I was approached by the admin of Backlink Excellence to do a review/test of his service.
Since he’s from Austria and we discussed the test via Skype, it took about 2 hours to come up with a test that would be a fair representation of the effects of using Backlink Excellence’s service.
Backlink Excellence offers a profiles “blasting” service, and the admin cautioned me… ” don’t confuse us with those crappy cheap profile blasting services” since his service (allegedly) does higher end kind of profiles link building.
In my head, I was thinking : “So what exactly could a “high end” to this kind of (crappy yet effective) link building be, as compared to the generic mainstream services out there like Drip Feed Blasts, Mega Link Blaster, Link Aloha, Monster Backlinks etc….?
Apparently the answer is, you target better forums, CMSes, platforms etc…. and you focus on placing links on places that get spidered frequently enough so you don’t have to spend a lot of time post-link blast getting your links noticed, spidered, indexed etc…
I’ve used bunches of these xrumer like services and the lower end ones, while cheaper…. seem to take a while to produce benefits, and also require more work on my end, to grab those urls, make a list, split them into feeds, or index them however I can.
Anyway, you probably don’t want to hear me babble on about SEO and what-not and just want to know the case study/test/review, right?
OK, Backlink Excellence case study….
This will be a 3 month review, perhaps shorter, seeing as how the seo competition here isn’t that strong.
Disclosure: Admin gave me the first month free as a review copy, but I insisted on a 3 month review to maintain the integrity of the test in multiple ways. I’ll be paying for months 2 and 3 of the service
One site for the test - After lots of back and forth with the admin we decided to find a site of mine that’s aged a bit, has some PR to it, is getting some traffic, and not on page 1 for any really competitive terms.
Site has over 114 indexed links according to YSE, and is over 2 years old, with a Page Rank of 1, not that these PR and YSE numbers really matter, but just more data for you to chew on, and hopefully it helps both of us make an assessment on the value (or lack thereof) to using Backlinks Excellence.
The site is a combo EMD, meaning that the domain has several keywords in it, including the 2 keywords being targeted here:
Information about the 2 main kws: Please tell me if this is TMI (too much information) as it takes me a while to dig up this info
kw 1- 2 words
14.8k Global exact searches
6.4k Local exact searches
Rank prior to test: Page 2, #12 overall in Google
SEO Competition-
#1 site, PR4, Site title optimized for this keyword, domain is almost 7 years old, 8k links to it
http://www.terrydean.org/
#2 site, Pr 4 also, with 1200 links to it, keywords in domain
http://internetbusinessmastery.com/
#3 site PR 2, 216 links, keywords in domain
http://internetbusinesstactics.com/
#6 site, PR3, 6k links to it, site title optimized for these keywords, and has keywords in domain
http://www.theinternetbusinessblog.com/
#11 site, Pr5, 5k links to it, has one of the 2 keywords in domain name, has keyword in the title
http://www.internetmarketing.com/
kw 2- 2 words
27 k Global exact searches
12k Local exact searches
Rank prior to test: Page 2, #20 overall in Google
SEO Competition-
5 sites page 1 with PR of 3,1,4,3,5,6 (most have keywords in domains)
#1 site, Pr 5, 1800 inbound links, has keywords in domain
#2 site, PR 6, has 2900 inbound links (subdomain of an authority site like about.com)
#3 site – 55k links PR 3
#4 site – has 12k inbound links, PR2, hyphenated EMD
#5 site, Pr5, has 1885 inbound links (has keywords in domain)
#11 site, Pr3, has 179 inbound links, NO keywords in domain name
Results?:
Sites gone from SERPs on pretty much all accounts, even for keywords we weren’t targeting. some inner urls are still ranking ok but these inner urls weren’t part of the test, so it seems that the main url that got affected here was the one getting all these links.
After 100s of thousands of profiles links sent out over the course of 3 months, there’s 781 credited YSE links
Sounds pretty bad eh?
The admin of Backlinks Excellenc eis a nice guy and says he’s still ranking happy clients’ sites just with profile links.
I also know some admins of forum profiles services who admit that these types of links just don’t work any more, or at least not like they used to.
Some stuff to think about…
Is this my final brush with profiles links? Yes, at least for direct linking at like I’ve said for a long time (maybe only to myself) these links will eventually go the rout eof social bookmarks because site admins will catch on at some point and exploiting loopholes isn’t really what SEO is all about, but generally speaking, the easie rit is to get a backlinks, the more devalued it eventually becomes.
Could I have helped the test out by adding content to the site periodically? Yes, but at the time (3 months ago) I didn’t think it was that important for the rankings of a main domain url to get site itself updated, but as my most previous post pointed out somewhere amongst the 2800 words there, adding content to sites just helps, plain and simple.
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{ 33 comments… read them below or add one }
The only type of profile links that are of any value now, are from forums that you are actively involved with, and preferably niche appropriate.
Google is forcing grey and black hatters to start doing more and more white hat techniques. This isn’t to say not to do link building, but rather when doing link building do it in the a name of building a relationship with clients/customers.
The days of getting links for links sake are dieing, getting links for the betterment of the end user is how we should all be thinking, yes some links that help our readership/viewers/customers can be considered grey hat, but truth be told, if what we are doing is what the “customer likes”/wants then I don’t think Google will have as much of a “cow man”.
Hey there Dan. Hate to do this, but didn’t see the opportunity to comment on a different post (probably too old of a thread) here http://linkvanareviews.com/the-micro-mini-site-business-model-is-it-dead-or-just-harder.
You have to read this post … if you do then you will completely understand what happened to you: http://www.makemoneyonlinewithseo.com/how-not-to-make-money-online/
In summary, I am 100% certain your entire network got a glancing over by a google employee, and your series of websites tied to your adsense account got a manually applied spanking. It was no accident that this happened just as you hit the $300 mark (in the example I gave above, it was the $100 mark).
The opinion of this guy, who has a ton of experience in adsense, is to focus only on flagship websites — and that the mini adsense model is dead. I’ll leave it at that, because you’re a million times more better served just reading this guy’s post.
Yup, read it and linked to it from somewhere on this site, I guess you just might have missed it, Grizz is of same opinion, go authority go flagship or go home…
I still hear people talking about that they can still rank pages by using profiles on high PR sites ‘repeatedly’. In other words, if they have a list of 100 high PR profile sites, they will create 1 set of 100 accounts and drop links to a page or two. Then in a few weeks they will check the results and drop another set of 100 links using a new set of profiles on the same 100 sites. Eventually (by that I mean 4 to 8 months later) they can rank for even competitive phrases. I want to test this theory myself but am in need of the right tool to get the job done.
A very nice and informative review!
Thanks very much and as for information overkill, in this case maybe, as the end result is that the website completely went off the radar and that should be enough information. But if the end result is good, then further information about the keywords and its difficulty is certainly helpful.
As for the reason why the site got tanked, indeed it could be a manual Adsense thingy, but there is also the very distinct possibility that it has to do with an extremely un-natural link profile, which IMO is much more likely and almost certainly played at least some kind of role.
100.000′s of profile links in a few months is just too much IMO, for almost any kind of website. I am pretty confident that with that amount of spammy, low quality links it is even possible to seriously damage link profiles and therefore rankings of quality sites like seobythesea or seobook.
Sorry to hear about your network btw, hope you can somehow recover.
Hi Dan,
Thanks for posting such a detailed and honest review about my service. Unfortunately, you didn’t get anything out of this other than a loss of time, rankings and money and I want to apologize for that.
To be honest, I’m not really sure why the results for this test were so negative. I obviously wouldn’t have approached you for a review if I thought it wouldn’t work out well, especially since I received lots of positive reviews in my sales thread at backlinksforum.com.
With that being said, some people still successfully throw a 25k package at a site that has been registered 2 weeks ago. And then there are clients that purchase multiple times the amount of links in a month that you received over a 3 months period. For the big majority of them it works out very well, however, I have to admit that the low count of clients that didn’t see better rankings or even lost rankings slightly increased post-panda.
Are profiles dead? No, at least not yet. Will they lose effectiveness in the future? I’m pretty sure. There is obviously nothing natural about such a link profile and as we all know, Google is becoming better and better at catching spam. I still don’t think it’s possible to nuke your competitors with crap links but the trend is definitely going towards using these links for buffer sites rather than directly linking to the money site.
That’s why I started focusing my efforts more on my monthly SEO service which offers a much higher link diversity as well as a more stable link velocity. I’d be happy if you’d be willing to review that service as well so hit me up whenever you feel like it!
Cheers,
Alex
First, I know that no all services will work for all sites, and I know some services will work for some niches but not others.
Having said that, why should Dan (or anyone else) use your SEO service, if your other service didn’t work?
There are SEO principles that work, and there are things that once worked that no longer have the same affect or don’t work.
Done the right way, Profile Links work, but from what I see your service does, it isn’t the right way. So if it that isn’t done the right way, why should we think your SEO service would be done the right way?
I am not trying to be mean, but seriously.
If you came back and said, I see it didn’t work, lets go through it and make sure it does moving forward and made the possible changes to your software, I totally understand you coming back and say, after making the changes, it works, here Dan free 3 month trail to prove it. Once you have proven that your fixes work, and Dan verifies it, then it makes sense to offer your SEO services.
The various testimonials I received prove that the profiles I offer work very well in many cases, or why else would people claim things like “This service is the real deal!” if it didn’t work for them?
So my profiles obviously do work but not in 100% of the cases as this review shows, which is surely true for every other backlinking service out there, including yours. And just because my profiles completely bombed in one case it’s a bit naive to assume that every other service I offer doesn’t work either.
Not all services will work for all sites, you said it yourself, and this doesn’t necessarily have to do with the link building software or how it’s configured.
As you said, your product bombed. And it bombed from a guy who reviewed it to many other people. So it isn’t on Dan or us to prove your products really work it is on you.
Alex, my point was, you asked Dan to review your other “products” after the first one didn’t work. I wouldn’t have done that here, and I would have offered it in a way that he would use your other “products” and came back and said they worked.
This isn’t true about just your profile links, but I have used almost all available “profile link” companies for very competitive niches, and they simply “no longer” work they way they once did.
Do they have their place? Yes, but only used in a certain strategy. This isn’t to put your product down, just from my experiences, and I think even Dan has said the same things.
I hope your ventures work out, I really do, I don’t mean any ill will, just that you probably should have gone about it differently.
Alex, I sent you an email, and I think I’m going to start reviewing SEO services, since even a 3 month trial on one website isn’t really enough of a baseline to give a verdict on a type of link or linking service which gives only one kind of link. On the other hand, I’m not going to “waste 800 bucks times 50 sites just to prove a point either, so please read my email and get back to me, thanks
I am glad for you Alex!
Dan your awesome, out of many of the online experts I know Dan is the most open and honest person I know who will tell you how things are!
@seocontentnetwork: I got your point and apologize for my misinterpretation. No hard feelings here.
@Dan: Just answered your email, sorry for the late reply. I think it’s a good idea to focus more on longterm reviews of SEO services since that gives a more accurate and detailed view of what each service can provide (or not). Looking forward to it.
This maybe of topic here Dan…. I looked over your recommended services and would like to know if there is someone that you would recommend to outsource AMR?
Thanks.
Try BacklinkBonzai, or BacklinkBanzai
Hey Dan, have you been testings the Backlink Bonzai service with results or is the service brand new? Just looked into their website and it is definitely getting my attention. Considering how they practically do all the work for you, I figured I’d ask for your thoughts.
Hi Dan,
Just found your site today and it’s awesome! I’m not surprised the profile thing didn’t work out – it really can’t be a stretch for Google to figure out that a site with anything over 20 profile links pointing at it must be trying to spam them. How many forums are most people involved in naturally? Certainly not thousands! I think the best bet for forum links is to cobble together a list of forums in whatever niche you are targeting and then find a decent outsourcer to comment on them every few days. It’s not as cheap as blasting forum profiles but I’m thinking it will be more effective. I’ll let you know for sure once I get my outsourcer lined up. =)
How do you keep your head from exploding with all the link building tools/strategies you use?
When it comes to link building, do you just try everything?
How do you maintain your focus?
I try everything unfortunately, mainly because you can’t really believe any affiliate marketer’s reviews nor SEO bloggers who get tied down into concepts they adhere to without trying to adapt or expand their horizons.
When something does work, I don’t expect it to work forever, so I hit it hard then move on to testing other things
I am linkink to high pr sites,what ever..blogs,forums etc..I am collecting the back links of the competators and the people who are offering backlink services.it usually works great..
Hi Dan,
I think there is one thing to consider. I had a .com domain, that had German content, German tags, was placed in google WMT for geotargeting Germany, and had German links. After, I used profil links for it, it disappeared from google.de , and guess what? I am ranking top in all kind of other google’s . This was because a lot of these profil links are not from USA. What most properly happend is, that your Geo-targeting changed, and you rank now for other google’s around the globe. Check scroogle scraper for other geo-targets to find out
Tina
What link building services do you recommend besides BMR, Linx Boss, Article Marketing Robot, and Article Ranks? Is UAW or MAN still any good at all?
Any new articles on the horizon?
Hi David, I have some reviews pre- and partially written, and am just waiting for 60-90 days to pas before I reveal results.
Thanks,
Dan
I noticed your site is not ranking on Google for “Link Building”, you used to be the first, any idea of what happened? Also in June’s PR update you got PR6, but in July’s update your PR drop to 3.
I’m looking forward to read new articles from you, last update was months ago.
Hi John, thanks for your concern, I ranked for that term because I felt like ranking for it, it was merely a text KW, and one that doesn’t bring in enough traffic to warrant the effort it would take to maintain the rankings, which is mini-seo-lesson in and of itself, if you catch my drift (build businesses not added chores and expenditures)
Thanks for the question,
Dan
Sory Dan I have been burning your bandwidth up today, looking on all areas of your site. I’m very impressed with it.
I’m at a bit of a crossroads at the moment, not knowing which way to go. Do you you think it’s better to write an original article and post once a week, or post spun content twice a week? I have 5 sites and am busy with other stuff too.
Great site!
Wendy
Your site is an AMAZING resource! Please post more frequently, I have never found such a useful backlinking-related blog!
Also Dan, you noted above that keeping a keyword ranking is a chore. Do you go into detail about doing this anywhere on the blog? Or is it as straight forward as continually building 50 BMRs/keyword/month, for example?
Hi Dan,why are you not posting any new reviews did something happened?
I miss the old days when you posted new updates regularly.
I hope everything is ok
Looks like this site is another in the long-line of formerly great marketing blogs as this site is languishing without new posts.
I don’t know if I agree with you about “great” but yes things have languished here. Please read http://linkvanareviews.com/back-from-the-dead
Thanks,
Dan
Hey Dan,
I just found you today and this site is a great resource. I am doing testing all the time too so you have saved me a bunch of time. Don’t stop posting. You got reader number 6 here.
Steve
Thanks, I will be posting more shortly. doing lots of site design work these days as part of my tests.
Dan