Build Your First PBN in One Hour, Flat Out!

The StartingUp Summer. Emptying the same drawer as our questions AI made obsolete, we found this 2022 workshop tutorial, never published: how to build a PBN, a private network of sites, in one hour flat. This time we finished it: gaps filled, numbers updated, workshop-style directness kept. At a time when generative engines are reshuffling visibility, this piece of SEO craftsmanship is a reminder of where link building came from, and why the question of citation has replaced the question of the link.

A Private Blog Network, or PBN for insiders, is a private network of sites, meant to support a search-engine ranking strategy (SEO). This strategy, often described as a grey-hat technique, has established itself as one of the pillars of SEO in recent years.

Today we'll see together how to launch your PBN on solid ground, avoiding the strategic and subtle mistakes that could bring your efforts to nothing.

In this article, I'm assuming you're comfortable installing WordPress, using FTP and configuring DNS zones. If not, feel free to check out my previous articles to get up to speed on these topics and come back afterward!

I'm also assuming you have, like me, plenty of unused domain names, bought one day during a sale, that you've been telling yourself for years you'll "surely do something with one day."

Feel free to adapt this method to your own use and enrich it with your own knowledge!

Here's a non-exhaustive list of what your PBN can be used for:

• Reinforce or even serve as a pillar for your SEO strategy, by boosting your main site (careful not to overdo it!)
• Do "favor exchanges" with fellow SEOs: they link to you from one of their sites, and you link back from one of yours
• Test markets by quickly spinning up small sites
• Sell links placed on link-building platforms

For our practical case, we're going to use a VPS hosting plan from OVH.

A VPS, or Virtual Private Server, is a virtual server, a kind of middle ground between shared hosting and a dedicated server. Dedicated but shared, basically, you'll get the idea.

It combines the advantages of a dedicated server while staying much more affordable.

From a purely technical standpoint, it's really a virtual machine running on a bigger server that also hosts the VPS instances of other customers.

While this solution can scare some people off, the reasons for using a VPS rather than shared hosting are numerous:

• Unlike classic shared hosting, we'll get dedicated resources. Let's not forget we're going to host a large number of sites!
• Spread across the number of sites to host, this solution turns out to be very economical!
• We'll get our hands on plenty of settings inaccessible on shared hosting
• And above all, ABOVE ALL, we'll be able to configure different IPs for our server, so that each of our sites truly looks independent from the other sites hosted on the server. This is a crucial point, one that will keep our network of sites from being unmasked by search engines before it's even launched.

I'd recommend going for a mid-range plan, which you can then upgrade if needed (adding disk space or extra memory, for instance).

WARNING: It might be tempting to sign up for the low-end equivalent of the OVH VPS at Kimsufi, OVH's budget subsidiary. Whatever you do, don't do that: Kimsufi only lets you configure a single IP on your server, which will be a blocker for the rest of this tutorial.

No panic! We'll also subscribe to a Plesk plan. For a few euros a month, this solution adds a layer on top of our server, letting us administer it as easily as shared hosting, with the bonus of a lot more freedom in our configuration.

We'll be able to configure up to 16 additional IPv4 addresses on our server. In principle, that means we can host up to 16 sites (or even more, if we respect certain rules).

To do that, let's head to OVH's Bare Metal Cloud tab, in the "Additional IPs" subsection. Here we'll order as many IPs as we have sites to host (counting the one included with the VPS).

It will cost us about €2 excl. tax per month per IPv4 as of this writing.

It's no longer a one-time purchase: since late 2022, the additional IP is rented monthly, with no commitment and no setup fee.

Each domain in the network will point to its own IP: that's the whole point of the addresses ordered in the previous step. In each domain's DNS zone, at your registrar, point the A record for the root (and for www) to the IP dedicated to that site. Nothing else to touch for now.

This is also the time to think "footprint," those unintentional signatures that let people link your sites together:

• Never two domains from the network on the same IP: that's rule number one, the one that justifies this whole tutorial
• Stick with your registrars' nameservers: an ns1.yourserver.com shared by fifteen domains is a signature that shows up in a single lookup
• Enable WHOIS privacy protection everywhere, and vary registrars and renewal dates when you can

Expect anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours of DNS propagation. Workshop tip: lower the TTL on your zones during setup, and you'll fix your mistakes without waiting.

WordPress Toolkit is a tool built into your Plesk interface that lets you create and administer your WordPress sites ultra-easily.

In a unified management interface, it will list all of your sites and let you connect to them directly. You can automatically install your favorite plugins, keep them updated, and secure the whole install in a single click (a service that could otherwise cost several hundred euros from a specialized company).

In Plesk, create a first subscription with your first domain and assign it its dedicated IP (the IP address selector appears right at creation). This is the site that will carry the multisite install: choose it with care, it will be the network's "master site."

Then add each of the other domains to the same subscription, each one linked to its own IP: WordPress will serve the right site depending on the domain requested. After each addition, check that the domain answers correctly from its own address (a ping is enough), and not from a neighbor's.

The install takes three clicks: in WordPress Toolkit, click "Install", choose the master domain, a serious admin username (not admin!) and a generated password. While you're at it, activate the Let's Encrypt SSL certificate (included in Plesk) on each domain, as well as automatic plugin updates: on a network you'll visit rarely, that's your best life insurance.

Switching to multisite then takes two minutes via Plesk's file manager, by setting the constants in wp-config.php: the full step-by-step is in the dedicated article just below.

I wrote a full article on setting up WordPress in multisite mode, I invite you to check it out here.

When you're offered this choice, you'll need to say you want to use separate domains (not subfolders).

You might know it already, I'm not at all a fan of using bloated all-in-one themes on WordPress, which are a real pain once it's time for the finishing touches. But today I'm going to make an exception to that rule, because the point here is to industrialize a process, not to produce high-quality sites.

This WordPress theme has a module that lets you build sites very quickly based on a pre-existing template. So don't expect anything fancy either, the templates are fairly plain and will probably fit your content rather poorly. The point here is to move fast so we can push our content online quickly. Since our goal is to move fast, this solution is ideal.

To generate our content, we're going to use an LLM. At the time this tutorial was written, that meant GPT-3, since retired by OpenAI: any current model (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) will do far better.

The $18 of free credits offered when signing up for the API are also gone, but rest assured: a few euros are enough to generate the content for a small network.

The method that works: give each site a clear topic, prepare about ten briefs per site (title, angle, target keyword), have first drafts generated, then go back over it yourself. Raw generated content published as is stands out to the naked eye, and what stands out to the naked eye also stands out to the algorithm.

Then spread out the launch: fifteen sites born on the same day with ten articles each is a statistical anomaly. Two or three pieces of content per site at launch, then a deliberately irregular cruising rhythm, do the job perfectly. And resist the urge to link your sites to each other: linking flows from the network toward your targets, never in a circle inside the network itself.

Let's recap the bill for a network of about fifteen sites:

All told, that's around €3 to 5 per month and per site, infrastructure and IP independence included. Compared to the price of a single link on a link-building platform, the math is quickly done.

And the clock? One hour for the infrastructure if Plesk isn't foreign to you, one evening counting the content. The title was a bit of a sales pitch, but the order of magnitude holds up.

You'll quickly notice that VPS instances are prime targets for attackers. Considered less secure, many bots keep trying nonstop to log into your management interface. So don't hesitate to dig into Plesk's settings to make a few adjustments:

• Configure Fail2Ban on Plesk (be careful to whitelist your own IP before enabling it!)
• Enable two-factor authentication via OTP code on the Plesk admin panel
• Regularly update the network of sites via WordPress Toolkit

I meant to tell you, in a follow-up article, how to recycle this server into "free" proxies for your scraping tools: that article never left the drawer either. This time, it will: in an upcoming article, we'll go further on three specific aspects of a network's life: recycling the server into proxies, hunting down the footprints that give away a PBN (DNS, certificates, shared audience-measurement bricks), and the rising question: what a network's links are worth now that generative engines count mentions as much as backlinks.

Everything you've just read, we do it for our clients, à la carte or end to end: VPS and Plesk administration, WordPress industrialization (multisite, deployments, hardening), AI-assisted content production reviewed by humans, and link-building and visibility strategy that actually holds up. We can set up the infrastructure and hand you the keys, take over an existing network that's running out of steam, or handle the whole subject, audit included.

If you'd rather spend your hour elsewhere, tell us about your project: the first conversation comes with no strings attached, and at the very least you'll leave with an honest opinion.