Best method To Host Multiple WP Sites?

The question that remains then is to know if you will use all, or some, of these sites to rank a particular site. In other words; is this meant to be used as a PBN?

 

Okay, thanks for your answer.

Please allow me to share my understanding of PBN’s and the big G.

Let me preface this by saying that Centmin Mod is a great tool and @eva2000 does a stellar job updating and maintaining Centmin Mod, and we owe a lot to George for making our lives easier. But when it comes to building a PBN I wouldn’t advice setting one up using only this stack.

The main reason for this is to avoid a footprint that is easily recognized by the big G. The whole purpose of a PBN is to hide in plain sight. Could you use Centmin Mod to run a couple of websites? Sure, why not!

But the number of sites you mentioned in your opening post is not insignificant, and you don’t want to run the risk of having the target site slapped with a penalty, and in the process have every site that links to it penalized, demoted, or even worse; de-indexed, by the big G. Diversity is the key when building a PBN.

Get X amount of GoDaddy hosting accounts, and X amount of NameCheap ones, and a few other of the big name hosting company ones and set up the sites on these. Throw in a couple of the popular VPS providers, like DigitalOcean, and you are well on your way when it comes to diversity in Class C IP addresses, performance levels, and server footprints.

To be clear: I’m not saying that this will be an easy job from both a maintenance, administrative, and budget perspective, but it is the only way to significantly reduce the risk of the big G sniffing out a footprint.

However, do keep in mind that there is a lot more that you should think about when you are talking about maintaining a PBN >= 1000. Things like diversity in email addresses from different providers used to register the sites, the amount of Google Analytics accounts plus the accompanying Gmail addresses (i.e. you do not want to sign in into 120 Gmails all from the same IP address.) The use of different WP plugins and themes, that in turn all need to be updated. For this purpose it is not a good idea to use an automation tool or paid service. Again; footprint. Plus a gazillion other things you would have to keep in mind (one that I could think of right now is the use of the robots.txt or .htaccess file that bans crawlers like ahrefs. No regular mom-and-pop website owner will ever add this in either file, for the simple reason that 95% isn’t aware of this option, but you don’t want to “expose” your site to the competition either.)

When you ask my opinion; it is not worth the time and effort, the financial burden, and the accompanying headache to build and maintain a PBN of the size you are mentioning, unless you have a team of people, very deep pockets, and clients that have the budget to make all of this worth it.

And it’s not only from the perspective that I’ve mention before. Blood, sweat, and tears should never be the reason why you shouldn’t do something. Don’t get me wrong. But you should keep in mind that G’s Rankbrain is getting smarter and smarter, and the time of building a PBN, and in the process Rank & Bank, are in my opinion over.

Don’t let my answer hold you back when you believe you could pull this one off. But if you ask me what you should do then in order to rank a website, I would answer; outreach. Especially when you are planning on trying to rank client sites. Especially when your clients are trying to create a long-term business via their online presence. If your intention is to Churn ‘n Burn your own personal projects, you could try the old PBN trick. But again, in my opinion not worth the time and effort.

Another thing I would like to leave you with is online research. There are a couple of good and in-depth articles on the internets about creating your own PBN, but at the risk of repeating myself, and getting tiresome in the process, not worth it anymore.

Hope that my 2 cents gave you some food for thought.