Last Updated on 26/10/2025
Introduction
Backlinks from a network of interconnected websites and blogs are known as PBNs (private blog networks). The same person often owns all of these websites, and they are all used to build connections to their money site. To make more money, they can also sell PBN links to other website owners.
A publishing corporation like Gawker Media LLC, which owns websites like Deadspin, Lifehacker, and others, has a framework similar to that of a personal website. However, the difference with websites located in a PBN is that they serve their target audience with valuable material secondary to link development.
The site network is hidden from the public to prevent detection, as Google views this type of artificial link creation as exploitation (hence the “private” blog network). In order to conceal your online traces, you also need to utilize several hosting companies for each website.
Google’s Opinion on PBNs
Looking at Google’s Link Scheme policies, we can observe that:
Any links intended to change PageRank or a site’s position in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines. Any actions that affect links leading to or leaving your website fall under this category.
Private blog networks undoubtedly fall under this category, since the links on these sites are added by someone operating on behalf of the site and are meant to skew Google search results.
The best way to encourage other websites to link to yours is to create original, relevant content that spreads naturally within the online community. Good content production pays off: Links are often editorial endorsements made voluntarily; thus, the more beneficial your material is, the more likely it is that someone else would find it beneficial to their audience and would have a link to it.
Editorial links that are placed as a consequence of excellent content are not PBN links. They are only a means to artificially affect search ranks, and they won’t be effective in the long run.
How Can PBN Backlinks Be Built?
You need to buy expired domains with current authority and clean backlink profiles, free of spammy links, to develop PBN backlinks. The next step is to create a blog on those PBN domains and provide excellent material that links back to your website, with each domain containing only one PBN backlink.
To pass internal PageRank, the web page that hosts your backlink must have many internal links pointing to it. To further boost page authority, you should aggressively build backlinks to that page from other high PR websites.
In an effort to improve your website’s search rankings for its target keywords, this PBN backlink approach helps raise the PageRank value it receives through the backlink.
To boost a website’s domain authority, some individuals just send PBN backlinks to the home page, whilst other SEOs link to both the home page and specific web pages to distribute PageRank throughout the whole website.
The Dangers of Private Blog Networks
Penalties are applied to your website, and it falls in the rankings
In most cases, your site may be punished and subject to manual action when excessive manipulative link-building strategies are used.
What is this, though?
When we read Google’s instructions, we can see that “When a human reviewer at Google determines that a site’s pages do not comply with Google’s webmaster quality requirements, Google takes manual action against the site. The majority of human corrections aim to undermine our search index. The majority of the vulnerabilities mentioned here will lead to pages or sites receiving lower rankings or being excluded from search results without providing any visual cues to the user.”
In other words, if your site is subject to a manual action, it will rank worse overall or on certain pages. You must correct the problem (delete the offending links or submit a disavow file) and submit a reconsideration request in order to reverse a manual action.
Your rankings are unlikely to recover to their original position, even if this is effective, because unnatural connections artificially boosted them.
Unnatural connections may also cause an algorithmic change when the system determines that the links shouldn’t influence a site’s rankings. In the majority of cases, especially in 2020, it is likely that the algorithm ignores the links rather than adjusting in response.
In the past, Google’s Penguin filter would regularly update, resulting in sites losing rank due to artificial links.
Links Are Disregarded
The fact is that connections the Google algorithm deems unnatural are likely to be disregarded rather than result in a human action for the majority of SEOs who employ private blog networks.
Nowadays, manual activities are often observed only when a site is reviewed by Google’s web spam team due to excessive use of manipulative techniques. However, if Google rejects links leading to your website, what does it actually mean?
Simply put, it indicates that they have no bearing whatsoever on rankings. Links that are not likely to be natural are ignored, according to John Mueller of Google. Not to mention, Google now has access to data from a sizable number of disavowed files. SEO specialists have been assisting search engines in better comprehending the origins of unnatural links for many years.
Resources used to establish links (effort and/or money) are essentially wasted if they don’t affect rankings, either favorably or unfavorably. Nobody likes to believe their efforts were in vain.
Recognizing PBN Links
When much of the technical information on the sites —such as the hosting company, site ownership, themes, duplicate content, backlink profile, photos, and videos —is the same across the private blog network, you can tell whether it’s a PBN.
A list to use for spotting PBN backlinks:
Hosting: PBNs that share a hosting provider or IP address can be detected immediately.
Site Ownership: When numerous sites share the same contact information, PBNs can be quickly identified using public WHOIS records. Additionally, it may be a warning sign if a suspected network of PBNs has suppressed WHOIS data.
Site Design: PBNs often use the same navigation, color palettes, and website design.
Duplicate Material: To cut running expenses, PBNs sometimes reuse the same content across several websites. To check if the text is available on other websites, you can paste a paragraph into Google search.
Backlink profile: PBNs frequently link to the same websites. To determine the degree of site interlinking, investigate the backlink graph of a suspected PBN in Ahrefs or Majestic.
Images and Videos: Because these digital assets are expensive or difficult to generate, PBNs often reuse the same images and videos across the network. To discover comparable content on other websites, use Google Image or Video Search.
Conclusion
As you already know, PBN backlinks are used to manipulate search engine results by transferring PageRank from a website with a high domain authority to a single website in need of a traffic boost. Additionally, PBN links remain a popular link-building tactic. However, it is considered a black-hat SEO technique against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and should be avoided on sites important to you if you want to achieve long-term success.
