Are PBNs Illegal

I have seen the question ‘is PBN Illegal’ asked many times. The simple answer is no they are in no way at all illegal. Having your own Private Blog Network is totally legal. I am not sure why anyone would think they are illegal, because they simply are not.

I feel its a very strange question for anyone to be asking. Why would anyone think that PBN is illegal? I really don’t get it. Let me explain a few things to you about any form of SEO.

There is no such thing as Illegal. There is only SEO that works or doesn’t work. End of story!

Google has guidelines and it has filters and algorithms in place to stop known easy SEO exploits. They are a business and they want people to pay for their adverts, not rank on page one for free. In recent years they made SEO much harder for people. They closed the loop holes and easy cheats.

But this doesn’t mean that PBN is illegal lol! It does mean you have to build them smarter and think a lot more about footprints. If you cut corners with your PBNs and you will get them busted by Google for sure. But follow the correct methods building your PBN websites. And you will be absolutely fine.

There is a lot of talk about Black hat, white hat and grey hat seo out there. Its all bullshit to be honest. There is only SEO that will rank your website and seo that will waste your money. There is no ‘hat’ category for it in my mind at all. Moreover, certainly there is not one form of seo that is legal and another that is illegal. There is not such concept really.

Any Link you Build to try and increase your rankings is against Google Guidelines!

This categorisation of forms of SEO has caused a lot of confusion in the SEO world for those that do not really understand it. Although it has some sort of general definition, its more often than not. Used by people selling something to scare you away from other more effective forms of seo. Or to encourage you to buy their services. One of the most effective is of course PBN SEO. It is also the one that the most myths exist about.

Let me make something very clear to you. If you buy or build a link where the sole purpose of doing so. Is to increase your websites rankings in Google. You are against their guidelines. There is no difference between an apparent white hat link and what people say are black hat links. There is no difference between the two at all! So when you see people trying to sell you something with the slogans such as:

Google safe White hat backlinks for sale

Absolute crap!

Or

Google Penguin safe backlinks

No such thing!

Not everything you read is true, especially where SEO is concerned.

You need to understand that all this is just good old fashioned marketing. For any link to be penguin safe, its not about just one link. Its about your entire link profile and other factors overall. You can get the best links in the world and point them all at your home page, your site wont rank. Because it has no link distribution factor and this is not natural and Google will hold it back for sure. So someone trying to get you to buy something saying its penguin safe, is really not true at all. Because like any backlink, it all depends on how and where you use it!

I know one very large SEO company in the USA, that markets all the time saying they only do white hat seo on their clients websites. I know for a fact they have a 2000 strong PBN network that is used to rank their clients websites. And I know their own website is ranked using 85% pbn links! They will not be the only one I can assure you.

I see many companies offering guest posting services. Stating the metrics and traffic stats of the websites. A large number of these sites are PBN’s. Because they call it guest posting and not PBN links. People don’t understand. There is a big difference between a guest blog on a real world site and a post on blog that was built only to sell guest posts. The latter is normally a PBN website. Sadly the vast amount of people out there involved in doing their own SEO. Just do not understand the differences.

I saw an article a year or so ago, wrote by one moron that I wont name. In his well known blog. He was saying how he used guest posting on a website and it worked great. But PBN’s should be avoided. In the image he posted of the website he used the guest posting for. I could see the URL of it. So when I checked it out. These were not guest posts at all, they were posts on a blog he didn’t own. But the blog was a PBN that was selling guest posting. So when this guy is saying PBN’s are illegal and are too risky to use. I just rolled over laughing at him really. What a twat!

There is nothing illegal about anything when it comes to PBN.

The word illegal means its against the law. So if you do it your going to get the police at your door, taken to court and fined or imprisoned. This is not going to happen when you build a PBN or use links from one. So to say a PBN is illegal is just the biggest joke really. People think there is some risk or other illegal element to PBNs. There is not! Its just an SEO method that works very well. Like any link building, if you do it wrong you will pay the price. This is not something that only applies to PBNs, it applies to every type of link building!

With all this in mind. Please understand that there is nothing illegal in building your private blog networks. As far as Google is concerned, you have just as much chance of being ‘caught out’ if you use links that are coined white hat. The only difference is, when you build PBN links correctly. PBN Links work like no other! Therefore, using them is more likely to increase your chances of ranking. Moreover, its not going to increase the risk in the process. Lastly, let me say it one last time. There is nothing illegal about PBN!