PBN Domain Registration: Where To Register A PBN Domain

Figuring out where and how to register your PBN domain is a fairly important aspect to building a successful private blog network. Depending on the size of your network and the number of domains you have the importance of choosing your registrar increases even more.

I wanted to outline some of the options and things to consider when building your private network with respect to PBN domain registration.

Lets dive in.

What Is The Role Of A Domain Registration

Firstly, lets understand what a domain registrar is and why you need them. Buying a PBN domain is not too different than buying any old domain name. A domain registrar will provide you with the option to register the domain name. Depending on how you have your pbn hosting configured it can either manage the name servers of the domain for you or let you point the domain to your hosting environment.

If you stick with the normal TLDs – .com, .net, .org, etc. you’ll be fine at any registrar but if you choose a country-specific TLD its possible you may need a custom registrar or be able to prove you are a resident of that country.

Footprints of Domain Registrars

When it comes to the footprints for your private blog network there are three main ones that can be identified with domain registration:

1. All your domains registered at the same registrar.

2. All your domains having the same public whois data.

3. All your domains having private registration.

We’ll address how we can get around these below.

How To Choose The Best Domain Registrar

Choosing the best domain registrar for your PBN domain comes down to a few factors:

Size

The size of the registrar will influence what percentage of your domains you should register there.

As you can see GoDaddy is the number one domain registrar by far. This means a couple things:

1. If your network is small, keep it simple and register all your domains at GoDaddy.

2. If your network is a good size, register most of your domains at GoDaddy and vary the others. I’ve heard 50% for GoDaddy mentioned before, I’ve done as much as 75 or 80% though.

Price

Price is definitely a factor, especially on renewals. GoDaddy is not cheap to renew your domains. If you do it in bulk and you can score a good GoDaddy coupon code then it gets a little better but I understand why you might not want to register all your domains at GoDaddy.

NameCheap.com is a great alternative that I know a lot of people in the industry use.

Reputation

I wanted to mention reputation because it’s important not to go with a completely unknown registrar. Reliability is important as is the popularity of it to avoid any footprints.

Private vs. Public Whois

This is a great debate. Some people always go with custom private registration while others only do fake public registration. I’ve done both. I’ll comment on both below.

Private Registration

This is a hassle free way of managing your domains. No need to manage fake user profiles and information or keep email data for multiple domains. You can keep many of your websites in the same account and register them using private registration.

However, this doesn’t come without its downsides. Of course having only links from websites with private registration is a big footprint, so it is important to mix both public and private up.

So let’s review:

Pros:

• Easy to manage
• Can keep many domains under one account
• No need for multiple email addresses or personal information

Cons:

• Footprint if used for all of your network.
• More expensive than not paying for private registration.
• Difficult to transfer between registrars

Public Registration

The only thing you need to remember if you’re going to do public whois information is this: never use the same information for all your domains. I lost 20-30 domains within a couple months one time just by testing this theory (and by testing this theory I mean learning the hard way).

One of the tools I love to use for this is Fake Name Generator. It’ll give you everything you need to register a domain with the exception of an email account.

Head on over to Fiverr for the email account and you can get a lot of verified gmail accounts for $5.

Let’s recap:

Pros:

• More natural and less of a footprint.
• Cheaper than using private registration.
• Easier to transfer between registrars.

Cons:

• More work required to create fake profiles.
• Big footprint if you use the same public whois information.

Transferring PBN Domains

Most people never transfer their PBN domains and never have to. One of the main reasons why you would want to however is to save on awful renewal fees at GoDaddy. A close friend of mine recently transferred close to 100 domains from GoDaddy to another registrar without losing any of their websites.

I don’t recommend transferring because there are a few moving parts that can go wrong in terms of both registration and hosting, but if you must it’s important that you consider a few things:

• If you transfer a domain with private registration you’ll need to disable private registration to transfer it (make sure to re-enable it on the other end).
• Check your name servers to make sure they transferred to the new domain registrar so your hosting doesn’t break.
• Make sure the account you setup has the same public whois data as the one from which you are transferring it.
• Make sure you’re getting enough savings to make it worth the hassle.

There’s not a whole lot in terms of information for PBN domain registration but I hope this post can help you sort out any questions you might have. Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any questions – I’d be happy to answer however I can.