Buy PBN Links? What You Actually Get, and the Cheaper Alternative

At a glance

• Our answer to “should I buy PBN links?” is no: a network that sells links to anyone is a public network, and public networks are the easy ones to find.
• When you buy a PBN link, you rent a placement on a blog the seller controls and shares with every other buyer.
• Sellers price links as one-off placements or as monthly or yearly rentals, and a rented link disappears when you stop paying.
• If the network gets deindexed, every link on it stops counting, and you have no say in how the network was built.
• Owning ten blogs costs US$500 to US$2,500 in domains, spread over a few months, plus hosting from US$39/month on Easy Blog Networks.
• Easy Blog Networks hosts networks you own. It does not sell links.

Easy Blog Networks does not sell links, and we have no seller to recommend. We’ve hosted PBNs since 2014, so we can tell you what you get for the money, how bought links fail and what owning ten blogs costs instead.

What you’re really buying when you buy PBN links

A PBN link from a seller is a placement on a blog the seller owns. You don’t control the blog, the hosting, the other outbound links or how long the blog stays up.

You also share it. The seller’s business is selling placements, so the same blogs link to many unrelated buyers. That is the outbound link pattern our guide lists among the harmful footprints: blogs whose links all point to the same small group of sites. On a link-selling network that group is the client list, and it grows with every sale.

There is one narrow exception. If someone you know runs a small network and shares it with a handful of people, it is still close to private, and the risk is closer to owning. A storefront that sells to anyone with a card is not that.

How PBN links are priced, and why rental pricing is a trap

Prices vary by seller and change often, so we won’t quote figures. What you can compare is the pricing model:

Model	How it works
One-off placement	You pay once for a link in a post. The seller decides how long the post and the blog stay up.
Monthly or yearly rental	You pay to keep the link live. When you stop paying, the link comes down.
Homepage or inner post	Homepage links cost more. On a real blog they drop off the front page as new posts go up, so a homepage link that stays put is a pattern of its own.
Packages	A set number of links across several blogs, usually with anchors you pick.
”Permanent” links	A promise that lasts as long as the seller keeps paying for the domains and hosting.

Rental is the trap. You pay every month for something you never own, and the payments buy nothing that lasts. If you stop, your rankings lose the links. If the seller stops renewing a domain or a hosting account, you lose them anyway.

What happens to bought links when the network is caught

When Google deindexes a blog, links from it stop counting. With a public network, that can happen to every blog at once, and you had no say in how the network was built.

Google’s spam policies define link spam as “creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings” and name “buying or selling links for ranking purposes” as the first example (Google Search Central, fetched 2026-10-28). The same page says violating sites “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”

In our view Google’s guidelines serve Google. Our guide’s point is practical: a network that sells to anyone is much easier for Google to find than one owned by a single person who never sells, and once it is found, the links you paid for are worth nothing.

If you buy anyway: red flags that expose a public network

Selling links is already the first red flag. If you’re evaluating a seller anyway, check these before you pay:

• The seller takes anyone. No vetting, a checkout page and a public price list mean every competitor can buy on the same blogs.
• The seller won’t show sample sites, so you can’t check anything. Sellers who do show samples let you run the checks below.
• The sample blogs link only to clients. Open a few posts: if every outbound link points to a commercial site and none go to ordinary small sites, that is the footprint.
• The blogs are thin, with a few short posts, no About or Privacy page and nothing a reader would come back for.
• Every blog links out the same way, with the same post length, link position and number of outbound links.
• The IPs or nameservers are shared. Look up the sample domains: several blogs on one IP range, or on custom nameservers that belong to one SEO host, connect them to each other.
• The link profiles are spammy. Run the samples through Ahrefs, Majestic or Semrush. Watch for anchors from pharma, adult or gambling sites, and for a domain that recently lost most of its backlinks.

PBN footprints covers each of these in detail.

How many PBN links do you need?

There is no magic number. It depends on how competitive the keyword is, what the pages above you have in their link profiles and how strong your page is already. Anyone quoting a fixed number is selling a package of that size.

Look at the backlinks of the pages ranking for your keyword in Ahrefs, Majestic or Semrush. That shows you what you’re up against. For a site in a niche that isn’t too competitive, our guide suggests starting with a network of 10 blogs and adding from there.

Pace matters more than the count. Add links gradually, from different blogs, with different anchors.

What makes a PBN link worth having

Whether you buy or build, these are what separate a link that helps from one that doesn’t:

• A link from a blog about your niche is worth more than a generic one.
• The link is placed inside a real post on a related subject. Sidebar links and link lists are worth less.
• The blog looks like a real site, with posts of varying length, internal links, an About page and the usual legal pages.
• The blog also links to small niche sites that don’t compete with yours, so your link isn’t the only one.
• Links drop off the front page as new posts go up and move to inner pages, like on any blog.
• You choose the anchor text, and you vary it.

Most of this is hard to get from a seller. It is all yours when you own the blogs.

Build ten blogs instead: the real cost

The alternative is a small network you own. Our guide’s starting point is 10 blogs for a site in a niche that isn’t too competitive.

Line item	Cost	Source
Domains with existing backlinks	US$500 to US$2,500 in total, spread over a few months	Our PBN guide
A single domain	US$50 to US$250 or more, depending on the name and backlinks	Our PBN guide
Hosting 10 blogs	US$39/month on Easy Blog Networks (prices exclude tax)	EBN pricing
Content	Your time, or AI posting with your own OpenAI API key	EBN pricing

What you get for that: control of the anchors, the placement and the relevance of every link, for as long as you keep the domains. No other client’s links sit on your blogs. You don’t pay rent on a link, and nobody can take one down but you.

The steps are in how to build your own PBN, domain buying is in buying PBN domains, and the risk side is in are PBNs safe. If you’d rather pay someone else to build a network, see paying someone to build a PBN. For bought links in general, see buying backlinks in general.

Hosting your own network on Easy Blog Networks

When you host the blogs on Easy Blog Networks, each blog gets a unique IP, and the IP and nameservers come from the hosting provider itself: AWS, DigitalOcean, Rackspace, IBM Cloud and others. That gives the network a natural hosting profile without custom nameservers.

Adding a blog takes a domain name and a blog title. Each one is installed with a random theme, different plugins, a randomized admin username and a mailbox. WordPress, themes and plugins update automatically, and every blog is backed up daily. You can schedule AI posts to every blog with your own OpenAI API key.

Easy Blog Networks does not sell links. Plans start at US$39/month for 10 blogs, with a 7-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

FAQ

Are cheap PBN links worth it?

No. A low price usually means more buyers per blog, thinner blogs and less care with hosting, which are the things that get a network found.

Is buying PBN links illegal?

No. It is against Google’s guidelines, not the law.

Can I sell links on my own PBN?

No. The moment you sell links, your network is public, and every buyer is one more site that leads back to your blogs.

What is a PBN, in short?

A group of blogs on domains with existing backlinks, hosted on different servers and IPs, that link to the owner’s money site. The longer answer is in what a PBN is.