Building a PBN Network Using Expired Domains with Damyan of SEO.Domains

James Dooley: PBN building on expired domains. There's now a lot of people talking about private blog networks. It used to be a thing of the past and it's come back now a lot with AI visibility. Today I'm joined with Damyan, a shareholder within SEO.Domains, probably the market leader when it comes to purchasing of expired domains. So Damyan, I wanted to get you on. Have you found that now this seems to be like a roller coaster where people now are starting to build PBNs again? Because, like, it seemed to be something that was here 10, 15 years ago and it seemed to start going away, apart from, like, in the iGaming sector. But now it seems in so many different markets people are talking about PBNs again. So can you kind of elaborate on that a little bit more, that what you've seen?

Damyan: Uh, in time people actually understood and appreciated, uh, that they actually need to grow their own network of assets, of web assets, that they can use as a leverage in terms of ranking, uh, in terms of, uh, um, managing the narratives, uh, about their brands, the reviews and etc. And, uh, it became more and more popular. It was very niche thing, like back in the days, 15 to 10 years ago, and probably only in few industries. And now everyone is actually looking into it. And, uh, we saw that people switched from building PBNs on just fresh new websites, new domains, to, uh, just expired domains because they multiply.

James Dooley: So on there I've got a question for you. A fresh domain, a brand new, like, let's say exact match domain. Yeah. Versus buying an expired domain that's got the power, might have some trust, might have some previous branded traffic. In your opinion, obviously you've seen a lot of these PBN buildouts, why is it better for it to be built out on an expired domain versus a fresh new domain?

Damyan: It saves time and money. Uh, the EMDs are actually quite well, quite good, but, uh, they need much more, uh, effort and time to, to get it out of the sandbox and everything. It's, uh, harder for people to actually make, uh, to make it look as a brand, to be cited as a brand and everything. So it, it could be, it could be, uh, by the end of the day, to be more powerful, uh, strategy, but it's much more, like, costly in every single way. And, um, when you, when you buy the expired domains, the power is already there. You just need to know how to extract it. And we see that people actually, um, even tend to, to go for the restoration of historical content or the restoration of the topic, uh, just... And, uh, we see that they extract more and more value out, out of the expired domains.

James Dooley: So on there now let's go a bit deeper into the actual PBN buildout. Right. So for me it's an absolute no-brainer. You need to put it on an expired domain because it's got the referring domains. It's got the power. Like, why would you build it on a fresh domain? Like, I get these keywords in the domain name. It needs to be on an expired. But when someone comes along now and they come to SEO.Domains and they go, "I've just found 150 domain names that I want. I want to own the asset and I want to build out this PBN." What are you finding that the most successful people are doing when they're building out PBNs?

Damyan: Um, firstly we, we help them figure... out, uh, which of those could be actually restored and how, uh, the websites will look like. Um, after that, then we see the domains with history but no, uh, no, no good copy in the archive. We, we suggest them to build, or build for them, um, like new fresh websites, uh, close to the same topic with, uh, content that was never there but, uh, still. And we see that the most important part of extracting the value of an expired domain related to if you want to keep the relation of the... historical content is to actually restore the URL structure that was, uh, previously there. Um, and if you cannot find good content, but there are, like, URLs with backlinks and stuff, you, you find a way to actually create content on those URLs, no matter if it's on Archivarix or it's on WordPress or some just, uh, custom HTML.

James Dooley: So on that, I want to go a little bit deeper on that. So restoring the old expired domain is 100% lining up the relevance because you're restoring it. But you said that not all domains can be restored. Can you explain why some domains can't be restored but some can when you're building out PBNs?

Damyan: If the, if, if the good history of the domain was so old that the Wayback Machine didn't actually, um, have a good scraping power, uh, back then, um, there might not be a good preserved copy. Just a, just a homepage or something. And, uh, and for, in some cases people blocked, um, like Wayback Machine crawler and stuff, so there is no copies there as well. Different reason, but most of the time it's that, uh, the crawler was not working efficiently and didn't copy at all. If, if the website was with bad structure that was not, um, um, saving, most of the websites got, uh, the good structure when Google said that it will, uh, give bonus points to everyone that actually saves money for them to crawl the website. And all of us SEOs changed to clean and smooth sitemaps and stuff. Uh, actually save them money and also, uh, this helped their, uh, Wayback Machine to actually copy it.

James Dooley: Yeah. So with regards to that then, with regards to the PBN buildouts, when you're restoring, you mentioned about restoring existing URLs. So when you're restoring existing URLs then, is that because if there's links going to an inner page, you want to kind of maintain that power to that as opposed to 301, let's say, back to the homepage?

Damyan: There are so many different strategies, but for me, um, the best one is to actually restore and, and leave it there, uh, until you get the results from, um, bringing back to life the, the previous, uh, structure. Um, you can, if it's, if it's an important website, you can hook it to a console and see the, the back, the old links actually popping up, uh, again, and then you decide what to do with it. And I would avoid, like, the 301s, especially those that were... That was working 10 years ago. Well, that was, like, redirect everything to the homepage. This is probably the fastest way to tank your website.

James Dooley: And then we've got... Is there anything else then? So someone comes along and they're saying, "Damyan, I'm all in. I want to buy some domains from SEO.Domains. I want to build out this PBN network. I'm going to restore the content. I'm going to restore the existing URL structure." Is there anything else that you're finding when people are building out these PBNs that is working well?

Damyan: Uh, it depends. Can you restore, like, all of the content or is there a certain bit that you kind of take out? Most of the time we restore just bits of the content and it's working, uh, well enough for, for those, um, projects. Um, of course there is also a question why do you need it, uh, in the first place? Do you need a PBN just to, um, to transfer some power, some link juice to, to your money site? Or you going to use it for a money site? Of course, there are some really nasty strategies, uh, uh, in Southeast Asia in specific industries where they restore the, uh, where the bits that they can, uh, on the... uh, from the previous, uh, uh, content and they just swap the, the homepage to some nasty things with high profits. Uh, and, uh, so, so many variety of options to, uh, to actually, uh, do this. But most of the time people do it for the, for the power, for the juice, for the link juice. And, uh, just restoring bits of the content could be enough.

James Dooley: And then with regards to building out the PBNs, are people still doing it, let's say, all in WordPress? Are you finding some now might use just static HTML with, with things like Claude Code?

Damyan: Nowadays it's so easy to build out websites. What are... Um, the problem, the problem we have with, uh, building them on WordPress actually is, um, first the, the WordPress CMS is quite heavy. And, uh, when you're doing those in thousands, uh, the cost for hosting and everything goes through the roof. And also WordPress websites are the most targeted for any malicious, uh, intentions and hacking stuff. And maintaining, maintenance of this is, like, uh, really crazy. And, uh, we prefer, um, using, for, for starters, you can always use, uh, the CMS called, uh, Archivarix. We kind of created a custom, uh, one for our projects. And with Claude Code, uh, the thing that I love the most is that it's easy to build, like, flat sites, uh, because the flat sites are unhackable. And, um, our company decided to, to try to get the benefit of all the, the choices. And we have some WordPress websites, but we have the WordPress CMS on a local copy and we are flattening the, uh, the public version of, of the content and just synchronising with some cron jobs regularly when, when we, when we put more content into it. And, um, we, we kind of lower the, the cost for everything, especially the maintenance, uh, with the hacking. But, um, most of our restored websites are on our custom CMS, and we started with Archivarix. Um, and, uh, I think it's really good. Also could be easily integrated in, uh, like your internal ERP, custom, uh, CMS, uh, or control board stuff. That also we did and it's working well. And the most important is working fast because when you're building PBNs, the most important thing is, um, the problems you face with scale, you need to solve those because no one is going...

James Dooley: I want to stop you in your tracks there, right? Because I'm a big, big believer about delegation. I'm a big believer that if I need my roof fixing, I go and get a roofer to fix my roof. If I'm hearing this and I'm hearing about the maintenance and how to build them out of these PBN networks, and I'm hearing a lot of success stories where people have built out 1,500 PBNs, they now own this strategic asset, and they're able now to, every time they win an award, they can be sharing out across all these platforms. And it's working so well, not just for the link juice or the PageRank distribution, but it also helps with AI visibility. So, if someone was to say, "Okay, Damyan, I'm all in. I want to buy some domains from SEO.Domains, but I don't want to build out the PBN network." Could somebody reach out to somebody like yourself and say, "Can you provide a done-for-you service? I want to buy a thousand domains, but I want you to set it up. I want you to build it, restore it, and host it." Could someone come to yourself for something like this?

Damyan: Of course. We, uh... I was trying not to be promotional. Um, we, we have built this, uh, all-in-one, uh, PBN management, uh, solution that works from, uh, like, uh, uh, registrar for, for special registrar for the domains, the hosting, uh, the special hosting for the domains, the, the control board, like the, the whole system. And the client is, like, just telling what, what he need, picking the domains. We leave them choose the domain. This is important part. And we take it from there. And he just wants to know what to, um, when it's ready for him to, to actually use. The, the new thing is that people started looking into this, uh, especially for the AI, uh, opportunities now because when you, when you build a specific PBN that's related to a specific topic, uh, your ma-, uh, main business, uh, topic, um, they can use them to leverage, uh, how AI, um, sees your brand and how it cites it.

James Dooley: Yeah, so building the consensus up on the third-party website, which is coming back to you. So majority of people that are listening to this, they're the entrepreneurs, the business owners. They want done-for-you packages. So they head over to Damyan and they go, "Right, Damyan, can you build me out this PBN network?" If someone's listening to this now and they're saying, "Yeah, but I'm based in Romania or I'm based in Belgium or I'm based in Holland or I'm based in Spain." Can SEO.Domains buy domains? Is it just UK and .com domains? No. Can you buy from multiple TLDs?

Damyan: Yeah, we're, uh, registered in, uh, more than 100, uh, country registries, and we kind of offer more than 150 domains. Uh, we already got more than 150,000 that are for sale. Um, the rest are, um, just we built our own PBN for different reasons and experimenting with different products. And we are kind of global leader in helping people to get assets in, in the countries because we're not... We are... Our focus for the, for the last 10 years was not, um, be the, the best in the .com area, but in the ccTLDs. So we kind of have almost everything. Of course, um, from time to time I understand that we, we cannot get domains from, for example, in, uh, in Kuwait. Uh, and, but majority of the countries you can get them for all of them. All of those, like, probably we, we miss, like, five, 10, or some islands in the Pacific Ocean. Of course, we, we don't invest in those. But yeah, we help people to build even local, uh, networks of PBNs.

James Dooley: Yeah, Damyan, it's been an absolute pleasure. Anyone who's watching this and you're looking to build out a PBN network, I strongly recommend hitting up Damyan at SEO.Domains. But if you're not looking specifically to build out your own network, I strongly recommend checking out the link in the description about the episode that I go on through with Giga Links. Giga Links is helping a lot. You don't actually get the backlink, but what you do get is a third-party corroborative source mentioning your brand, and it's brilliant for AI visibility. Damyan, thank you very much.

Damyan: Thank you.