How Many Domains Do You Need to Get Your Money on The First Page

One of the biggest unknowns when people start out building a private blog network is just how many sites they need for it to be powerful enough to rank their money sites.

Quite clearly the question will depend greatly on the niche they are in and how competitive the target keywords are but my usual answer to this question is: you will need fewer sites than you probably think.

There are other factors at work besides the competitiveness of the niche such as how you use your network sites, especially how many links you put on the homepage (where all the juice is).

While it is not always an option for some, I tend to only put 1 money site link on each network site . I do this partly because my money sites are spread around in different niches and partly because I want to squeeze as much juice out of each link as possible. I also think it reduces the risk of leaving footprints that Google might spot.

So just what can you rank with X network sites? Let me give you some examples:

1. With 11 network sites (all with a single money site link on their homepages) I have managed to rank a web 2.0 page of mine in the top 5 for a Clickbank product name. Quite often I am 3rd behind the official site and a big forum in the niche.

With this position I have made $400 in commissions between October 2013 and February 2014. Ok it doesn't sound like a lot but $80 a month of passive income going forward will be very welcome. The total cost of those 11 sites is probably around the $400 mark including content so I've broken even after 5 months - not bad but we can do better.

2. I have a site in a high traffic niche where the competition is fairly moderate until you get to the top 5 of Google where it gets extremely tough.

I built a PBN of 11 domains all with just one money site link each. I also purchased a small package of manual blog comments to even out my anchor text a bit (I was fairly aggressive with my keywords for my PBN links).

2 months later and I now hover between positions 6 and 8 for a term with 1 million searches per month (on average). This month I am on target for 8,000 unique visitors and 20,000 page views.

Total cost is around $350 as I haven't yet added that much additional content to the PBN sites. I will continue to do this though so the cost will slowly rise towards $400 - $450. But I am already making around $100 from this traffic and I am collecting 5 - 15 email addresses a day that I can monetise at a later date.

3. As an experiment I tried to tackle a highly competitive financial term in the UK. Leads in this market would sell for £30 - £40 each to a broker.

I was just curious to see what a PBN could do but I didn't want to push things too much. I built just 7 links to this site and this was enough to get it onto page 4 of Google for what is one of the highest traffic terms in this niche.

I didn't use a single exact match anchor text in this instance so I will try changing some of my links to be a bit more aggressive and see what happens.

Total investment of roughly $250 and if I wanted to I could recoup this because my money site gained a PR4 just from those 7 PBN links and a single homepage link would probably sell for £300 per year.

As a further experiment, I'm considering tackling a local keyword too because given the low competition for some commercial terms, I believe I can rank a site with just a handful of PBN domains.

If you are smart about the keywords you target then even a very small PBN can get you to page 1 of Google. So don't think you need to be buying hundreds of domains for it to be worth it.

The Tale of Two Domains - Which One Would You Choose to Buy?

A good domain for a private blog network doesn't need to have lots of links pointing towards it to be of value. Here's an example why:
Domain 1:
PR = 2
DA = 26
Linking root domains = 42
Linking C Class blocks = 11
Domain 2:
PR = NA as it expired a long time ago and has dropped out of the Google index
DA = 11
Linking root domains = 1
Linking C Class blocks = 1

So which one would you rather have for your private blog network? Surely the first one right?
Are you so sure of your initial buying decision now? Is Domain 1 really the better choice?

Lets say domain 1 is currently  on auction at Godaddy. Current bid price is $80 so expect a final price over $100.
Domain 2 is currently not registered at all so it would cost around $10 - $15 with privacy enabled.

Domain 1's best link is, say on a blogroll spot of a PR4 site along with a bunch pf other outbound links
Domain 2's best (and only) link is this PR4 one from an authority site

The single PR4 from an authority site, in my opinion, is a lot more better than all of the links Domain 1 has put together. Why? Because I could probably build the same or similar links to Domain 1 myself given time but I could NEVER replicate the editorial link from an authority site that Domain 2 has.

And that's why trust is so important. MozTrust is based around the concept of Trust Rank which was actually a Yahoo patent originally (although most people accept that Google do something very similar). It is a measure of how far away from a trusted set of "seed sites" your site is.

So Domain 2 above is 1 "hop" away from a trusted site which would probably form part of that set of seed sites. If you then link through to your money site from this domain, it is 2 hops away.
Other sites that might make up the set of seed sites are universities, large association websites, large charities, large news sites, foreign government and university websites etc.

I believe that MozTrust is a very good metric to use when deciding what domains to buy. I use it as my main metric above others like DA or even PR.

So next time you are looking at domains to buy, don't just go for the one with more links or a higher Domain Authority. Take a closer look and see if there are some hidden details that most other people will overlook.

Please note: when looking at MozTrust (or any other Moz metric), you should ensure that you only look at the scores for the root domain and not the page or subdomain.

Should You Recreate The Old Site Or Make It Fit Your Niche?

So you found a truly great expired domain for either godaddy auctions or flippa What is the best way to get the most with that domain?

a) change the content/theme so that it matches that of your money site

b) keep the content/theme the same as it was before and "force" a link to your money site despite the unrelated content (the benefits of which are that you are more likely to keep the authority links pointing towards your domain)

If I had to choose between the 2 then I'd choose option A and repurpose the domain into something that was relevant to my money site.

I do this because I have found links from related sites to be more effective in terms of rankings than those from unrelated sites.

BUT, I also like to try and take a hybrid approach to both get relevancy and to try and reduce the risk of the links being removed by the authority sites linking to a domain. So, for example, I recently picked up a domain that was originally the website for a nutritional conference but I was looking to promote my jobs/careers website at the time. Rather than make the site solely about careers, I instead created a homepage article that was all about the career prospects of a nutritionist because this is, after all, the type of people who would have been going to the original conference.

Thus, I managed to work my link naturally into the article and get the benefit of having relevant keywords throughout and especially in the page title (as I mentioned in my report, this makes a difference in the power of the links you build). Mostly, though, this is not possible so I just make a broad website on my expired domains to do with one topic or another.

Sometimes it is feasible to keep this broad topic relevant to the original site in some shape or form and it comes down to where the backlinks come from. For example, a while ago I found a domain that had a link from the World Health Organisation but it was mainly about preventable diseases in poorer countries. So instead I built a general health website on this domain and linked to a health related site of mine. I really wanted to maintain the relevancy of the link I had from the WHO and try to pass this through to my money site.

One word of caution for anyone thinking of using the exact content taken from archive.org to rebuild the site that was there before; I would advise against this as the original owner does still technically own that content and there is always a small chance that you could get into a legal dispute. It is simply not worth the risk.

I hope this has cleared things up a little. Remember, these are my opinions and how I work and there is no perfect solution. I just try to stay under the Google radar.