[Christina]

here was a recent comment that I found it was pretty useful even though nothing really shocking, just a great summary.

still pretty relevant these days even after the HCU.

In 2012 or 2013 (I can’t remember), I put out the most comprehensive course on building private networks available at the time. It’s still better than any other course I’ve seen out there. I have built well over 1500 network sites for myself and for others. The course is no longer available for sale (although I’m sure there are still pirated copies out there somewhere). I just mention it for context in that I know what I’m talking about here.

The most important thing in building your own network for links is understanding how to choose good domains. If you don’t, you will just waste a lot of money. And even when you know what you are doing, you are still going to buy a dud now and then. What you are trying to do in evaluating domains is minimizing that risk.

How you buy domains, doesn’t matter all that much. I used to love searching for expired domains by scraping and crawling thousands of sites looking for broken links to domains that had expired. I had a whole system running on autopilot spitting out domains for me constantly.

The problem with that method is there are tons of people doing it now. You will rarely find a good domain, and even when you do, there won’t be much time before it is scooped up by someone else.

I like auctions just because I can find a big pool of domains to sort through. Is it more expensive? Absolutely. However, if you are not making more money off your private network than what you are spending to build it, you are doing something horribly wrong.

One thing I will tell you with auctions is do not get emotional. Set the highest price you are willing to go to for a domain and do not exceed it. Sometimes people will bid twice as much. That’s fine. Let them have it.

You may see domains sell for crazy amounts. Don’t let it bother you. Remember that not everyone in the auction is trying to build a private network. Sometimes a domain has much more value to someone else just because they see the potential for building a brand using that domain or it has some other value to them.

As far as evaluating domains… Don’t use third party metrics for anything other than a filter. If you start buying domains just because they have a high DA (or DR or any other metric you want to look at), you are going to buy a lot of duds. Those metrics are too inaccurate.

The only thing I will ever use them for is as a filter. For example, I may set a minimum DA of 20 just to weed out domains that are probably worthless. Yes, I may miss some that are categorized incorrectly, but if I have 1000 domains to look through, I need to save time somewhere.

Back when I started doing this in 2006 or so, most of us used PageRank. It told us exactly what Google thought of a domain’s link profile. It was much easier to evaluate domains back then than it is now.

Since the last public PageRank update, that method doesn’t work anymore.

Besides just looking at a site’s links, what I started doing after that was putting domains into Semrush and looking at their ranking history.

If you agree that links are a major ranking signal (I personally think they are still the strongest one), and you probably wouldn’t care about building a private network if you didn’t believe that, then what better way do we have to evaluate the strength of a domain’s link profile then seeing how it ranked and performed in Google Search?

If you see it ranking for a lot of moderately competitive keywords, you can feel relatively confident that the link profile is fairly solid. If it never ranked for anything, then you know the link profile is trash.

Before anyone asks, no, I do not have a special formula or a specific number of keywords I look for. You have to go a bit with what the data is telling you and use your best judgement. You get better at it with more experience.

Even with some weaker keywords ranking, the domain may be worthwhile. That’s when it comes into pricing. If I can get a domain like that for $75, I’ll take it. If the auction goes up to $300, I’m not interested.

I have never been a believer that the domain has to be relevant to your niche to be useful. What you are doing is harnessing the strength of the links pointing to that domain, and then building relevant links off of it based on the content you populate it with. I call it link laundering.

I of course do all the typical checks people do like checking the Wayback Machine to make sure the site was not used for something illegal or spreading malware.

I also eliminate domains where the domain name has no use to me. I am not going to take a domain like RonForSenate2016.tld and turn it into a domain about mortgages. The name has to make sense for what I want to use it for.

When it comes to actually building the sites, my philosophy is that the sites are going to be built to look like any other site you might come across on the internet. They just happen to link to where I want them to.

I create custom logos. For some sites I’ll create social media accounts if it makes sense. They will have privacy notices. Anything a real site would have, I create.

I don’t just build blogs either like many people do. Again real websites. There may be a blog attached, but they are not just blogs and nothing else. You can also build things like directories in your private network.

What I build are sites that absolutely could stand on their own. I could monetize them if I wanted to (and some I have). They are just like any other site you might find on the internet in that niche.

Basically, I take the approach that every one of my sites is going to come under a manual review by a Google employee. I’m going to create helpful sites that serve a purpose and can stand on their own, but they link to where I want them to link to. If you do that, it’s doubtful you will ever run into a problem.

I add a lot of internal links on the site too. One dead giveaway for a lot of network sites is they don’t build internal links. I build silos or topic clusters just like I would for a site I was trying to rank and internally link between all the articles.

In fact, it’s been probably 10 years since I had a network site deindexed, and that was a few sites I was purposely doing some shady things on to push the boundaries and see how far I could go.

When it comes to hosting, every site in the same network has its own hosting account at a different provider.

I avoid creating an outbound link footprint. What I mean by that is if I build a network of 10 websites, those 10 websites are not all going to link to the same places. That would potentially create a footprint easily identifying them.

That’s a fairly basic rundown of how to build your own private network.

Found it here:

Biggest tips in buying expired domains for getting backlinks for LOCAL SEO? (AND DOING IT RIGHT)
byu/Novel-Internet-9158 inSEO

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