Home topics technology SEO Tech SEO When building an online presence for your business, don’t discount the value of PBNs Andrew Vilbar February 28, 2017 Managing a traditional bricks-and-mortar business is, in itself, a tricky prospect but taking a business online with little to no training can be an absolute nightmare. Establishing a web presence involves learning new strategies and new ‘languages’. One term that small businesses might be aware of, perhaps owing its bad reputation, is Private Blog Network (PBN). In a nutshell, PBNs are a series of domains where the entity controlling them sets out improve the Google ranking of a client’s website by altering anchor text and links in their network to, in effect, manipulate Google’s ranking algorithm. Why do they have a bad reputation, you ask? Simply, put, they can attract penalties from Google. The reality, however, is that it is very hard for small business owners to cost-effectively ‘attack the market’, so to speak, when they move online. PBNs are an opportunity to gain a small foothold in the SEO space. I’m not advocating that your entire link building campaign should centre around them – they definitely should not . The majority of links to your site should come from established, reputable sites. However, you should leverage PBNs by incorporating them into your overall link building strategy. You undoubtedly would have heard of people who have had their sites penalised by Google due to Penguin – a Google update to its algorithm that tracks manipulative