Grumpy SEO Guy (0:00)

This is Grumpy SEO Guy, episode 95. Should you make a low Dr. 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 because people are misunderstanding about Dr. And PBNs. So in this episode, we're gonna talk about building a PBN with low Dr. Sites and why it might be a good idea. 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. Okay, first things first. If you're watching this on YouTube, please subscribe. I don't want to be that person who's like, click subscribe, smash that notification button, or, like, whatever they say. But, like, guys, subscribe. Come on. If you like the podcast enough to listen to it every week, you should at least subscribe. And I'm only saying this because, like, I'm getting a lot of con. Like, I'm. I'm getting some, like, smart. Like, some good and very smart comments on some of the videos, but, like, not from subscribers. Like, guys, you comment on every video. I know you're watching them. Click, subscribe or don't. It doesn't matter to me. But anyway, thank you for listening to grumpy SEO guy. Anyway, so when people learn about Dr. And by the way, I'm just stating Dr. Here as an example. Metric. Okay? It can be doctor. It can be DA. It can be anything you want. It doesn't matter. The point is, people think that higher doctor is always better. And for some reason, if you have a lower Dr. Website, you probably should not get Backlinks from that one. That literally doesn't make any sense, but we're going to talk more about that, okay? So when people learn about Dr. They immediately think, oh, I need high Dr. Backlinks. I need high Dr. Backlinks. And then they go out and they start trying to find high doctor backlinks. And most likely they meet some scammy sellers who say they have high doctor backlinks. Okay, now let's take a second and just stop and define what doctor means. Okay? Yes, I've mentioned this before, but maybe somebody's listening and they have not heard this before. So we're going to do this right now. Number one, okay? There is a measure of authority called pr, okay? It stands for page rank. It is produced by Google. It is the actual level of authority that a URL has. Okay? The problem is they were publishing it. This was years ago. This was back in the day they were publishing it and people were using it to sell backlinks because the more PR a website has, the more authority their backlinks would offer. Okay? So higher PR websites, you could charge more money. Now, I don't know if this is actually the reason that they stopped providing pr, but they did many years ago. So other companies came and they said, well, we don't know what PR is, but we're going to approximate it. We're going to give you a guess as to what we think the authority of this website is. So there's many different. So there's many different softwares, there's many different apps that have their own guess as to what authority is. So for example, Moz, you've probably heard of them, has something called DA Domain authority. Ahrefs, you've probably heard of them, has something called Dr. Domain Rating. Okay? Any tool that you can think of probably has its own version of authority, okay? None of them is official. They are guesses. Because the only authority that matters is Google's pr. And nobody can see that anymore. I believe they still use it. And if they don't use it, they use something, you know, close to it, but like, whatever. But people can't see it anymore, so they have to use Dr. DA, whatever. Everybody's got their favorite. So naturally, when people grasp this, they say, oh, I need the high doctor backlinks. I need the high doctor backlinks. I don't want low doctor backlinks. Let's get the high doctor backlinks. Okay, Couple problems with this. So, okay, here's a problem. Simply using Dr. By itself is not the greatest way to determine how useful a backlink is. I'm not saying Dr. Is worthless. I'm saying going by Dr. Individually is not the best way to determine the strength of a backlink. But that's a different topic. So anyway, let's just. That's. That's the first reason. Okay. Another reason is Dr. Is a domain level metric. It has almost nothing to do with the page that your link will be on. Okay? You could get a link from a website that has Dr. 90 or, you know, whatever. Look, Dr. Is a scale that goes to 100. Okay? So 90 is quite high. Most websites on the Internet are not Dr. 90. So we're just using this as an example. You could get a backlink from a Doctor90 website that might not help you very much because it's possible that the page that that backlink is on has minimal authority, if any. Okay. People don't know this. They're like, oh, I just need to hide Dr. Backlinks. Okay, here's the third reason that you shouldn't only rely on Dr. And high Dr. Backlinks. I want you to ask yourself a question, and if you're familiar with Grumpy SEO Guy, you already realize what the answer will be. What is the first rule of SEO? Would this ever naturally happen? Okay. Before you do anything with SEO, you have to ask yourself, would this ever naturally happen? If the answer is no, you should probably do something else. If the answer is yes, you should probably do it. By the way, this is the reason that I try to teach so much theory. Instead of just making every episode, do this, do this other thing, do that. This is how you do SEO. Because if I just teach you specifically the things to do, you're not going to understand SEO. And as soon as stuff changes, you're going to be like, I don't know what to do anymore. It doesn't work. But if you understand the concept of SEO, you will basically be unconcerned with SEO, any alterations or anything to the algorithm, because you will understand SEO instead of having memorized a bunch of steps that might not help you tomorrow. Okay? So would this ever naturally happen? So anyway, here we're going to take this. We're going to take this one step further. Okay? Would this ever happen naturally? Okay. Do you think? Now I want you to imagine you have a brand new website because you're do an SEO and you got a brand new website and now you're like, I need only high doctor backlinks. Cause they're powerful. Okay, okay. Ask yourself this question. Would that Ever naturally happen. Now remember, remember, before we even go further, remember there's a lot of websites on the Internet. Most of them have low Dr. Let's not talk about doctor. Most of them have low authority, okay? I can't prove this, but I would bet that as the authority increases, the number of websites with that amount of authority decrease exponentially. Okay, let's talk PR for a second. Google's page rank, okay? Page rank went from 0 to 10, okay? There was also a value of negative one, which I think happened if your site got penalized. But let's just, let's ignore that for now. Let's just use 0 to 10. I would presume that more than half of the websites on the Internet are probably pr0 or 1, okay? Then sometimes you get 2, 3, 4. And I'm doing this from memory because they haven't shared PR in a really long time. But I remember normal people never had websites that were past three or four or five. We had one that was five. Like we, we had one that was five, okay? Most times that you had like six or seven or something. It was like a well established company, not some person's website, okay? And then like I think 10. I feel like somebody told me once the only PR10 website on the Internet was google.com. i don't know. Look, here's, here's the point though. And by the way, those numbers might be totally wrong. But the point is the more authority you get, the fewer websites there are with that much authority, okay? Like think about it, like, think about it like money, okay? As you go up, like there's, there's people, there's probably a lot of people in the world that have a thousand dollars, okay? There's fewer people than that that have $10,000. There's fewer people than that that possess even $100,000. And then there's fewer people than that with a million dollars. And then there's even fewer people than that with a billion dollars, okay? It's very unlikely that some person you know is a billionaire. It's extremely unlike. Now you're like, I know a billionaire. Bam. Okay, good for you. But I'm saying billionaire, okay, but same thing with high authority websites, okay? Yeah, everybody knows a high doctor website, okay, that's cool. But guess what? Most people don't have access to them, okay? And if they do, it's probably a scam to try and charge you a lot of money for backlink on a high doctor website that's on some page that doesn't even get indexed on some editor's account that's so far into the website that you're never gonna see it and it's gonna have no authority itself. By the way, don't fall for that scam, okay? Anyways, look, ask yourself. Remember the question that we were just talking about? Would this ever naturally happen? Okay. Would this ever naturally happen? Do you think your brand new website would ever only get backlinks from websites with tons of doctor do you think that would happen? Do you think a brand new website would only get really authoritative backlinks? No, that would never happen. Why? Because most websites on the Internet are not very authoritative, okay? In real life, for every. Let's use doctor here. Okay? For every doctor. I'm just making up numbers here, okay? But for every, like, Dr. 50 backlink you get, you probably have a hundred Dr. 40 backlinks. And for every Dr. 40 backlink you get, you probably HAVE 100 Dr. 30 backlinks and so on. Why? Because large amounts of authority are not the norm. All right? So anyway, look, here's the point. It doesn't make any sense to look out for high doctor backlinks unless you already have a lot of lower authority backlinks. Okay? So now let's talk about. Should you make a PBN with low doctor websites? Yeah, because having a lot of backlinks from lower Dr. Sites is a regular thing. That would probably happen. Okay, like. Okay. And while we're on the topic, like, it always cracks me up, like, in a sad way when people are like, when you see sellers and they're like, okay. It's like, they're like, we sell backlinks and you're like, oh, interesting. Do you have any high doctor? And they're like, yes, we only have high doctor backlinks. Whatever, dude. First of all, no, you don't. And second of all, if you do, you're not doing it right. Okay? Like, that doesn't make any sense. Like, all my friends are millionaires. Okay, okay. Anyway, should you make a PBN with reduced Dr. Websites? Yes, you probably should. Well, let me. Let me put it a little differently. I'm not saying that you like, feasibly should do it, but I'm saying if you're going to be building a PBN for yourself or for your clients or whatever, probably doesn't make any sense to stick to only high Dr. Websites because that doesn't seem organic. Again, it wouldn't happen right, like now if you're. If you're bill. Okay? If you're making a PBN just for like clients who already have lots of low quality backlinks but don't have any really authoritative backlinks and you're going to make your unique custom high authority PBN just for that specific kind of person. What? Whatever, dude. I guess. But like, no. Plus, plus, here's, here's a second reason to make a lower Dr. PBN. You might do it mistakenly when you start and you want to make mistakes on cheaper domains, not on more expensive domains. Okay. In fact, I would even say that if you wanted to have a good number of websites in your PBN that are brand new, you should do that. Why? Why? Because that would naturally happen. Not every website on the Internet has lots of authority. And the links that you're getting from most websites probably do not have a lot of authority. So anyway, anyway, I can't wait until people, people hear this episode and be like, your number's wrong. I have exactly 92 backlinks from Dr. 30 websites and then I only have 57 from Dr. Dirty website. Whatever, dude. First of all, good. Good for you. I guess that's cool. Are you at the top of the search engines? Yeah. Well then keep doing what you're doing. Okay. Anyways, look, here's the thing. There's no problem making a PBN with lower authority websites. It's probably a good idea. It's probably pretty rare that you're going to get very high Dr. Websites because there's not that many and they're very expensive. I was just talking to somebody the other day. We're actually, I was, I was helping them with finding good domains that are for sale at auction. And we found it. We found a great, like, guys, this was a great domain, right? And then like they were like following it and they were bidding on it and then like they ended up knocking. It went for like low five figures. And I'm just like, yeah, I probably, probably wouldn't have bought it either. That's pretty expensive. But like it was, it was an excellent domain. I don't remember the doctor let's say it was like 40. I don't, honestly, I don't remember. But it had an excellent backlink profile. Like excellent backlink profile, excellent referring domain profile, you know, like superb anchor text, no silly IPs, nothing crazy. It was an excellent domain. Like I highly recommended it, but not for that price. Right? So anyway, you're not gonna build. Okay, I don't, I don't want you. You could, right, but normal people do not have the money to build a PBN with high authority domains. Okay, and that person who messaged you on that forum, we have only high Dr. Sites in our PBN. I highly doubt they have the money to do it either. Now, I'm not money shaming people, okay? I guarantee you there's people out there that do have the money for that. But let's think about the, the amount of people that are doing this. How many people do SEO? Thousands. Right? Most of them are scammers. Okay, do you think that those like people doing SEO that are trying to sell you their junk all the time, do you think they had that much money to buy a PBN with only high Dr. Domains? No, of course they didn't. They're probably gonna sell you some blog comment garbage and. Oh, oh, here, okay, here, let's, let's talk about this fun scam too. Okay, cool. I'm glad that I like, like had a. I'm glad that we started talking about this because now I can talk about this stupid scam from sellers. Okay? I have seen this before, so just be aware of this. It is common. Oof. It makes me sad that this is common. It is common that people will say we hide our backlinks. High doctor back. Okay, okay. And then if you really press them and try and find out specifics, but if you really like, like message them about it and just basically like demand answers. Right, okay. Or, you know, whatever, you will learn that their high doctor websites are things like WordPress.com now hold on for a second. WordPress.com is in fact a high doctor website. But that backlink they're selling you is on a sub domain of WordPress.com that they created and it has no doctor. And if it has any, it's very low, but it probably has no doctor. So technically they are telling you the truth. It is on a high doctor website. But what they didn't tell you is that it is on a sub domain. And as you know from listening to grumpy SEO guy, subdomains do not inherit any authority from the main domain. Okay? By the way, that's why WordPress does it that way, because otherwise everybody in the world would have a rather authoritative website. So look, it's on a subdomain of WordPress, which has no authority at all when it starts, because a subdomain is the same as a brand new domain as far as authority goes. So technically what they said, oh, it's On a high Dr. Domain was true, but they were misleading you about how much authority you would actually be getting. Anyway, I've seen this happen before. It's obnoxious. Do not buy from people like that. And especially because, like, you know, the price was cheap, right? So what have I told you before? If it's cheap, it is definitely trash. If it is expensive, it plausibly is trash. Right? High price doesn't make something good. Low price almost guarantees you that it is bad. All right, so anyway, yeah, I hope this makes sense. Feel free to vary the amount of Dr. Or whatever in your PBN. You want to have some high Dr. Sites, you should do it. If you want to have some low Dr. Sites, you should do it. If you want to have some brand new domains, you should do that too. A good PBN or private blog portfolio has, and by the way, let me repeat myself again here too. Pbn, Private Blog network. Okay, but I like to call them private blog portfolios because a network suggests everything is linked together and you definitely want to keep your blogs that you're using from linking to each other. That's a terrible way to make a footprint and get your whole thing found and lose all of your authority. Or at least get them de indexed. Anyway, look, you should have a large distribution of authority and other things in your PBN. So you want to have a couple doctor minus 40 or 50 or whatever websites do it. That's a great idea. You want to have some that are like 10, 20, 30. Great idea. You should do that too. You want to have some websites that were purchased yesterday and have no authority at all, you should do that too. You should have a big mixture of them. Why? Because that would happen naturally. Anyway, part of the reason I'm making this episode is because I've been asked numerous times if you can make PBNs with new domains and the answer is absolutely yes. Just be aware those websites will have lower authority than previous domains that already have authority. Anyway. Yeah, let me know if this was a useful episode. 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 want to suggest a subject for a future episode, you can contact me on Reddit. My username is Grumpy SEO Guy. You can visit the Grumpy SEO Guy subreddit or you can email me@hellorumpyseoguy.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 want to support the podcast because it's the best source of SEO information on the planet and it's free, you can do so@patreon.com Grumpy Seoguy 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 so you want to start your own SEO agency? Part two.