Choosing a domain for a PBN (1st time)

The red color indicates that the pagerank is fake but even when it shows as green it's highly unlikely that its really a PR3 cause those rarely end up on expireddomains.net, instead they get picked up in auctions so.

Lesson 1: You won't find legit PR3 domains on exipreddomains.net

Lesson 2: PR hasn't been updated for over a year so it's quite inaccurate.

Lesson 3: Always verify the PR by checking the PR of the backlinks, as well as the quality of the backlinks and the OBL (outbound links) on these pages. Sometimes you find a domain with a handful of PR4 backlinks but if they are blog comments on heavily spammed pages with 100's or even 1000's of them it's virtually useless.

TIP 1: A good way to pre-filter large amounts of domains is by looking at metrics, personally I like to stick with min. DA20 / MozRank 3 / MozTrust 3 / CF 15 / TF15. If the CF (Citation Flow) is much higher then the TF (Trust Flow) the domain often has a very spammy backlink profile. These TF/CF metrics are provided by Majestic SEO btw.

TIP 2: Never rely solely on metrics, ONLY use it as a pre-filter for 1000's of domains, eventually you still have to check the actual backlink profile. Backlink Miner is a good tool for that, but you can also import the backlinks in Scrapebox and run a PR and OBL check on them.

Here a list of tools/services you will need

- RegisterCompass, allows you to prefilter based on metrics in bulk (paid)

- Ahrefs subscription to export backlinks of domains (paid)

- Backlink Miner or Scrapebox to check the backlinks PR and such (paid)

- Netpeak checker to check metrics of domains.(free)

- Xenu linksleuth, to find long time dropped domains, Google "Hayden" method for more information about that (free)

Ok roll another one I would say as this will keep you busy for a while. Yep sourcing good domains to use in a PBN is quite time consuming.

Few more things to think of:

- Unique hosting, you don't want all your sites on the same host, make sure to avoid SEO hosts at all costs as they will get your domains deindexed, just a matter of time so register seperate shared hosting accounts. Avoid cheap reseller hosts as well as they are often abused by tons of SEO's and thus it carries the same risk.

- Be careful how you link out from your domains, don't place all your clients on the same domains. I stick to a rule of linking out from max 25 percent of my domains to one client, and even that is a bit high. You want a good diversity in OBL profiles on your sites. There have been tons of network taken down semi-automatic simply cause each site in the network had the exact same OBL profile. I know you have quite a few low budget clients so I realize how tempting it is but believe me, don't do it, no matter what others might say. I've seen too many clients that used such networks and when checking their backlink profile they had dozens of such links and all deindexed so I'm not making anything up here.

So quickly summarized:

- Avoid SEO hosts or anything that looks like it
- Avoid domains with heavily spammed backlinks
- Check the backlink profile before you decide to purchase
- Don't link to the same clients from each site
- Take all the metrics with a huge grain of salt.

This is enough to get started for now. Just shoot me a message if you have any specific questions but don't mail me domains to verify if they are good, that's your job. If it doesn't look good then just skip it.

ps: If the domain is any good it will already be registered before you finished your tea (not by me though).