I’ve heard a lot of good things about the Article Ranks service so I decided to do a preliminary review of it.
Here are some ArticleRanks, AKA Article Ranks questions, bullet points and comments
- Their network is all on multiple diverse IP addresses
- Don’t know how many sites are in their network
- FAQs page says you get anywhere from 20-200 links per submission
- You can pay $2.00 for submissions unless you gain credits for publishing articles
- If you publish articles syndicated via their system you gain submission credits, which means accepting and publishing their articles could give you free backlinks
- They have a paid membership option of $39.00/month which allows for unlimited submissions,
Comments: I guess what it all boils down to is: is it worth it to you to spend $2.00 for every article submitted to a blog network for 20-200 backlinks of (as yet) unknown effectiveness?
- The number of backlinks you get is conducive to the number of sites accepting your articles, and which categories are being submitted to, which is why you should read this post on How To Get More Backlinks From Article Marketing
- They do have a free membership option, just remember that you either have to:
- Publish some of their articles on your site in order to get free submission credits
- Or pay $2.00/submission as a free member not publishing any of their articles
Article Ranks Paid monthly service information:
Upgrade This is where you can upgrade your account to monthly status. If you are submitting more then a few articles a week then this is essential in cutting costs. Monthly status gives you unlimited submissions. Please note it does not give you the ability to submit to multiple top level categories, there is still a credits fee for this. Package: Subscription Price: 39.00 USD
Testing, and results: testing starts on Thursday June 3, 2010
Download Targeted Subscribers Wordpress Plugin Here
{ 34 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Dan,
Been reading your blog for the last month and spent a good 10 hours in total on it. Keep the content coming – I and I’m sure thousands of other people really appreciate your honest reviews.
Just wanted to mention something quickly – I’ve just joined BLS through your recommendation along with UAW a few weeks back. However, joined Article Ranks a while back too and though I’d share that you do not need to pay $2 each article if you pay the full monthly fee.
Question – From what you can tell so far, is SEO LV a brand new network or is it part of MAN & AMA?
Cheers,
Ant
Thanks Anthony, I modified the post. Quality suffers when I post too much too soon, my apologies.
I am glad you are testing articleranks + SEOLV, really looking forward to your results!
I am with both, articleranks for about a month and SEOLV since yesterday. It looks like there are many blogs on the same IP coming from articleranks…but looking forward to your review here.
Any update on your ArticleRanks test?
We’re starting testing now, there’s been a bit of a delay
Hi Dan
My name is Musa the owner of ArticleRanks
I have just come across this, just thought I would drop by and leave you guys a coupon so you can all test the system before parting with any money.
Just enter this coupon on signup 63127decedfffc7c83a180c41440d71c
And it will give you 5 credits. I.E 2 submissions
The system is getting more and more powerful everyday and we have some exciting new features in the works, we have just completed rewriting our publishing engine so that distributions are better then ever, with more in depth stats.
Hi
This is simply not the case and totally depends on the category you submitted too. As a user for example may have added 20 blogs all hosted on the same server, or multiple users may be using a company such as hostgator. This is the case with any open public network, where users have the ability to add sites.
The network is spread across hundreds of C Class IPs.
We personally own various blogs in the network and we strictly make sure that they are all on separate C Class IPs.
I think the thing users need to understand as well is we didn’t just create the site as another so called tool. We are an SEO company ourselves so we want to create the best possible network as in the end we use it daily ourselves, so we want to get the best benefit out of it for our clients and our personal sites.
Dan, any updates?
So far I am happy with AR but I don’t do the strict testing that you do so I’m looking forward to what you find.
Sorry for lack of frequent updates, this stuff gets overwhelming at times, but I did have 1 url on page 6 go to #3 which is a promising sign since it’s harder to rise up page 1 than it is to get there in the first place. That’s all the “evidence” I know about at this time.
Thanks,
Dan
Ok guys let me tell you me history, I have a social network site and all my keyword if very competitive but I’m using seolinkvine and articleranks for about 3 months and now I have some of my keywords in positio 9 to 20 for 102.000.000 competitors and for other 75.000.000 I think this number is stream high but I only have 8.000 backlinks using this marketings tool imagin when have 30.000 backlinks.
hey dan,
can you please have a update, whether i should opt for articleranks.i am already member of UAW and really happy to be it ever. I need yet another good one like UAW , i think you recommend articleranks as you mentioned on seolinkvine review.
Please let me know what you think.I blindly believe you because you are the few IM that i trust.
Dear Daniel
Thank you for the review of articleranks.
I am going to try it.
Mark
I’ve had some issues with Article Ranks that I would like to share.
1) When you ask a question through the “Contact” it’s never answered.
2) There is not a proper FAQ, it leaves MANY questions unanswered. And it’s separated into two FAQs, one is largely hidden.
3) There is no way to add categories after you have posted the article. If you accidentally forget to add additional categories, you are not allowed to delete the article and re-post.
4) Spinning articles properly is difficult when they forbid you to use punctuation due to their coding issues.
5) The stats do not show enough detail. It would be more effective if broken into two categories, “auto-accept” and “manual accept” websites. If the stats were broken up this way I could better understand low acceptance I.E. if my article’s content is questionable or if I have a niche subject that is being auto-rejected.
6) I’ve had no luck signing up my squidoo account, I actually think this feature is not working.
7) I keep hearing claims of 400 backlinks with one article, I average 15 on a well spun article, and 5 on an un-spun article. If they would give properly detailed stats I could better understand why.
Hi Brandy
Please allow me to answer your queries
1) There are currently no outstanding tickets, please let us know your ticket number so we can look into it
2) We have nearly finished with our new look and feel site you should see clearer info
3) You have to make sure you are adding the correct categories, there is even a verification screen to double check. We can not allow reediting of categories as we take category spam very seriously
4) We do not forbid punctuation, just certain characters in the code. We do not erase any english punctuation whatsoever, please give an example of this?
5) Again our new look and feel is ready to launch, but we give the most in depth stats out of any service of this nature, you just need to hover your mouse over each article title to get better stats
6) Squidoo experiences temporary issues now and again because of the amount of publishing to them
7) These are not claims, 400 links with one article is minimal, you can get many more. Let us know one of your articles so we can check this.
I am 90% sure you are not spinning the articles correctly
Hi Musa,
Thanks for answering! I didn’t write down the ticket number, so I’ll retract that issue. – I can’t prove it. I dig the new look, it fixed most of my issues. One thing I would like to suggest is stating clearly in the FAQ that spinning your article immediately gives the best results. I’ve been posting the article, seeing how it does on its own, and a week later spinning the article. This strategy was not as successful as spinning it right away. When I spun the articles right away I received an average of 40 backlinks vs. spinning it a week later and receiving 15.
Hi yes they should be spun before being published, otherwise a lot of them do get rejected as website owners do not want duplication
So far I’m not too impressed with ArticleRanks to be honest. Like BrandyQ mentions their FAQ isn’t particularly useful and the required info is hard to find. I keep getting an error for my url and I’ve contacted them numerous times about this issue (even submitted a ticket) and nobody has responded. Also some articles submitted by others have been “approved” but there’s no clear way to retrieve these articles. Can anybody suggest a more reliable and user friendly alternative to ArticleRanks? Thanks
Hi Rita
I just checked and you only submitted a ticket today, which it was responded to within 5 hours and just again about an hour ago.
We have re faced our whole site and not to sound too confident, but we do have one of the most user friendly interfaces.
We try to deal with all issues as soon as possible and if you believe there was a delay we apologise for that
Musa I was a great fan of your network but the way you have ruined your credibility by putting in the domain limit and increasing the price to $89/m for existing users is certainly not good.
And the funny thing is you are giving no price increase guarantee when you have already increased it for your existing members and the same was said earlier.
Other networks have also increased the price but for new members only not for the existing ones. This is certainly not the way to go.
Daniel I think you should mention this point in your review too.
Hi Paul
The price hasn’t actually been increased the price remains the same there was no increase on that, the only difference is there is now a limit on that plan, however additional domain can be added there is no need to upgrade to PRO people can just purchase additional domains for a minimal fee.
In the long run this will work out for the best for the network and we stick by that.. We have already added over 500 new PR sites to the system ourselves and will continue to do so over the next coming months
Musa, accept it or not but this is a price increase. The price someone was paying to use unlimited domain was $39/m and now it’s $89/m.
Most disgusting thing was your and your workers comments like ” leave if you want” and “great everyone who’s leaving are spammers”.
This is not good. There might be lot of people who can not afford the $89/m price. I said what I feel but its your business and you can do whatever you want.
Best of Luck.
Paul we would of applied a limit even if we didn’t launch the PRO
We have increased it to 10 which is more then fair
I think a lot people only like to take the bad out what we say. We actually said “Some customers that unsubscribed are spammers, We may possibly lose some good authors, but as mentioned before its a risk we are willing to take”
Of course we do not want to lose subscribers, we appreciate our customers, but we are simply stating that if people are unhappy they can unsubscribe, we do not want to take peoples money if they are unhappy or not benefiting from the system, obviously we would of loved to keep people that unsubscribe but in the end its the users choice and if people REALLY feel they are not benefiting or the price is high then we havent trapped them or got them into a contract
As someone already mentioned on the blog:
The math still works if you have 6 domains and submit 30 articles a month for each domain that is 180 articles a month in the system if each of those articles gets distributed 30 times with even only 1 link in each article that is 5400 backlinks a month which works out to less than .02 per backlink I can live with that
I can feel how much tense you are at the moment that you have to increase the limit. But at the same its appreciable that you listen your customers and it is a surprise for me also as it was said earlier “We are not going to change our mind…”.
Man always be polite with your customer whether they are joining you or leaving you
Cheers.
How ironic, I was reading this site to find an alternative to article ranks and came across these comments!
Even before Musa decided to annoy his whole customer base things where going downhill with ArticleRanks.
The submission rates dried up to a mere trickle, the site is often down and index rates are now extremely low.
The condescending comments directed towards ArticleRanks customers was the icing on the cake for me.
I cancelled immediately. I was getting results with system anyway so cancelling was a no brainer.
Hi Neil
This is one of the many reasons we introduced pro as each plan now has separate publishing lines. With PRO having the most priority
As an example we submitted a site an article on the 14th June and its been published almost 60 times already!
Considering we have not lost any signups and had more people upgrade to pro I do not think the changes upset more then 5% of users!
You are reading about the negatives because people only post when they are upset about something – Happy users do not really post
This is why review sites are somewhat flawed as you are always going to see more negatives as they are the people that are posting.
Thank you for confirming that now everything except “pro” is basically garbage.
Since i wont spend $90/MONTH (!) i am done with articleranks. Ironically, me and my partner just wanted to sign up for a project…but since you are now admitting that only PRO is halfway suitable (so called “priority subumissions”) i think we dont need to bother anymore. Customer lost. Bye.
G.
Please do not try and twist what we say!
We said all plans have different publishing lines – The $39 one is still the same as it has always been no slower nor no faster.
And yes, the domain limit and basically everything below “PRO” is not suitable except for the most casual submitter. This is an egoistical change with articleranks which is sad, i can see many people going to other networks.
I am paying not one single penny on ALN, i do not have a limit whatsoever and get good rankings. Why? Because i have PR4 and PR3 sites in the system, it doesnt cost a thing.
On articleranks, even with such sites in the system you are still degraded to “lamer” level including domain limits and “low priority submissions”.
You have really gone downhill. Sorry.
10 domains is a casual submitter? Comeon now…
A casual webmaster or submitter has around 5 domains MAX
If you are submitting more then 10 domains per month, then you are either
1) An SEO agency reselling our services
2) An affiliate promoting affiliate links
If someone is promoting more then 10 sites and not earning anything from it then they are SERIOUSLY doing something wrong!
Wouldn’t really feed these negative people Musa. Waste of time IMO.
ArticleRanks is fine.
If you can’t afford $90/month to promote your sites/business then….meh. He is perfectly within his rights to change his pricing plan – and giving him reasons not to and complaining about it is just cheap and unprofessional.
And you’re right about the negatives – you rarely hear about the positive reviews even though they are far in the majority. I haven’t been a member for that long, but so far this service is easily worth the $90/month cost – by far.
You can’t please everyone =)
Adam, thanks for chiming in, I agree that it’s really a pittance to pay if you’re in a situation and business model that would easily recoup 90 or even 900/month spent on site promotion.
Musa has been polite and I’m impressed with almost ALL of the service providers who come here to respond to questions and concerns, BMR, and tom form BacklinkBooster.com especially.
I would not have the patience to deal with people which is why I refrain from offering my own service, aside form being a bit lazy and simple-minded…
I think what would help people out a lot is if I did a webinar with some folks i know that would help people get into better ROI niches and business models. that way, the angst would not be there and people wouldn’t worry so much if a service didn’t work as expected or didn’t pay off for them.
If anyone who reads this thinks it’s a good idea, please let me know if you have a certain expert in mind you’d like me to interview.
Thanks,
dan
This was NOT my point. I was one of the first using articleranks and can very well see the “progress” (uhm..regress) the service made while at the same time increasing its price.
You make it sound as if limiting the number of domains and introducing this “layered pricing structure” is a good thing? Hint…a “LIMIT” is never a good thing…AR did not have such limits when it started out.
Furthermore…i am only reporting and observing what i see..for example right now i am NOT happy with the distribution rate anymore.
I have recent articles in there now for over a month now which are only distributed about 24 times on average in a month’s time. I remember that this was better in the past. This is a very weak distribution rate, IMO.
Admittedly, this is on the “free” (“pay as you go”) account since i am accumulating points by having sites in the system. But seeing the low distribution rate makes me think that AR goes the way of SEOLV – if you dont see this and are able to constructively critic something and see clearly it has gotten worse you might have a problem.
So..now me and a partner are building a blog network so we decided to use AR as one element of link building and signed up for the “pro” account for $40/month. Needless to say we are already seeing the “10 domains limit” as a big problem….since its VERY obvious that the recent pro..uhm regression of this service is only serving one purpose…to make the operators of the service more money and force people into buying the $90/month plan so its halfway usable.
So what do you expect? Me raving that its really good that it got expensive and all those limits got introduced? Why should i do that?
Quite a spirited discussion going on here!
I actually paid a visit to see if I could find any real explanation for the price change. I didn’t become aware of it until recently when I logged in so I could answer a question for one of my VA’s.
Like most who have complained, I was a bit bothered by the lack of notification to existing customers. The change did catch me by surprise, but (after reading his comments in this post) I both understand and respect Musa’s reasons for doing so. I’ve seen some of the agencies out there reselling AR and other services. So, I don’t blame you, Musa.
However, I’m one of those people who happen to be promoting more than 10 domains via AR and I’m neither reselling submissions nor blasting affiliate links. I just happen to like making money. My current portfolio is netting me a very comfortable $xx,xxx monthly income and I’d like to keep it that way, thank you very much.
Seriously, though, I am planning to sell some of my smaller sites as I’m finding a small selection of larger authority sites much easier to manage. I figured I’d use AR and my other subscriptions to give them a good boost in the serps before listing them in order to make them more attractive to sell. Hence, the need to promote more than 10 domains on my part.
Having offered my 2 cents, I agree with Dan. $90 (an extra $50) is a small pittance to recoup. I’ve been a member for almost a year now and I currently use AR every day in my business. It’s a significant component to my overall link building strategy. So, I’m off to upgrade.
-Paul
What is the best way to take the best from Article Ranks.
What are the results I should be waiting for :
How many backlinks per well spun article.
And something else to add?
Thanks for the answers!!!!