One of the common mistakes I see people make with their PBNs is that they simply add new posts without a clear plan.
Some people might look at the site on Archive.org to see if there were interesting pages worth recreating.
But when a site had hundreds of pages, you end up hunting for needles in a haystack.
The best way I have found to solve this problem is to monitor 404 page traffic for a very specific kind of visitor.
And in this blog post, I’m going to show you how to do this with one of Xagio’s free tools.
Why Broken Pages Matter For PBNs
The reason you need to focus on broken 404 pages is that they are the hidden gems in every single PBN.
See, these old URLs are still getting traffic through referral backlinks from other sites, and that means that there’s a lot of link juice still available.
But if you simply redirect 404s to a 301 page, then that link juice gets diluted and wasted.
And when you find great PBNs with many existing backlinks, that diluted link juice quickly adds up and poses a huge missed opportunity.
It’s wasted money and time.
How Does 404 Monitoring Help?
With a 404 monitoring solution, you can gather data about inbound traffic from other sites that end up on a 404 page.
What this tells you is that someone clicked on a link on another website, and that link is currently pointing at a page that no longer exists.
That information is highly valuable, as you can use it to recreate the page with the exact same URL slug so that there’s no link juice dilution.
You should also consider relevance mapping for the new page you set up, and you can learn more about this important PBN approach here.
Let me now show you how you can use Xagio to get valuable insights for high-quality PBN links.
Step-By-Step Instructions To Monitor 404s With Xagio
Here is my simple process that I always implement for all of my PBNs.
Step 1: Enable 404 Tracking
With Xagio installed on your PBN site, simply head to the “301 & 404” tab and then click on the “Settings” section.
You’ll need to enable the “Log Only 404’s With Referring URLs” radio button to make your data collection cleaner.
This option only logs 404 traffic where the referring URL can be identified.
Once you start logging 404 referral traffic, it’s time to wait a few days or weeks. In some cases, you might see data entries very soon, but you need to be patient to get valuable information.
Step 2: Analyze The 404 Log
Set a reminder to check your 404 log entries on a regular basis for new entries.
Then, simply head to the “301 & 404” tab again and navigate to the “404 Monitor” section.
You’ll start seeing entries here showing the number of hits to a 404 URL. This URL is the page that people are trying to get to, but it no longer exists.
If you see a lot of entries, then focus on those with the highest number of hits first.
Click on the number in the “Referers” column, and you’ll reveal the referring web page with the link to your PBN.
I always check the referring page and the backlink on it first.
The reason for this is that I want to know what the topic of the article is, as I’m going to need that information for the next step.
Step 3: Create A New Page
The final step involves creating a new page on the PBN site with the exact same URL slug you found in step 2.
But before you simply add a page with random content, consider taking a more planned approach.
First, check what the page is about where the backlink is coming from, and then consider which money site you want to link out to from the new PBN post.
Your goal is to bridge the different topics in a creative way, a process that I call relevance mapping.
You can then use ChatGPT and Xagio to create new content for the post that perfectly bridges the topics in a meaningful way.
This process covers topical relevance and ensures that the maximum amount of link juice funnels through to your money site.
Step 4: Monitor The Results
The final step you should consider is to actively track the rankings of your money site that you’ll be linking to.
This will provide confirmation of how valuable the new page is and will definitely give you plenty of encouragement to continue this process for all 404 logs on all of your PBNs.
Start Monitoring Your PBN Traffic
What I haven’t mentioned so far is that the 404 monitoring tool used for the above process is completely free to use.
Sign up for a free Xagio account, install the plugin on your PBN sites, and simply activate the 404 monitoring.
It takes a few seconds, and within a few days or weeks, you’ll have insanely valuable information to act on and massively improve the power of your PBNs.