PBN Footprints: Which Ones Matter, Which Are Myths, and a Checklist

At a glance

• A PBN footprint is a unique identifier that shows up on all your blogs and ties them to one owner.
• Harmful footprints are unique to your blogs: the same WHOIS owner, an outbound link pattern, an SOA email, unique nameservers, rare plugins, and analytics or ad IDs.
• Neutral footprints, such as hosting everything on one provider or C-block, or thin blogs, make links weaker but don’t get a network deindexed.
• Common footprints, such as WordPress, popular themes and plugins, and provider nameservers, are shared with thousands of sites and do no harm on their own.
• When unsure, ask whether the trait would be natural for a legitimate blog.

Start with the definition from our PBN guide:

A footprint is a unique identifier on all your blogs.

It could be a plugin, a theme, an outbound link pattern or many other things. Finding most footprints takes more than a Google search, so assume whoever is looking has the knowledge, the computing power and the people to do it.

The word that matters is unique. A trait can be shared by all your blogs and still be harmless, if thousands or millions of legitimate sites share it too. That gives three classes:

Class	What it means	What to do
Harmful	Unique to your blogs	Fix it
Neutral	Unnatural, but doesn’t tie the blogs to you	Fix it when you can, because it weakens links
Common	Shared with thousands of other sites	Ignore it

Harmful footprints: fix these

These connect your blogs to each other and to you. The first two are the obvious ones, and most likely what was used in the mass PBN deindexation at the end of 2014, which is still relevant.

• WHOIS information. The same owner on every domain. Since GDPR, most registrars give free WHOIS privacy, but not all of them hide everything. Our guide noted that GoDaddy’s WHOIS could still show an organization name. Check your own domains’ WHOIS output rather than assuming. More in WHOIS privacy for a PBN.
• Outbound link pattern. Blogs that link only to your sites. More on this under the myths below.
• SOA records. The SOA record in your DNS includes a “hostmaster” email address, and cPanel usually fills it with the email you signed up with. That’s a serious problem. In cPanel or WHM, update the contact email so it no longer shows yours.
• Nameservers. Use the hosting provider’s default nameservers. If you use PBN or SEO hosting, make sure it doesn’t put every blog on nameservers unique to its service.
• Plugins and themes used only by you or the SEO community. A plugin nobody else runs points straight at its users. A competent developer can make plugin files return a standard 404, but the safer move is not to rely on rare plugins.
• Google Search Console, analytics and ad codes. Each has a unique ID in the HTML, and they are very easy to find. Don’t put them on PBN blogs.

Neutral footprints: they weaken links, they don’t get you deindexed

These won’t get a network deindexed. They look unnatural, though, so links from them may count for less.

• Hosting on one provider, or on C-block hosting. If your links come from IPs that are the same or close together, as is common with SEO and C-block hosting, they can be discounted, because natural links come from many different IPs. See C-class IP hosting.
• Thin blogs. Only short articles (under 600 words), only a few posts, no internal links and no outbound links to other sites.
• Links that stay on the homepage instead of moving to inner posts.
• Domains registered in bulk on the same day, or all at one registrar.

Most of these fix themselves when the blogs look and grow like real ones.

Common footprints: ignore these

Plugins, themes and anything else used by thousands or tens of thousands of other sites, including the nameservers of big hosting providers. They won’t affect your results.

The exception is combinations. Our guide’s note: avoid using the same plugins on all blogs, because that combination, “if specific enough, can be a footprint in itself.” Five popular plugins are each common. The same five on every blog, next to the same theme, may be unique to you.

Footprint myths

When in doubt, apply one test: would it be natural for a legitimate blog?

Myth: only one link per hosting provider

Some people say you can’t have more than one link from any hosting provider. Look at the big cloud providers: each hosts an enormous number of websites for a very large customer base. Does a site end up with links from several sites hosted on the same provider? All the time. Multiple links from blogs at the same provider are normal. Multiple links from blogs on the same IP, or on one small SEO host’s nameservers, aren’t.

Myth: hide that you use WordPress

Plugins that promise to hide WordPress are a common suggestion for all-WordPress networks. They don’t work.

Hiding WordPress completely is a big job. It means moving the wp-admin and wp-content folders and rewriting the paths to CSS and JavaScript, and most plugins and themes stop working because they use hard-coded paths to wp-content. Hiding plugins don’t go that far. They leave clear signs, such as the xmlrpc.php and wp-cron.php files in the root, which still answer requests.

Some go further and fake the server signature. We saw a user pick Microsoft IIS as the fake signature on a server whose server headers still showed it was Linux. IIS doesn’t run on Linux, so the disguise made the blog stand out more than plain WordPress would have.

There’s no need to hide it. WordPress is the most popular blog platform on the web, which makes it a common footprint. Keep each install plain, on a normal setup.

Myth: just link out to authority sites

“Link to Wikipedia and big news sites and you’ll be fine.” No. It is easy to find blogs that link to specific websites while excluding the top 1,000 sites. Your blogs should also link to smaller niche sites that don’t compete with yours, the way real blogs do.

Myth: you can build a PBN with zero footprints

Every site shares something with millions of others: WordPress, a hosting provider, a common theme. Zero shared traits is impossible and unnecessary. What you can do is avoid every harmful footprint and keep the neutral ones to a minimum.

Server-level footprints, one post each

Content and DNS aren’t the only places a network shows. The servers do too. Each post below covers one in depth:

• Nameserver footprints. Why nameservers owned by an SEO host are a bigger footprint than IPs, which all providers share and which change hands.
• ASN. How the network a server sits on reveals which company hosts it, and what that means when all your blogs share one.
• MX records. Why a whole network of domains without email records stands out, when most real domains have them.
• Server headers. What the Server header says about the software behind a blog, and which values look normal.
• X-Powered-By headers. The header that names the technology running the site, usually a PHP version for WordPress.
• Default server pages. What a server shows when you open its IP directly or hit an error, and why identical pages across servers connect them.
• Real IPs behind Cloudflare. How misconfigured Cloudflare setups leak the server’s real IP, and the shared-nameserver trap.

For how investigators put these together, see how to tell if a site uses a PBN. For what our data says gets blogs deindexed, see causes of PBN deindexation.

The PBN footprints checklist

From our PBN guide, in three parts.

Domains

Possible footprint	What to do
Registrars	Use popular registrars such as Namecheap or GoDaddy, and more than one.
Public auction domains	Buy domains from different marketplaces.
Registration date	Don’t buy all domains on the same day.
WHOIS	Check what your WHOIS record shows for each domain.

Website

Possible footprint	What to do
Cheap SEO hosting	Host only with reputable, popular hosting providers.
404s redirected to the homepage	Rebuild the strongest old pages. Don’t use 404-redirect plugins.
Short articles	Vary article length, at least 600 to 800 words.
Commercial keywords	Don’t write only about commercial keywords.
No internal pages	Add About, legal, privacy and other internal pages.
Search Console, Analytics, AdSense or other tracking and ad codes	Don’t use them. For analytics, pick something that leaves no unique code.
SOA email	Remove your signup email from the SOA record.

Linking

Possible footprint	What to do
Outbound link patterns	Don’t link to all money sites from all blogs.
No links to other sites	Link to other small niche sites and some authority sites.
All links on the front page	Let links drop off the front page as new posts go up.
No links to internal pages or posts	Link internally.

What Easy Blog Networks handles, and what it doesn’t

The hosting footprints are the ones that are hard to fix by hand, so they are what we built Easy Blog Networks to handle:

• Each blog gets a unique IP with a large hosting provider, and the IP and nameservers come from that provider, shared with its other customers. The full list is on our providers page.
• Each install gets a random theme, different plugins and a randomized admin username.
• Every blog has a mailbox, so the network doesn’t stand out for missing email.
• SSL is enabled automatically.

The content side is still yours: outbound links, tracking and ad codes, WHOIS settings and how real each blog looks. No host can fix those for you.

FAQ

Is WordPress a footprint?

Technically yes, but a common one. It runs a huge share of blogs, so it ties your blogs to nobody.

Can I build a PBN without footprints?

Without harmful ones, yes. Without any shared trait at all, no, and you don’t need to.

Are PBN footprints the same as SEO footprints?

“SEO footprints” sometimes means search operators used to find sites for link building. In PBN terms, a footprint is anything that connects your blogs to each other.

Does Cloudflare hide my footprints?

Only if it’s configured carefully. Misconfigured setups often leak the real IP, and putting every blog on the same pair of Cloudflare nameservers creates a footprint of its own.