Even if you’re a complete newbie, you’re already heard the phrase “make sure your PBN doesn’t have any footprints or Google will burn it”. To understand footprints and how to avoid them, we first have to define them:
Footprint is a unique identifier on all your blogs or domains, which could be anything from your domain contact in Whois, unique WordPress plugin or theme or the same one backlink from all your blogs.
There are also some other things which are not real footprints but will seriously hinder your results. These include using the same hosting provider for all your blogs, publishing only short articles and using only commercial keywords in anchor text.
Always remember the definition and try to keep things natural. Is it natural for all websites linking to yours to have the exact same theme? The same domain owner? The same plugins? The same outbound links?
One of the easiest ways for a search engine to find a blog network us outbound links patterns. This means you want to link out to different websites, not just your own. These should include big authority websites like Wikipedia and also smaller niche websites which are not in direct competition for your keywords.
What you must avoid at all cost is using Webmaster Tools, any kind of Analytics or ad codes. These have an actual unique ID and can be easily traced to all your blogs.
Further Reading
We published a few blog posts on this very important topic:
- Latest discoveries about deindexation and Search Engine crawling
- 6 Footprints and 10 Issues That Can Get Your Blog Deindexed
- Busting Myths About PBN Footprints
- Causes For PBN Blogs Deindexation (backed by data)
- Why nameservers are more dangerous footprints than IPs
And you’ll find your footprint checklist in the Checklists article.