How to Identify PBN Sites? : An Easy Guide that Anyone Can Follow!

Private Blog Networks are a group of websites that link to each other to boost their rankings. While these websites often appear normal at first glance, they’re usually owned by the same person.

Although this manipulative black-hat SEO tactic worked in the past, Google learned how to identify and penalize them over the years. If you want to avoid PBNs when crafting and implementing your SEO strategy, first you have to know how to identify PBN sites.

We are here to guide you throughout the whole process with step-by-step instructions. You won’t even need in-depth SEO knowledge to make use of this guide.

PBN – A Quick Glance

A private blog network or PBN is a group of websites owned by an individual or an organization. The websites within the network are usually of high authority and exchange backlinks with each other.

Usually, the owner supervises the process in a way that backlinks are always directed to a specific website. The goal is to create a strong backlink profile for the main site and maintain a high domain authority score for the others.

PBN is usually considered a black-hat link building strategy because of this manipulative approach. Google and other search engines consider PBN as spammy and might de-index all the websites involved in the network when detected.

However, although the penalty is serious, many webmasters still manage to get away. They keep manipulating their link building activities right under Google’s nose with some shady tactics in play.

While it takes Google some time to identify PBN networks, there are ways for you to detect them if you know how to do it.

How Google Views PBN

Before we get into the discussion of how you can identify a PBN site, let’s see why Google doesn’t give any credibility to links coming from a PBN.

Google has a specific guideline in place for all webmasters to follow when trying to make it in the SERP.

PBN contradicts with Google policies since the links are unnaturally provided to a single website in bulk. Although it’s hard to notice since many different websites are involved, Google can detect them even if it takes some time.

One of the ways a PBN gets exposed is when Google starts indexing the links and comes across ‘thin content’ or content that adds little to no value to the link.

It’s not possible to deliver quality content from every website of the PBN when its sole purpose is only to place links anyhow.

This is a weakness of the network that Google explores and if detected, penalizes the websites for.

How to Identify PBN Sites? : Things to Check

To avoid the risk of getting links from PBN, you should be able to spot a PBN site when you see one.

Although webmasters now run PBN in a more sophisticated way to escape search engine spam algorithms, there are still some loopholes you can figure out yourself.

Hosting

All the websites in the PBN are most likely to be hosted by a single IP address.

This makes it easier for you to decide if a site belongs to a PBN.

There are tools you can use to find out the IP addresses of a website, such as –

• SpyOnWeb
• BuiltWith
• HostChecker

It’s normal for different types of websites to share a single IP address. However, when you find several websites with similar content hosted by the same address, then something is fishy!

WhoIs Information

WhoIs information reveals the primary information and contact details of the owner of a website. When you have a set of websites you think are PBN, find their WhoIs information for a clue. If they are PBN, the WhoIs information of the owner will be the same for all.

You can directly navigate to the WhoIs info with SpyOnWeb.

Analyze and compare all the suspicious websites to see if they come from the same owner or not.

Sometimes, you may find the information hidden or secured. This is just another indicator for a PBN because there is no reason for a webmaster to encrypt his information unless they are involved in spammy practices. So, think twice before connecting with that website.

Expired Domains

Needless to mention – you shouldn’t consider getting backlinks from websites with lower DA or DR, say less than 25!

However, the problem is that PBN nowadays includes sites with higher authority to maintain the credibility of the backlinks going to its main site.

The webmasters usually make it happen by purchasing expired domains. This is a foolproof way to go about it since expired domains already offer a decent authority. A PBN leverages this domain authority to manipulate its link building campaign.

You can still figure out if a high authority site is PBN or not by looking at a couple of the other metrics, for example – despite their high DA, they usually have

• Lower organic traffic
• Almost no page traffic
• Significantly less amount of keywords unusually ranking on the SERP.

This is the domain overview of a random website in the SEO tool – SEMRush. You can see how despite a good enough authority score, the site has terrible traffic. This is only possible when the site is PBN!

Sometimes, the result will not look this obvious.

If you are confused about it, you can go back to the basics and try to find out the domain history.

The Way Back Machine is a great tool for this purpose. You can look at the statistics of the expired domain by calendar years, content history, page URLs, and so on.

If you notice that the site has been redesigned with totally unrelated content, then that’s a strong sign of PBN.

Also, if you can be sure that several expired sites have been redesigned like this right around the same time, then they are without a doubt, a part of the PBN.

Backlink Profile

When you analyze the backlink profile of a site, you should always look out for the red flags – in this case, links from or to PBN.

Let’s look at some of the unusual scenarios you might come across during a backlink analysis of a PBN site –

Excessive External Links

Well, too many external links are not by any means a bad thing. However, the way you get them makes a difference.

Take PBNs for example. As we have mentioned, PBN owners buy off expired domains and reuse them with their own content.

But they don’t actually bother that much about clearing up the site’s previous backlink profile – which would be a tremendous task in itself.

So, if you are navigating a PBN site, you’ll most likely notice a high number of external links and if you date back to the earliest of time, you’ll see loads of them are completely unrelated to your niche.

Broken Links

As said before, PBN owners are so in a hurry to build new backlinks that they don’t even care about the dead links from the existing backlink profile of an expired domain.

It’s true that a high number of broken links doesn’t automatically mean a site is from PBN. However, you have to take a good look at the links and how relevant they are.

So, broken links can be a good marker to detect PBN as well if you keep your eyes open.

External Links from the Homepage

Many websites like those of magazines, restaurants, online bookshops, e-commerce platforms, and directories often display a different brand on their homepage as part of their advertisement or sponsorship campaign.

That’s not what we are talking about here.

We are talking about links placed randomly on the homepage or embedded in one of the sections of the homepage (e.g. the sidebar, banner, image) with no relation to the business most of the time.

You should be careful about this type of website design. We’ll discuss more about spammy web designs later.

Referring Domains and Backlinks Ratio

In this part of learning how to identify PBN sites, you should know that there is another hint you can take is the unnatural ratio of backlinks and referring domains in a PBN. If too many backlinks are coming from a single domain, then you are allowed to doubt the site to be in PBN.

However, that’s not necessarily the case every time. In order to be absolutely sure, you need to look at a couple of things –

• Site authority and traffic: Low-authority sites can never give you so many backlinks naturally. They might have spammed or joined a PBN.
• Type of backlinks: If the backlinks are mostly nofollowed, the site is probably not in the PBN because the main focus of PBN sites is to manipulate link building practices and ensure link juice. That’s not possible without do-follow links. So, only if the backlinks are do-followed in bulk, you can call the site PBN.
• Tying to the last point, if a site agrees to receive backlinks from footers or sidebars of the prospect, it gets a whole bunch of backlinks this way since every page in a website has a footer. In case you didn’t know, footer or sidebar links are actually nofollowed. So, they don’t exactly stand out to be indicative of any PBN.

After checking these criteria, you are done with your backlink analysis and can decide if the site you chose is a PBN or not.

All these domains here have one thing in common – low authority score but an unusual amount of inbound links going to the website. When you find websites with an authority score of 2 building 12M backlinks for a single website, you get why that site is a no-go!

Unnatural Blog Links

It’s common to see a lot of the backlinks in a domain coming from Web 2.0 blogging sites like WordPress, Blogspot, Substack, Medium, and so on.

The reason Web 2.0 has become so popular is because it’s easy to use, free of cost for hosting, and user-friendly.

It looks like the PBN owners feel the same way!

A lot of Web 2.0 PBNs are now spreading out because of this and they are easily linking out to clients without any care for relevance or context of the link.

That’s actually a good news for you by the way! Now, you can differentiate between the natural and the spammy by simply looking at the contextual placement of the link.

Remember that high authority sites already receive links from blogs and Google sites naturally for their quality content. You don’t need to take up spamming techniques to make it happen.

Still, if that happens, now you know how to filter them out as PBN.

Stuffing Anchor Texts

Usually, anchor texts should be a healthy mix of primary keywords, related queries, and LSI. But that’s for those who wish to build their links as genuinely as possible – like you and me

On the other hand, a PBN site is determined to get backlinks no matter how. So, the SEO managers there hardly care about the right proportion.

Their target is to rank on the SERP and make it quick and easy. To do so, they keep repeating the main keyword within the anchor text. The idea is to rank for that particular keyword and pass domain authority to the link. As a result, the anchor text density increases in a post.

This much stuffing sticks out as an unnatural style when writing the anchor text. That’s why, it is easily noticeable.

Whenever you see the same anchor text coming up over and over again, stop right there and discard that site as a whole no matter why you were looking into its backlink profile.

Content Quality

PBN managers have only gotten smarter with time. So, you may be a little disappointed if you can’t figure out anything using SEO tools and software.

You can still go manual and try to understand what makes a site one of PBN.

The content strategy of the site is a good start for that.

A PBN content shows some definite symptoms that you should notice. For instance –

• Thin Content 

We have already mentioned the concept of thin or valueless content that most PBN sites create. Just get the quality of the content evaluated by an expert and you’ll see why the site is spammy right away.

• Heavy Plagiarism

To get quick results, PBN sites often resort to copy-pasting content from other sources. Just use a free plagiarism checker tool to find out.

• AI Dependency

The constant rise of AI software has made it easier for content creators to write content effortlessly.

In the case of PBN, the amount of AI-written content is much higher. You’ll find their quality too good to be written by the same people that wrote some of the other content on the site.

Just look at the weird word choices and too generalized information within the content. If you still can’t realize it, have a handy AI checker tool do the work for you.

• Spun from Originals

Sometimes, you’ll be reading a blog that keeps ringing a bell in your head – meaning you have read that blog before. PBN has to make quick work of the projects so they get easy backlinks with high authority. So, when they are not plagiarizing, they are usually rewriting content from other sites.

Again, focus on the words that don’t go with the content in the least bit. They usually stick out like sore thumbs in a PBN content, so you won’t have a problem finding them.

• Inconsistency

Go through a few pages of content. If the site belongs to a PBN, you’ll see that nothing makes any sense when it comes to topical relevance.

PBN puts less effort into structuring the content and more in spamming their way to get more backlinks. So, when you notice inconsistent and irrelevant information sprinkled throughout a content, it’s better to stand clear of it.

• Repetition

If you are analyzing several suspected PBN websites and their content, try to compare and see if you find similarities in the style they are written. There is another possibility that you’ll see the same image files used in the same context on all of them.

• Quantity

Usually, a PBN makes use of a relatively low number of content with a high keyword and anchor text density. So, when both the quality and the quantity of content are down, there is no point in going forward with that site anymore.

Keyword Quality

Since PBN has low organic traffic, you can tell that the sites of PBN are not lik