I’ve bought PBN links from dozens of different providers. Expensive ones, cheap ones, with DR 10 and DR 50+, old drop sites, fresh link farms, niche-specific ones and mixed bags. And do you know what the main pattern I’ve noticed is? Most PBNs are created for one purpose only – to place an outbound link from them. That’s pretty much where the site’s development ends. They find a drop site, set up a WordPress site on it, upload a few articles, and start selling links or placing them on their own projects. After that, the site might continue to exist for another 2–3 years, but in reality, it doesn’t develop at all.
- A PBN doesn’t develop as a standalone site
This is probably the most important point. So, I open a PBN that’s been around for, say, two years. What would I like to see there? That the site has grown over those two years – for example, it went from 100 pages to 1,000. Plus, new sections have appeared, the semantic scope has expanded, pages have reached the top of search results, the backlink profile has grown and, most importantly, organic search traffic has materialised.
But what do I actually see very often? It’s the classic scenario: the site was launched, then they published, say, 5–10 initial articles, and after that, practically all the new content consists of client articles with outbound links 😂 The main task is complete – the PBN is ready to place links.
For me, the correct approach is completely different. A PBN should evolve into a niche-specific thematic portal. And if I were to revisit it in two years’ time, it should continue to thrive and develop regardless of whether anyone is buying a link from it today or not.
- They published 5 articles – and then gave up
This is a classic PBN scenario; it’s like opening up the publication history:
👉 January – 5 articles
👉 February – one sponsored post
👉 March – two sponsored posts
👉 April – nothing
👉 May – one
And so on for two years )) What sort of bloody news site is this? For a proper media outlet, content is an ongoing process. That’s why I’m much more drawn to a completely different model – not five articles at launch, but regular site updates. Depending on the project, this could mean 3–5, 10, 20 or even 30–50 topic-specific posts a day. Not for the sake of quantity, but to constantly expand the semantic scope, create new clusters, strengthen old pages with internal links, and gain new entry points from Google. If the site is about cars, I want to see hundreds and thousands of articles about cars, not 10 articles about cars followed by a whole lot of content on casinos, databases, crypto and ESS.
3. Publishing an article doesn’t mean it’s been added to Google
Another thing I constantly notice is that a site might have, say, 1,500 published pages, but only 20 are in the index. Articles are published simply because someone knows how to press the ‘publish’ button, and nobody really gives a shit what happens to the URL afterwards. For me, publishing is only half the job. You’ve published it, checked it, got it indexed, and now you keep an eye on it. Because I don’t need 5,000 articles on a PBN if a significant proportion of them effectively don’t exist for the search engine. And it’s particularly funny when your article, complete with a link, is among those pages. What a brilliant investment 😂
- The PBN doesn’t rank for anything at all – no keywords and no traffic
I open the PBN in Ahrefs and see a DR of 35 – that’s brilliant. Next, I check the organic keywords – there are 0, traffic is 0, yet there are several hundred pages on the site, even though it’s been around for two years. And a simple question arises: why, in two years, has Google not given this site practically a single decent keyword? I’m not just interested in whether the drop domain has any old backlinks. I want to see that a new site is also capable of ranking. That’s why, in my PBNs, I focus on keywords and organic traffic from the outset (although I don’t have it on all of them, and that’s fine too).
It’s not essential to have tens of thousands of visits. But after launch, I’d like to see progress: the site developing, keywords growing, rankings for them improving, and, naturally, traffic starting to come in. For most of my new sites, the first organic visits start to appear roughly 1–3 months after launch; sometimes sooner, sometimes later. This is because a PBN that Google is able to rank is far more interesting to me than a PBN with a high Domain Rating (DR) that has been sitting there for two years with zero visibility.
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CIS and international markets (gambling, casinos, dating, crypto, and white-hat projects)
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