PBN Backlinks In SEO: Should You Avoid Them?

PBN backlinks are links received from PBN websites.

These Private Blog Networks (PBNs) are a collection of websites owned by a person or group, with the lone purpose of providing links to a website to artificially rank higher on search engines results pages. 

Often, these PBN websites were once legitimate sites with established authority that have been repurposed to transfer that authority via backlinks. The site gets updated, publishes content and appears legitimate design-wise, only to hide its primary objective of giving out or selling links.  

Do PBNs Still Work?

Yes. While search engines like Google have gotten adept at spotting PBNs and their links, they can still get away with their temporary boosts. Recently in particular, PBNs have upped their game when it comes to content quality in order to better fool search engines. 

How Much Do PBN Backlinks Cost?

PBN links are defined by their low-end prices. Most of the time, the backlinks they provide start from as cheap as $5. That number is a far cry from the link building pricing of legitimate methods. 

The two primary ways that people receive or find PBN backlinks are by either purchasing an old website with established authority and remodeling it into becoming their own, or by directly buying links from PBNs. 

• Buying old sites: PBN managers find old websites by searching through public domain databases, observing registrar drop-lists or maybe even by participating in domain auctions. Through these methods, they change the newly obtained website into a new mold, and start sending links to their target site. 
• Buying PBN backlinks: People find PBN backlinks mostly through freelance networks, private forums or specialized marketplaces. As mentioned previously, they’re lured in by the cheap prices and the prospects of quick authority, so they purchase these links. 

If you want sustainable growth and to avoid penalties, you should not buy PBN links.

You reap what you sow with PBN backlinks, and oftentimes the consequences are never worth the temporary rewards. Uncertainty and risks are synonymous with PBN links, and other than a quick burst of authority, the number of potential benefits that can be provided is lackluster. 

You should not buy PBN backlinks because:

Google Devalues PBN Links

PBN links fall under what Google considers to be a manipulative link building strategy. Since your links don’t come from a genuine source which is representative of your content’s quality, Google actively devalues those links. This means that through advanced algorithms like Spambrain, the authority and vote of confidence that a link provides are cut off once they’re detected as unnatural and manipulative. 

PBN Backlinks Run the Risk of Penalties

If worst comes to worst, a usage of PBN backlinks can result in penalties from search engines. There’s no guarantee when and how you’ll receive a penalty, but the risk of it hitting your website is always looming over your shoulders. There are two penalty types that can be imposed upon your website.

• Deranking: Once deranking penalties are enforced, your site plummets down the SERP.
• Deindexing: The worst case scenario, search engines can completely remove your website from appearing in the search results page, flushing all your work down the drain.

Benefits Are Short Term

PBNs almost always get caught eventually, it’s simply a matter of when. It could be in a year, next month, tomorrow or maybe an hour after, but they always do. You also have to consider that search engines are only getting better at spotting manipulative link building, and they’re not going to stop improving anytime soon. Short-term benefits are practically worthless for your website if you want stability, so you should try to shy away from PBN backlinks.

A Lack of Control

If you’re buying backlinks from a PBN, you’re putting your faith in an unstable external website.  Granted, in a hypothetical scenario where you bought a single link from a PBN, only for that site to get shut down later, you probably won’t suffer all too much. Nevertheless, most PBN backlink purchases that actually yield results don’t come from those small doses.

As such, a website buying these large supplies of links is getting the bulk of its authority from a site that can close or be deactivated at any moment. Additionally, in some cases a PBN may notice that an abundance of links on their site is detrimental to their traffic, so, they’ll start deleting links placed on their pages in an attempt to recover. 

A PBN is not like your average high-authority website, its future is unpredictable, trusting such a site with your authority isn’t a smart move. 

Other Approaches Are Preferable

If you’re willing to put in the funding, time and effort into upping your site’s ranking, there’s other approaches which can provide true results. There’s no shortage of SEO agencies that specialize in natural tactics that’ll save you the headache of the consequences that come from PBN backlinks. 

At the end of the day, what PBN backlinks end up being is a waste of money. Sure, the quick authority and ranking that they deliver can direct some traffic and potential customers your way. However, those benefits don’t outweigh the risks and the likely additional work you’ll have to put in to recover from search engine intervention. It’s better to keep that money in your pocket, and use it somewhere else. 

PBNs are distinguished by their lack of investment, effort, and identity. 

When buying links, or conducting competitive backlink analysis, it’s crucial to be able to spot PBNs in order to avoid them. Granted, when selling backlinks, a lot of these sites ditch any attempts at hiding their nature as PBNs. Nevertheless, for those that are less blatant with their true colors, there’s clear telltale signs that you can look out for in order to identify them.

• Website design: A PBN’s user interface is often cut-and-dried, making it look like any other run-of-the-mill website. Since PBN managers constantly cut corners, no investments are made into the design of the site.
  
• Website theme/topics: In order to maximize the amount of websites they can sell links to, PBNs don’t often establish a clear theme for their sites. Usually, you’ll find articles from wildly differing topics, for example jumping from something like medicine to video games.
  
  Additionally, another giveaway is if a site is linking to other websites which are completely unrelated to their own.
• Lack of social proof/about us: Most legitimate websites have an “about us” section detailing the team’s bios, LinkedIn profiles or at least an email. PBNs, of course, are not legitimate websites, and while they do sometimes contain email addresses, they stand out since they’re usually structured unprofessionally.
• Unnatural or aggressive placement: Outbound links on PBN websites either stick out like a sore thumb or are placed in a way that tries its best to grab your attention. This can be done for example by either setting the anchor text in bold or making it very blunt.
  
  
• Website history: Since PBNs are recycled websites with prior authority, you can use tools like the Wayback Machine or WHO.IS to uncover the previous site in place.
  
• AI content: Once again, effort isn’t a PBN’s strong suit. As such, relying on AI chatbots to do the heavy lifting when it comes to creating content is common among these websites.
  
  
• Traffic metrics: With PBNs, there’s usually a discrepancy between the authority the site has, and the traffic that comes its way. Using an SEO audit tool from a site like Ahrefs can reveal traffic patterns which are volatile, inconsistent, or flatlined at zero.
  
  

If there’s an unwanted link pointing to your website on a PBN, you can remove it by using Google’s disavow links tool.

Perhaps a competitor wanted to harm your site by adding your link to a PBN, or maybe you purchased a PBN link before finding out about its potential downsides. You don’t have to worry too much about it, as it’s very possible to get rid of these links by:

• Contacting PBN owner: While this method is unlikely to produce much success, you can always simply ask the site’s manager to remove the link from the page. 
• Use Google’s tool: The disavow tool in the Google Search Console allows you to upload a list of sites you want Google to ignore when checking your backlink profile. Though disavowing backlinks doesn’t outright delete them, it does stop them from counting for your profile.

Important note: A lot of the time, you may not even need to go to these extents, as search engines have improved their capabilities for detecting PBN links to such a degree, that it’s likely they’ll simply devalue the authority being passed from such links before you even notice. 

Can a PBN Still Be Useful?

If you’ve already made your own PBN, you don’t necessarily need to blow it up. Prior to deciding to get rid of it or not, it’s worth doing some research into the potential benefits that it can still bring you. 

Specifically, there’s a chance that the PBN you’re running shows up in certain AI responses. If the content provided is of high quality and is considered valuable to AI engines, it’s simply more attention that’s on your website. So, if that happens to be the case, it’s not a bad idea to keep the PBN up even as just a simple repository for information. 

PBN backlinks are of low-quality and risky to employ. Yes, you may see an immediate increase in ranking and authority for your website if you turn to them, but the benefits will quickly dissipate, leaving you with an empty wallet and maybe even a penalized website. Focus on link building with non-manipulative methods, and if it’s too much for you to handle, you can always outsource your link building to agencies such as Gopeak that specialize in it.