PBN Domains - Buying domains that your PBN deserves

This is the second part of our three-part series on Advanced Private Blog Network Building. If you have not yet, read the first part on planning your PBN.

There is one thing you should know before anything else:

The entire value of a PBN comes from the quality of the backlinks the domains in it have. Not 80%. Not 90%. All of it.

I push this point because so many people try to make a PBN cheaper by buying cheap domains. If you must cut cost, cut it from the content. Great content on a weak domain gives you nothing. Great content on a pile of weak domains gives you...

Infinite face palms. Now that is out of the way, let's begin.

What to look for in a PBN domain

You want a spam-free domain with strong backlinks from sites in the same niche as your money site. A health money site wants PBN domains with links from health authorities, ideally many of them, from many different networks.

Use Majestic, Moz and Ahrefs to see the backlinks (DomCop shows all three on every domain). To judge the niche, look at the Majestic Topical Trust Flow category, shown on every DomCop domain page.

Metrics get you from thousands of domains to a shortlist. They do not tell you whether to buy. Always open the backlinks by hand before you pay. No metric is foolproof and this is the single most important step.

Then check the history. Rule out anything that has been a PBN site before, carried spammy links, or shows foreign-language or adult content in the Wayback Machine. Our post on four checks for fake backlinks shows how to do it in minutes.

Finally, for a domain you are buying at auction, search Google for site:domain.com. A live site with no pages indexed was probably penalised. This check tells you nothing about a dropped or pending-delete domain: its pages are gone anyway.

Where to buy PBN domains

There are six ways to get good domains for a PBN.

1. Brokers
2. Auctions
3. Backordering pending-delete domains
4. Catching drops yourself
5. Archives of dropped domains
6. An expired-domain crawler

1. Brokers

The right option for your first two or three domains. Judging backlinks takes time and skill you do not have yet, so let a broker do it. The sales sections of forums like BlackHatWorld have official threads; do your diligence, scammers exist.

2. Auctions

The best domains end up at auction. GoDaddy Auctions leads, and NameJet, SnapNames, Dynadot, Sedo, Namecheap and Flippa are worth a look (DomCop lists all of them and more). The downside is that every bid draws more bidders and pushes the price up. Bid in the last few minutes, not days out.

3. Backordering pending-delete domains

Your best route to an expired domain is a backorder placed before it drops. A domain sits in Pending Delete for five days before the registry releases it.

These are the domains in DomCop's Expiring list. For a valuable one, place backorders with several services (DropCatch, SnapNames, NameJet, Dynadot); you only pay the one that catches it. A backorder costs about $60 to $80, and a contested catch goes to a private auction between the backorderers.

4. Catching drops yourself

I list this only to warn you off it. People try to save the backorder fee by registering the domain the second it drops. The backorder services have direct registry connections and will beat you every time on a domain worth having. Pay the fee.

5. Archives of dropped domains

Roughly 200,000 domains drop every day and the catchers miss some good ones: the metrics were thin at the time, or nobody looked. DomCop keeps an Archive of dropped domains with good metrics that are still free to register at the normal price.

6. An expired-domain crawler

If you are building a large network or brokering domains, a crawler pays for itself. It crawls the pages of an authority site you name, finds the broken outbound links and checks whether those domains are free to register, then fetches the metrics. You register the finds at any registrar for the standard fee. DomCop's crawler comes with the Guru plan; the crawler tutorial shows a day's run.

Which metrics matter?

Members get paralysed by the number of metrics: Domain Authority, Trust Flow, Domain Rating, Estibot, Semrush... All I can say is:

Metrics take you from 200,000 expiring domains to 20 worth opening. That is where their usefulness ends. You still have to look at the backlinks.

They do help you spot spam. For a PBN domain, a Trust Flow to Citation Flow ratio near 1 (or above) is healthy; fake-link domains tend to sit below 0.8. A low Moz Spam Score is the other quick check. And the one metric I find truly useful is the Majestic Topical Trust Flow category: buy as many domains as you can whose links come from your niche.

Don't panic if this takes longer than you hoped. Start the network with a "good enough" domain and add better ones later.

Carry on to the next chapter in this guide on hosting that leaves no footprint.