtual – this provider operates in over 30 Edge locations all over the world, which provides a worldwide footprint, reaching more areas when compared to other public cloud providers.

Inxy – with over 750 servers in their name, the provider is the leading hosting provider, providing the most advanced hosting solutions. It has data centres in countries like the US, Russia, Netherlands, Singapore, and a few other European countries.

Linode – the company was formed in 2003, and it has over 250,000 customers globally ranging from Fortune 50 companies to startups and persons who offer the highest-performing products or services scalable to meet the specific demands of the business.

LeaseWeb – this company is rapidly growing with over 50,000 data servers in eight data centres located in the US, Asia, and Europe.

Media temple – this provider operates in over 100 countries and has over 125,000 businesses and individuals who rely on their scalable technology and premium service model, enabling it to become a world-renowned brand. It offers perfectly fitting solutions to the simplest projects to the business’s most demanding workloads and applications.

Rackspace – on a global scale, Rackspace serves over 200,000 businesses, and it has multiple data centres and offices in almost every continent, putting the company’s mission to get global recognition out in the open.

DNS providers

EBN also uses a variety of DNS providers:

Azure DNS – this is one of the leading providers in the cloud industry. Microsoft’s global network of the name servers has the redundancy and scale to provide ultra-high availability to your domains.

ClouDNS – it offers specialized DNS solutions to its customers, which comes from a free platform to a custom DNS package, and also including some cool security features.

DNSimple – after launching the secondary DNS back in 2015, which provides zone replication to DNS providers, the company has seen an increase in its domains and customers, which are over 50,000 and 17,000 respectfully, across the world.

DNS Made Easy – this provider remains the top DNS hosting choice among large corporations. This is mostly attributed to its 100% DNS uptime history and an overall uptime history of around 99%.

How secure and transparent is Easy Blog Networks         

Easy Blog Network has no footprints, and its platform undergoes regular audit for print impressions and security vulnerabilities. It also supports HTTPS as well as SSL, which are the most advanced security features on the internet. On the transparency aspect, EBN ensures that it indicates the IP address of the hosting company on your blog network. It also provides a couple of IP addresses and they ensure that include the details of the hosting provider. You can access any information on their platforms such as DNS providers and the IP addresses.

Is EBN safe for Blogs?

Quite a number of studies have been done, trying to ascertain the platform’s de-indexing rate, and they have all come to a similar conclusion – it is significantly lower than other competitors in the same field. In one of the study, done by PBX Fox, they tracked the de-indexation rate of over 6000 blogs, and their findings showed that the indexation rate of EBN was very low, in fact, EBN rate and that of premium cPanel hosts are on per. In another study, Charles Forte did an analysis of different PBN hosts and found that EBN had the lowest rate of de-indexation compared to all other hosts.

When you consider all these studies, you can see why EBN is one the most reliable and trustworthy hosting providers it is today, and that it guarantees safety for your blog network.

Pros & Cons of Easy Blog network

Pros

  • Diversified hosing and unique IP – Each blog will be hosted on a randomly selected hosing provider with a unique IP, completely unrelated to each other.
  • Security and performance optimization – EBN stays protected against SQL injections, brute-force attacks, and other hacking attempts. Updates and backups basics are addressed when backing up, and if there are any problems, there are sorted out immediately, and everything is restored back to their normalcy.
  • One-click WordPress installation – the truth is, software installation is pretty tough for most people. But when it comes to EBN, it is amazingly easy. It has an extremely user-friendly interface that lets you easily set up your blog network without any need for help.
  • The system was well-thought-out from the initial stages, where specific measures were taken to ensure that EBN comes out as the best service in this space.
  • Useful SEO metrics and time-saving tools – EBN’s system does have some built-in tools that are quite useful as they save you time when managing your PBN, such as blog health, convenient WP login, and grouping by blog niches. What’s more, EBN has auto-updated SEO metrics that help you boost your PBN performance. These metrics include the number of posts, pages, comments each blog has; the number of URLs and redirected URLs; DA; and majestic info such as CF, TF, referring IPs, and external backlinks.
  • Economical – due to the competitive modern scene, most things on the internet are quite pricey. However, Easy Blog Network is quite economical, especially for the large PBN developer. So, if you are looking for affordable and flawless hosting, EBN is an excellent option for you.
  • EBN backs up your blogs regularly – a feature that is not provided by other hosting providers. Instead, you find yourself paying a hefty amount to acquire some third party plugins. Having your blogs getting backed up on a daily basis gives you a sense of assurance that your data is safe and sound, no matter how precarious the upcoming time is.

Cons

  • You can’t host blogs that are not live – EBN removes all blogs that get de-indexed or go offline. This is one of the downsides of EBN. But before your account gets purged, you will receive an email notifying you of the same.
  • Not suitable for mini-PBNs given that the number of blogs you are required to host is 10 and it’s priced accordingly
  • IP address limitation, where one is only required to have a maximum of 50 unique IPs.
  • EBN advises against high traffic blogs, probably up to 10,000 visits, which may be a disadvantage to some website.
  • All websites on EBN are hosted on servers that only contain other PBNs. Your website could potentially be affected if other users are not doing the right thing.

Easy Blog Networks Alternatives

GOPBN

What is GoPBN?

Originally, GoPBN was founded by two friends who were in need of a better alternative to hosting their PBN domains. So, what they did, they transformed what they had created into a SaaS offering, and later introduced it to the market as GoPBN. It immediately picked off and was touted as a better alternative to EBN, all thanks to its intuitive control panel, expert-handled hosting, and extensive scalability options that extend to over a 1000 sites. However, GoPBN was later acquired by EBN, which triggered a number of product-related issues, including higher prices, and a weird skew of privacy that existed between the customers and the provider where they sometimes asked for customers’ ID scans and didn’t share with the customers about where their sites were hosted.

But, despite all this, GoPBN offered unmatched automation and speed alongside rapid deployment, unique IP configurations, cloud infrastructures, global location options, and footprint-free promises, all of which had a bit of a going for them.

Pros & Cons of GoPBN

Pros

  • GoPBN didn’t rely on WordPress alone when installing CMS platforms on the domains hosted by them, they also utilized Joomla and Ghost. This is unlike other PBN providers.
  • It had a small user base and breadth, which ensured that customer support was super personal and far less robotic when compared to its competitors.
  • Setting up your sites on GoPBN was super-fast as you could deploy over 10 blogs in seconds to their platform.

Cons

  • Their hosting services were quite pricey to most businesses. They rationalized this with the claim that the platform didn’t just rely on WordPress installs for PBN sites.
  • They never published potential hosting providers, and never even told their customers about the companies their sites are hosted on.
  • The fact that the platform required its customers to issue a government ID was a major red flag, especially when it comes to anonymity purposes.

Bulk Buy Hosting

What is Bulk Buy?

This is the other alternative that has been widely considered as one of the most effective PBN hosting options. It is digitally-minded and has a simple intuitive user interface that leaves little or no confusion to both experienced and novice users. This is to say that if you looking for a simple solution for your PBN hosting, then Bulk Buy is the ideal choice for you.

Sure, they may not have some of the deep dive analytics and other advanced features provided by the competitors, but it sure does offer an array of benefits and advantages, one of them being their nameserver and IP distribution. With Bulk Buy, be sure that your PBN sites will be hosted alongside legitimate entities. This plus other procedures put in place maintains your PBN footprint-free and keeps you far away from Google crawlers’ eyes.

Pros & cons

Pros

  • Bulk Buy doesn’t charge any additional fees for SSL certificates, which comes together with other hosting installations. They also offer free email migrations, forwarding, and backups.
  • It has a full-scale PBN builder on its dashboard, which gives you a one-click request option, with scalable, flexible, and customizable sites starting at $35.
  • Bulk Buy is known to have an exceptional customer support team ready to handle your concerns every time they arise.
  • There are regular backups to sites hosted on their platform at all levels, which guarantees the security of your sites.

Cons

  • There are no automation tools on the platform, which is a bit of a disdain to automation lovers. Blog development does require going through the support process, which takes time.
  • Bulk Buy doesn’t offer a free trial period to those who would wish to test the service before they can commit to it. This is a huge disadvantage considering that most site owners want to know what they are buying before the actual buying.

Priority Prospect   

What is Priority Prospect?

The Europe-based hosting provider is one of the mightiest in this field. It has a global IP database from which to choose from. As the site owner, you can be able to choose between dedicated and shared IP addresses if you are looking to manage your costs effectively. What’s more, unlike other competitors, Priority Prospect does have a domain marketplace of their own, which guarantees you a strong domain with a clean backlink profile and stellar metrics. They only use auction domains that are strictly vetted and checked by hand so as to guarantee high-quality and effective use. Also, the provider has a capable team ready to assist you in finding the best-expired domain opportunities. The purchases on Priority Prospect are on an IP by IP basis, where users are able to select IPs, whether shared or dedicated, and each IP gives you access to their services.

Pros & Cons

Pros

  • Priority Prospect is designed in a way that takes out the confusion from connecting domains to hosting, and for better diversification, you are able to know where to host domains.
  • They offer a highly incremental IP pricing structure, unlike other competitors who charge associated costs on a site-by-site basis for every 5-10 sites.
  • The provider utilizes a proprietary IP network based on the cloud, which allows them to distribute IPs globally, accelerate the speed of the sites, and also protect the sites.

Cons

  • Yes, Priority Prospect does offer separate cost options where shared IP addresses go for $1.80 per month and dedicated addresses go for $3.10 per month. But the thing is, this cost is a bit higher when compared to the other alternatives. This may seem like nothing when you look at it, but the truth is, when you start scaling up, that’s when you get the real feeling of how cumbersome it can get.
  • The host doesn’t provide site creation tools, which is what beginners rely on to get started. This means that they will be a lot of room for error and thereby heavy penalties may apply to those unsure of the entire process.

Launch CDN

What is Launch CDN?

This provider refers to itself as “PBN hosting made easy”, and if you take a closer look at it, you will find that this is actually true. Compared to other competitors LaunchCDN uses content delivery networks (CDNs) to host PBN sites on different IPs, which means that your sites are hosted alongside regular, legitimate, and non-PBN sites. The aim here is to keep everything as footprint-free as possible. To be honest, the site’s footprint focus is the strongest among all other alternatives. When it comes to the inbuilt site builder, LaunchCDN and Bulk Buy Hosting utilizes the same backend, which they charge a small additional fee, making the approach more hands-off. The hosts also provide an array of other benefits, which all work together in order to make a super strong and cohesive hosting option for your PBN.

Pros & Cons

Pros

  • The fact that they host sites on CDNs, utilizing unique IP addresses, the sites are hosted together with other legitimate sites.
  • They provide impressive customer service, which includes free SLL certificates and free migrations for your domains, regular check-ins, and daily backups, which ensures that everything works perfectly.
  • With this site, not only do they rely on CDNs to launch each site, but there are also a couple of additional systems such as Stackpath, CloudFront, and Cloudfare.

Cons

  • The pricing is not at all customizable. For example, you find that the pricing structure rises from like 400 to 1000 domains, which means that if you’ve got 450 domains, you will spend much more than you intended to.
  • No instant contact option or live chat with the customers, which is not that ideal in today’s market.  

PBN.Hosting

What is PBN.Hosting?

Unlike other PBN hosts, PBN hosting doesn’t crowd your websites with shared IPs, as they use 6 different content delivery networks (CDNs) so as to spread the domains out. PBN.hosting gives you the kind of security that even the best spammer will have a really hard time trying to share your IP address, which could later spell trouble for you. The host provides fast, safe, and reliable WordPress PBN Hosting, with an added benefit dynamic cloud IPs that has proved impossible to tie together.

Pros & Cons

Pros

  • Everything is handled in one place – on their dashboard
  • Guarantees top security for your PBN sites.
  • They allow restoring of sites from Archive.org

Cons

  • The hosts run exclusively on Amazon Web Services, which may make some users uncomfortable adding more than 15% of their PBN to the platform.   

CloudBoss Pro

What is CloudBoss Pro?

This is a hosting management platform that enables you to manage your hosting accounts in one place. It already hosts a number of real websites, all thanks to its simple, yet automated features. While other platforms built their processes and interfaces in a ridiculously complex way, which makes it super difficult for most users, CloudBoss chose to simplify their platform in such a way that you are able to create and manage cheap SEO hosting without any problems. It also seeks to enable the site owners to host their PBNs on servers that already host other reliable content.

Pros & Cons

Pros

  • You are able to backlink your sites without too much effort.
  • With CloudBoss Pro, your sites don’t get shared with other SEOs which protects you from getting detected by Google.
  • You are able to create and manage cheap SEO hostings
  • Easy to sign up and start working
  • Saves time
  • Comes with 50 PBN hosting slots offered for free.

Cons

  • Ethical issues
  • With CloudBoss Pro, you not only pay for the subscribing fee, but the users also pay for the setup costs.
  • A majority of the site is on Amazon Web Services.

Other alternatives

Other alternatives include;

Paz hosting – which calls itself ‘the next generation SEO hosting’, offering easy and cheap SEO hosting to PBN site owners all over the world.  

SiteWyz – run by the owner of a pretty popular tool – RankWyz – it has a lot to offer. For instance, runs its servers on popular brands such as Digital Ocean, Linode, and Vultr, which is great. Also, you get an easy WordPress setup, backups, and management.

Our overall review

Easy Blog Networks for sure checks off all the boxes when it comes to the most reliable and reputable PBN hosting providers. It offers its users safe, automated, and easy-to-use PBN Hosting solutions. Since its launch back in 2014, it is not a surprise to see it as an industry leader today. EBN is the perfect platform for your PBN, and it’s super affordable too. The support is quick, and they are always ready to assist you anytime you encounter a problem with your network. It’s worth trying.