I previously 301 a site - but now want to make it a PBN, thoughts?

[Trump]

Hello,

A few years ago, I bought a very strong domain. Extremely strong, for my little country. It would have been a perfect opportunity to make it into a PBN/a real site.

Unfortunately, I 301 it to one of my sites instead. I think this was around 2019.

Now, I'm thinking about making it a PBN. A proper one. And then link it to one of my other money sites.

What's your thoughts on this? Has the domain played its role and been squeezed out of all opportunities, or could this shift work?

I would appreciate some input on this.

 

[SmokeTree]

Look at your analytics and see how much juice is still being passed to the domain you are doing a 301 to. You can set up logging on your server to catch visitors to the site depending on how you're doing the 301. I do a lot of server work for Internet Marketers and I can tell you that I really don't see a lot of PBN setups in the wild these days whereas just a few years ago, I was involved in helping clients set pretty big PBNs up and got a lot of PBN related server work. The general consensus is that PBNs are not really worth the cost to set up and maintain. Your use case may be different but this is my general opinion as a sysadmin that works with a ton of IM clients. Hope this helps!

 

[Trump]

Look at your analytics and see how much juice is still being passed to the domain you are doing a 301 to. You can set up logging on your server to catch visitors to the site depending on how you're doing the 301. I do a lot of server work for Internet Marketers and I can tell you that I really don't see a lot of PBN setups in the wild these days whereas just a few years ago, I was involved in helping clients set pretty big PBNs up and got a lot of PBN related server work. The general consensus is that PBNs are not really worth the cost to set up and maintain. Your use case may be different but this is my general opinion as a sysadmin that works with a ton of IM clients. Hope this helps!

Thank you for your response.

With juice in analytics, I guess you mean how many visitors that come through the 301-domain? The project that I am 301 to is a fairly small and abandoned site. Analytics isnt even properly set up unfortunately.

But visitors are for sure still being redirected.

Ive heard that a lot of people are against PBNs now days, which is understandable. I wouldn't set one up for the US market either.

Why I'm thinking about building one, is because I work in a small country where links are hard to come by and very expensive. My competition seem to be doing good with really bad PBNs as well.

I appreciate your response!

 

[Ryuzaki]

I don't advise building out PBNs either. Lot of risk for one more referring domain to your project (not really a risk if you only have one pumper site), when you can just get a link from any active site online. The whole internet is a PBN that doesn't leave a footprint and doesn't give me a manual action. That's how I look at it these days.

But I don't think your domain is "spent". I had a domain 301'd to a project for years, removed the 301, and gave it to a buddy to build a site on, and it's doing just fine. He's actually about to build another site on another domain I had 301'd. They should still have the juice and any traffic flowing to them.

 

[SmokeTree]

With juice in analytics, I guess you mean how many visitors that come through the 301-domain? The project that I am 301 to is a fairly small and abandoned site. Analytics isnt even properly set up unfortunately.

If no analytics, what you'll want to do and should do for every site you run is to make sure you're logging visitors at the server. Even if you're doing a 301, the server or something running off the server like a PHP app with WordPress performs the 301 and knows who/what made the request to the site in order to be able to return the 301 response. The server logs all visitors and in many cases even has IP information and will give you more of the truth of exactly who is hitting your site(s) than any other source because it's literally at the front door. Most cpanels have some kind of way to enable/view webserver logs and I'd enable that and watch it over a week or two to see what kind of hits you're getting.

 

[Grind]

Don't build private blog networks, build private relevant sites.

The 301 doesn't matter, just put good content on it with a handful of links out to highly authoritative relevant results (please not f'ng Wikipedia, can we as SEOs stop being so collective cliche already?), let it sit for 60+ days, check the indexing status.

If it's indexed, drop your link, get it recrawled or build a couple of high-quality links to it.

If it's not indexed, move on.

The end.