Grumpy SEO Guy
How Many Sites Do You Need In Your PBN? - Episode 66
This is Grumpy SEO Guy, Episode 66. How many sites do you need in your PBN? 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, 'cause people are always wondering, "How many sites should I have in my PBN?" Like there's an easy answer. There's not, but today, we're gonna talk about that question. 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 does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. The answer to that question is really gonna depend on a few things. One, how many clients do you want? Two, how many backlinks do you wanna be able to provide each client? Three, in a case where you're making the PBN for your own website instead of for clients, how is your competition's SEO? All SEO, remember, all SEO is mostly dependent upon your competition. So I actually had a question on YouTube, on the, it was on a comment for episode 49, which is called The Four Ways to Get Backlinks. This comment was by a user named the programmer 2077. So, this was his question. It said, hey, Grumpy SEO guy, first off, thanks for being grumpy enough to make this episode. It for real is super insightful. Can you tell us roughly how many websites you have in your portfolio used for backlinking to clients? Also, were those sites you built all from the ground up, or did you acquire them from other people over time? Thank you for the question. Thank you for listening to the podcast. Here is my response. I said more than 90% of them were purchased expired. I'm gonna answer the rest of this question in a future episode. Here you go, great question, but I think that this is a good topic to discuss, because a lot of times, along with the question of how many backlinks do I need, which as you know, from previous episodes, is not the right question to ask, people will ask how many sites do I need in my PBN, or whatever, PBN private blog network, by the way, okay. And by the way, from listening to this podcast, you should understand that PBN is the wrong name for it, even though that's what everybody calls it. It should be a private blog portfolio, because a network suggests that the sites are linked to each other, which is a bad idea, if you're actually doing this. So let me talk a little bit about that. Let me organize this into each of the questions that was asked. Question number one, can you tell us roughly how many websites you have in your portfolio used for backlinking to clients? Okay, no, but let me answer the question that I think you're asking instead. So, generally speaking, and I think I've talked about this before, I think I really think I mentioned this in another episode, and if I didn't like us this will be the first time that I tell you, okay. When I started, now remember this was years ago, when I started with private blog portfolio, I started with five websites, just five, five websites, because I figured like one probably wasn't enough, like two, three, four, whatever, five seemed like a good number, okay, but obviously having five, that greatly limits the amount of backlinks you can build. Why? Because if I have five websites, and I build five backlinks to this client, and then five backlinks to another client, and then five backlinks to another client, that's a footprint, isn't it? Ask yourself, would five websites all link to this website, and they all link to this other website, then they all link to another website. Would that ever happen? Unlikely, so five probably isn't enough, right? So then I got 10, right, double it. Now, another question, and I might answer this in the future, or I might, I don't know, I feel like I need to make a picture to answer this question. Anyway, a question that I often get is, if you have this many sites, how many backlinks can you build from them? Well, it depends. Let's say you have 10 websites, okay. You could build 10 backlinks to one client from all 10 websites, right? So that's one from each, okay, that's cool. But then you can't do that again, 'cause you build 10 backlinks to the next client, and then 10 backlinks to the next client, it's a footprint. So anyway, I had 10 websites, which is better, it was better, but it was still kind of risky, wasn't it? So then I got 15, and when you have 15 websites, you can do a couple of things, right? And I'm not saying like 15 is some like specific number, like grumpy SEO guy says I need 15 websites. No, he doesn't, I'm just using this as an example, okay? You have 15 websites, what could you do? You could build 15 links to one client. Well, that's pretty cool. You could build five links to three clients, right? Well, that's pretty cool. You could also divide it up in different ways, depending on what you need and what you're selling, or however you're handling this. But you don't want any repeats, and you don't want any footprints. Well, I guess you want minimal repeats. I'm not saying you can't repeat anything, but I'm saying the more often the same pattern appears, the more suspicious it is, and you have a higher likelihood of getting found. So anyways, look, let me answer the question that I think this person is asking. I would say, and this is, I haven't done any competition research into you, I haven't done any, you know, but, okay, I'm being completely honest with you, I would say that if you have a portfolio of 30 websites, okay, you will probably get some pretty good results. Now, this is not for selling to clients, this is, I'm saying 30 to a specific site, okay? If you have 30 websites, and you made them all correctly, okay, you follow the rules in episodes three, four, and five, okay, you made them all correctly, 30 websites in mo... Okay, look, most people, okay, let me back up a little bit. Most people are bad at SEO. Most people go out and buy backlinks, but they don't really understand what they're doing, so they don't buy good backlinks. So they buy backlinks, and they buy garbage backlinks, and they get hundreds or thousands of backlinks, and then when you do competition research into those websites, you're like, oh no, they have a thousand backlinks, so I can't possibly buy a thousand sites for my portfolio. You don't have to, 'cause those thousand backlinks are probably spammy, okay? How many RDs, referring domains? How many RDs do they have, right? Are those thousand backlinks from 10 domains? Well, then it's not really more than 10 backlinks, is it? Don't quote me on that, but I'm just saying you can kind of think about it in this way, okay? Multiple backlinks from the same website don't help you anymore than one does. In fact, they can also hurt you. But anyways, so really, if you've got a competitor with a thousand backlinks, but they only have 10 RD, 10 referring domains, you can think of that as a competitor of having 10 RDs. I always tell people that RD is way more important than number of backlinks anyway, okay? I would rather be competing against a website with a thousand backlinks from 10 domains than a website with 100 backlinks from 100 domains, okay? But anyway, look, I would say that in many cases, not all cases, there are always exceptions to anything I tell you. But if you, okay, let's put it like this. If you're doing it for your own website or for maybe a company hired you to do only their SEO, okay? So you're not selling backlinks to everybody. You're building them a portfolio, okay? How about that? You're building them a portfolio. 30 to 50 websites will probably get you great results, not necessarily the top of page one, but it will probably get you noticeable improvement, okay? That's, and there are so many, like times if that's not the case, don't quote me, do not say grumpy OCO guy said I need exactly 30 RDs to, I'm not saying that. I'm saying if you build a portfolio with 30 to 50 websites, you will probably be surprised at the results, okay? You will probably get noticeable movement and you will probably be like, oh my gosh, this works, okay? There's a thread, by the way, in the grumpy SEO guy subreddit or a listener, I had no clue he was gonna post this. I'm not sure it's a guy, but forgive me if you're a woman and I just said he, anyways, I had no clue this person was gonna post this and they said, hey, grumpy SEO tactics, which, by the way, was hilarious, they said, hey, grumpy SEO tactics really work. And they posted a SERP chart from SERP box of a website they had been ranking by using the method that I teach. And guess what? It had gone up to the top of the search engines. Of course it did, because that's how you do SEO. But anyway, look, people are gonna say, well, 30 domains is expensive. It, honestly, yes, I agree with you, it is. 30 domains are probably expensive, but you don't need to go by the super expensive ones, okay? I know we just had an episode on how much dr do I need? And then you say, well, grumpy SEO guy, do you always say that dr isn't accurate anyway? Or it's just an approximation, it sure is, but you don't need to buy super high dr domains anyway, okay? Look, the other thing that I always tell you is that doing it yourself is cheaper in the long run than renting links from somebody, okay? The first year is very expensive. You're buying multiple domains, multiple hosting, and then you have to pay the registration fees, which aren't even a lot on top of all that, right? So you might pay hundreds of dollars for a domain the first year, okay? But then the second year, it's gonna be like $14, or however much you're paying for a renewal, okay? So it's expensive the first year, but the second year it costs you literally $14 for the year plus hosting, let's say $30. So add those together. So $44 for the year. You're gonna pay more than that per month if you're renting good quality backlinks, okay? So, like, I don't know, figured out if you wanna do it yourself or not, 'cause it's cheaper in the beginning to pay somebody else for it, but it's cheaper over time to do it yourself. The first year will be very expensive, like I said. Let's use some random numbers here. Let's use some random numbers, okay? Don't quote me, I'm making up numbers. Let's say you spend $500 per domain, okay? Yes, that's expensive. Let's say you spend $500 per domain, and you buy 30 of them, okay? So how much money is that, okay? That's $15,000, okay? $500 for a domain, and you're buying 30 of them, that's $15,000, very expensive, I agree with you. Okay, then you gotta buy hosting for all of them. Let's say $30 on average per site per year, okay? For hosting. So you have 30 domains, and you're paying $30 on average, $900, okay? So you're at $15,000 plus $900, okay? So that's $15,900, okay? And then after you buy the domains at auction, you also have to pay to register them. Let's say $15 per domain, okay? So that's 15 times 30 is how much? 450, right? Yeah, $450. So we're at $15,000 plus $900 plus $450, okay? So that's $16,350 your first year. Super expensive, I know, just hold on for a second, okay? The second year, let's say you're keeping all of these domains, you're not buying anymore. The second year, it's not $16,000 again, $16,350. Instead, all you have to do is pay hosting, which is $900 a year for all of them, and registration, which is actually renewal, which is $15 per domain, which is 450. So instead of $16,350, it's $1,350. For the year, you are going to pay more than that. If you're renting 30 good quality backlinks from somebody, okay? You are going to pay a lot more than $1,300 per year if you are renting those links. So first year is very expensive. It's very expensive, I agree with you, it's annoying, if you're just, I mean, I don't know how much money you have, but like that sounds like a lot. If somebody's like, oh, I have to do a thing, and you're like, well, it's going to be $15,000, you're like, whoa, that's a lot of money. It is a lot of money, okay? But the second year, it's not. I mean, I don't, look, I don't know, again, $1,300 might sound like a lot, but might, okay, first of all, SEO can be expensive. Let's just get that out of the way. But look, here's the thing. Do you want to pay $1,300 a year ongoing, or do you want to pay five or six or $7,000 a year, every year to rent those links from somebody? I'm just guessing 30, I hate it when people ask me for prices because there's no guide, there's no document that says like the appropriate backlink prices, like DR50 is this much, DR40 is this much, that wouldn't even be good to base it off of DR. But the point is that document doesn't exist. But the point is, let's just estimate, I'm just making these number, I'm just, I'm just approximating these numbers right now based on nothing. Okay, let's, let's, let's just pick numbers, let's just pick numbers, okay, we're just picking numbers. Do not quote me on any of these. Do not say grumpy, SEO guy said that you should spend this much money to rent backlinks. I'm not saying that, I'm picking random numbers, okay. Listen episode 63, where I talk about why I always have to say that every time I talk about this. Okay, let's say for example, you're going to rent, this is a price comparison. Let's say you're going to rent these backlinks, okay. Because as we know, lifetime payments or one time payments for backlinks are always a scam, okay. And there's a whole other episode on that one. It's episode 10. But anyway, so we know that we have to pay monthly because that ensures that they are good and they are not scammy and they're not going to disappear, okay. Let's say we find a place that will rent us backlinks for $30 per month per link, okay. Just making them numbers, guys. Just making them numbers. But I would say that in certain circumstances, that's a fair price to pay for certain quality of backlink, okay. $30 per month per link. 30 of them because we're going to build 30 sites, right. So $30 per month per link times 30 links. $900 per month, okay. So that would be $10,800 per year, okay. Now, is that expensive? Yeah, that's pretty expensive. But hold on for a second, $10,800 the first year. Another $10,800 the second year. Another $10,800 the third year and so on, okay. Now, that's expensive, but if you do it yourself, it's more expensive the first year because I said it's what, $16,350 or something. Okay, the first year. But then it's only $1,350 each subsequent year because you're only paying hosting and renewal. So it's way cheaper. It's cheaper by the end of the second year, okay. It's cheaper to do it yourself. It is always cheaper to do it yourself, okay. Let me say this again. It is always cheaper to do it yourself. On that note, it is always safer to do it yourself too. Because nobody is going to put any shady links on any of your sites if you own them, okay. Anyway, I'm getting way off topic here. I feel like that could be an entire topic of another episode. So anyways, 30, look, I feel like that's what people are asking. I would say 30, 30 to 50 will give you a competitive benefit, okay. Probably less. I don't know where competition is doing, okay. I don't know. Like if you want me to look in your competition and give you a more approximate number, sure. But it's going to take time and money to do that. So let's just say that on average, because most people are bad at SEO, therefore your competition is probably not that hard unless you're in a very competitive industry and you probably know if you are, okay. For most normal websites, 30 will get you some decent results and I am estimating so hard right now. But I will tell you, based on my experience, 30 will probably get you a decent amount of results unless you have hard competition or you're in like one of those weird industries. But let's just leave it at 30 and move on to the next part of the question. Okay, also, were all those sites you built all from the ground up? Or did you acquire them from other people over time? So this is where I responded to him. I said 90, I said over 90% of them were purchased expired. So does that count as getting them from other people? I guess, I don't know, like maybe, but I mean, I don't know if that counts or not. Truthfully, I don't know, but anyway, here's the point. I did not start from the ground up, meaning buying a brand new domain nobody has had before and building it up from nothing. I did not do that. Now, let me be very clear, I have done that, okay. I have done that when I started building a, oh, I don't think I've ever told you this before. This is gonna be fun. Okay. (laughs) When I first started building a private blog portfolio, I was buying expired domains and I was also trying it from scratch, okay. I was building brand new domains that nobody had ever owned before. And I think, I think, I'm really trying hard to remember. I think I had 15, it might be 30. I cannot remember. I was experimenting a lot back in the day 'cause like, there's no guides for this, right? Except for episodes three, four and five, but they didn't exist yet. So like, there's no guides. So I was like playing around. I'm like, well, let's see, let's see if regular quality websites do anything and then let's see like how expired domains compare. So yes, I did build some from scratch, but I use those more for experimentation than I did with the expired ones. So the expired ones, as you know, begin with authority because you're buying websites that already have authority. That's why they're expensive, by the way. If they were just regular websites, they would just be the normal cost, which is like what, $10 or something? I don't know. Anyway, so yes, I have done it both ways, but the majority of the websites in the portfolio are expired domains that I had bought expired. If that makes any sense. I hope that answers your question. There's no wrong way to do it. Just know that if you're starting from scratch with brand new websites, they're not gonna have as much authority. They will have some, but they will not have a lot and a link will not be as helpful as it will be from an authoritative website. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it that way. In fact, you could say that doing it that way would make your portfolio look more natural, wouldn't it? Because not every website on the internet is authoritative, right? Yes. So, you might wanna think about doing it that way. Maybe by some that are expired and by some that are unused. And then combine them because that would look natural. And what's the most important thing? The most important thing is being natural. Because let me ask you a question. Think I've asked this question before. Do you think that if a website, especially a brand new website, right? Only gets backlinks from authoritative domains. Do you think that looks natural? Would a website ever only get backlinks from authoritative domains? I don't think so. So, it's actually a really good question. You should do both, that's my official answer. Buy some expired domains and also buy some normal domains. Blend them all together so that your portfolio is organic. Okay, it's not only, because okay, look, here's the thing. People are always like, let's go back to talking about DR for a second. I was like, oh, I only want high DR backlinks. Like first of all, no you don't. You think you do, but you don't. Let me ask you this. You have a brand new website and you're out there buying these like 80 DR backlinks, which are probably a scam anyway, but that's a different topic. Do you think that your website, that you just built the other day, okay? Your website that you just built the other day that doesn't have any backlinks? All of a sudden gets all of these 80 DR backlinks. Do you think that looks organic? Why would that ever happen? Why would all of these authoritative websites link to your brand new website? Why would that ever happen? It wouldn't. Stop doing it that way. That's my answer. So excellent question. The programmer 2077. Excellent question. I hope I've answered it adequately for you. In conclusion, how many do we have in our portfolio? A lot, but I'm not gonna give you a number 'cause it doesn't matter for the purpose of this. Number two, which I think was the actual question. How many do you probably need? 30 to 50 is a good place to start. 30, probably 15. I would even go so far as to say if your competition is terrible, you could get great results with 15, probably less. I don't know. It depends every case is separate. Anyway, but 30 you'll probably get good results. And if you don't, you're either doing something really wrong or you have a penalty or your competition is really hard. But don't quote me on those numbers. But if somebody asked me to guess based on how much experience I have and how long I'm doing this, I would feel comfortable telling you that probably 30 will get you nice benefits if not get you to where you wanna be. Okay, anyways, and then, were there sites you built from the ground up or did you acquire them from other people over time? Most of them were required. I mean, most of them were purchased, expired. A few of them purchased from a domain broker that I know and some of them were built as completely new domains. 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 wanna suggest a subject for a future episode, you can contact me on Reddit. My username is grumpyseoguy. You can visit the grumpyseoguy subreddit or you can email me at hello@grumpyseoguy.com. 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 wanna 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 with nonsense that doesn't work. Join us next Wednesday when we talk about why there is no such thing as secret sauce. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]