If you struggle to get backlinks to your website…reaching out to other webmasters isn’t your thing… If you thinking about getting into and making your own private blog networks…then this message is just for you. Here’s why…
Hi there, my name is Alicia Chase, and other than blogging, I’m in the SEO business and have many years of experience. Building your very own private blog network is still the pinnacle of ranking sites.
Done right they are awesome, done wrong and you will pay the ultimate price.
I am going to go through and show you exactly how to do it the right way in these few articles so if that’s you…keep reading.
How To Set Up Private Blog Networks The Right Way
This article is the first in a series that focuses on all the small details that you need to know and get right when building your Private Blog Networks(PBN)
These few articles will cover all of those little details that it’s important that you need to get right.
So pay full attention in order to get the Maximum Impact from the expired domains that you buy.
So when it comes to building your private blog networks for SEO. There are three big areas that we need to focus on and get right.
It all starts with domain registration and that’s covered in this article.
In the next part of this trilogy, we look at the hosting options and what you need to be doing there.
And the final post is about site configuration itself in terms of on-page SEO, setting up WordPress ,and layout structure.
So let’s get into Private Blog Networks Domain Registrations details.
Now the biggest single takeaway that you must get from this entire post is that:
it’s absolutely crucial that who ever you register the domain with, you must have a working email address for it.
If you don’t the domain registrar can’t verify that you’re the owner and you will more than likely lose the domain because you can’t verify it’s yours.
I use Namecheap for the best part of my domains, you can add as many contacts under your account.
Also, you need a working email to verify you are the owner within 30 day period to confirm you are indeed the owner.
And quite often it will be the case that you actually lose the domain if you can’t verify because the registrar cannot contact you as the owner.
I set up a new Gmail address each time for verification and to test if the domain has been marked as spam in the Google search console. Watch this to see what I mean…
Another option is to have forwarders set up to verify domain-specific emails that you set up for each of these expired domains that you buy.
Registering your expired domains.
I have found over the years
What I want to do is talk through your options and tell you what I do which isn’t necessarily what you might want to do or be comfortable doing just depends on your own philosophy and approach to SEO.
But I’ll at least outline what I do and you can consider it for yourself.
Then you can decide which way you’d like to go about it.
It’s not absolutely crucial if you’re using someone like GoDaddy or Namecheap because they’re absolutely huge and there are tons of domains registered there.
I also think it’s not a bad idea to spread your domain registration around. Having all your domains under one roof could leave footprints.
Obviously, you just want to check around for the best deals and also have a look at whois privacy.
If you’re applying the whois to the domain that you’re buying generally speaking you do want to use that whois privacy protection.
Some of the companies offer free whois for life and typically at companies like Namecheap and GoDaddy it’s only the first year that your whois privacy protection is for free.
And normally you will have to pay an extra cost each year after that.
However, it’s really important to note that not all domain types allow whois privacy protection.
Typically country-level domains though this varies and you can see more here just to give you more information because you may be interested in domains from other countries to other different users depending on your needs.
But a lot of country-level domains do not allow privacy protection.
And the other issue here is that Google is also a domain registrar and theoretically they can actually see behind privacy protection.
Now whether they actually do or not is a highly debated point in the SEO arena.
But I know from my own experience that deindexing went down greatly when we regularly started putting privacy protection on our SEO domains.
Depending on how many links your money site will have but you don’t necessarily want every single good backlink or all of your backlinks to have privacy protection.
That doesn’t look very random necessarily, but there are other options apart from putting privacy protection on every single one of your private blog network sites.
For instance.
If you’re not using privacy protection, you can use the previous owner’s details.
Whoever used to own that domain we can actually access that information and put that into the domain registration records as the current owner now.
It’s not easy to find that information and I’ve looked a lot to find it freely and really it’s very very difficult to consistently get that on the web.
So what you can do is sign up and get a $ 50-a-month subscription.
It’s $49.95 with domaintools.com.
And with them, you have a 100 domain check limit each month.
You might have a personal moral objection to using the previous owner’s details.
I’ve never found it an issue really in terms of those people getting upset.
Now if you do use the previous owner’s details, one very important thing you must remember.
As I said, you’ve got to make sure to have a working email do not copy that old owners email address if it’s something like Hotmail or Yahoo.
You’ve got to have a working email address, even if it forwards to your own normal email got it.
It is pretty difficult to find this kind of information for free as I said and if you’re doing this on any scale, I do recommend a domaintools.com account and $50 dollars a month is not a lot for this level of information here.
What you can do if you use the previous owner’s details domain registration you may as well use that for the hosting and any Social account profiles linking to it as well.
Assuming you’re using small hosting accounts, which is what is recommended when hosting your private blog networks.
Now, obviously, if that conflicts with billing information, you can’t do it really depends on the configuration of the admin area of each individual hosting company that you might consider.
What you’re trying to do here is just trying to mimic or copy what real webmasters do or what you did when you first opened and made your first website.
It’s also very important to remember that in your domain registrar account. You typically have administrative Technical and billing contact details.
And normally you only need to fill in one of those and just tick a box and it will be copied to all of them.
Obviously, if you’re using the past owner’s details, you will need to make sure that that’s consistent across all of them because otherwise, your domain registrar may default to your own Account Details.
You don’t want that because google can then possibly tie together your ownership of those sites and deindex the lot of them and they’ll lose their value.
Another option that you can use is to generate fake details from fake name generator.com.
Remember your email address must work.
So DON’T use the email address from fake name generator.com.
They’ll charge you fifty dollars to create that as a real email address in order to access that domain if you use it.
Trust me I did it once when I was a newbie at all this and I accidentally use the fake email address there on domain registration.
One of the good things about fake name generators is they can create details for a lot of different countries as well.
To see how to use the fake name generator click here.
So it’s not just limited to the US. For instance with all of these methods that I’ve talked about so far,
whether it’s using the past owner’s details or fake details be aware and be fully mindful of the fact that these do violate your registrar’s terms of service.
It’s strictly against the terms of service.
But the alternative is that we get our sites wiped out by Google who has tied together ownership of your network.
I’ve personally never lost a domain.
So if you’re not comfortable in using fake names or the past owner’s details just keep using domains that allow you to use whois privacy protection.
You can just stick to your dot-coms, dot nets, and dot org and add privacy.
But if you’re just sticking to the.com .net and .org you’ll be absolutely fine.
So hopefully that clarifies your domain nagging questions or issues or thoughts about PBN domain registrations of these expired domains.
Remember in the next part of this trilogy, I get to hosting which I use Launchcdn and terms of setting up the individual sites, but here we’re just talking about domain registration.