Why Are There No Good Examples of PBN Sites? - 139

This is Grumpy SEO Guy Episode 139. Why are there no good examples of PBN sites? You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy, and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy, let me tell you why I'm grumpy today. I'm grumpy today because people always want to know why there's no good examples of PBN sites, and that question has many answers, and we're going to discuss a lot of them now. First, couple reminders. Okay, reminders. You can email me at helloagrumpyseo guy.com. If you have a question and you want to set up a Zoom advisory call, you can email me there, and we'll talk about setting that up. If you want to ask a question to the Grumpy SEO Guy subreddit, you can do so reddit.com/r/grumpyseo Guy. If you want to support the show, you can do so at patreon.com/grumpyseo Guy. Okay, let's continue. But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started, everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience. This podcast is not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. So, the question is, why are there no good examples of PBN sites? That's a great question. Here's some of the reasons. Reason number one, let's say I were to share a site and say, this is what you should make your PBN site look like. Okay. So the first thing that would happen is everybody would just build a site that looks exactly the same as mine. And that's not going to help you guys and that's not going to help me either because you don't want websites that all look exactly the same. You want a bunch of different kinds of websites. Okay. So people would copy my theme and they would copy my number of images and they would copy my layout and they would copy where I put the links and they would copy the number of words in the posts and the number and how long the excerpts are and they would copy the information in the footer and they would and I don't want that. Okay. So I'm going to copy my sites and you don't want to copy my sites either because especially if you're going to be making more than one because you don't want your portfolio to have a bunch of websites that all look the same. That's a bad plan. Okay. That's a bad idea. So don't do it that way. Okay. Don't do it that way. Okay. So that's first reason and we're going to talk more about that in a minute by the way. Second reason. I'm not going to share an actual PBN site then you know who some of our clients are. That's not good for anybody. Okay. And who knows what people would do to it right or you're going to build a bunch of like garbage links to my site because I ruined grumpy SEO. No. Like no. I don't want that to happen. So I'm definitely not going to do that. And also if I were to do that no one could ever use that website again because it would be publicly available right. It would either be so if if I were to share a site. Hey, here's an example of a PBN site. Probably people would post it all around the internet. Oh look, here's grumpy SEO guys PBN site, blah blah blah. And it would become known on the internet as a PBN site. And then I could never do anything with that domain again and neither could anyone else. So like the reason would be because that site would have so many like here's an example of a PBN type of backlinks that nobody would ever like want to use it for anything else. And it also wouldn't be useful as a PBN anymore because it would be identified as a PBN site. So by the way, PBN private blog network is the common name but we call it. What we call it private blog portfolio or PPP because a portfolio is a bunch of websites that are not linked together and network means a bunch of sites that are linked together and you don't want to link your sites together in a PBN because that's a bad idea. It's a footprint. You don't want to do that. So anyways, in case you list this episode and you're like, I'm not aware of what PBN means. Now, now you know. Okay. So anyways, look, anyways. So that's another reason I'm not going to do it. Then somebody's like, well, you could just build a brand new one and not you. No, I don't want first. So I don't want to. No. If I had a domain, I probably just use it anyway. Second of all, the same problems from before everybody would copy it and then no one could ever use that domain for anything else ever again. Anyway, because I don't know if you like, oh, here's a PBN site. Well, look at this PBN site. Here's a different PBN site and then they would link to it and no, I don't want to ruin a domain like that. So we're just, we're just not going to do that. Okay. So I have given specific instruction on how to build PBN's private plug portfolios for those you paying attention in many episodes. Okay. And the biggest questions that people have are things like what theme should I use? How many words should my post be? How many should I have the full post or the excerpt show? Like those questions are all answered. But the more important thing is that it doesn't matter. Okay. So you're overthinking it and just build a website. What do I generally say, right? I say build a normal website. Well, what does a normal website look like? Really? Go online and look at websites. That's what a normal website looks like. Like, I don't know what else to tell you. Anyways, so here's, this is, I think this is the most important point though. When you get a lot of sites in your portfolio, okay? 15, 20 or 30 or however many you have, okay? It's not gonna matter if some of them show the full post and others show the excerpt because you have a variation and that's good. You do not want every website linking to your client or every website linking to you to be exactly the same. So have some of them show the full post, have some of them show the excerpt, have some of them look one way and have some of them look another way and stop trying to make them all the same. As long as you have a blog and it has authority and you're linking to another website, you're doing it correctly, okay? We've got a couple clients who have been listening to the podcast for a while and they've built their own PBNs and I know this because they've done a couple Zoom Advisory calls and they did it correctly. Now maybe the Zoom Advisory call was because they wanted to look at domains together or something like that but they did it correctly. They have different looking websites, different numbers of posts and everything is different which is the way you want to do it. There's not a wrong way to do it as long as you're not doing anything spammy like blog roll links or footer links or non-contextual links. Anyway, I hope this answers your question. If it doesn't, let me know what questions you have in the comments and I'll talk to you later. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe and if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review. It would really help the show out. I hope this episode was helpful. If you have any questions or want to suggest a subject for a future episode, you can contact me on Reddit. My username is Grumpy SEO Guy. You can visit the Grumpy SEO Guy subreddit or you can email me at [email protected]. If you email me, please either whitelist my email address or check your junk folders because I've been told that my replies are going into the junk folder and it's probably because we're talking about things like SEO and backlinks and I think those words will classify an email as spam. And if you want to support the podcast because it's the best source of SEO information on the planet and it's free, you can do so at patreon.com/grumpyseoguy and I will talk to you later. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy. The SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time nonsense doesn't work. Join us next Wednesday for another episode.