I just spent about 35 minutes talking to Ryan over at My Link Club link building service to get some inside scoop on how the service works.
As we all know, the job of a sales letter is to sell, not explain all the minutiae that we usually find out about AFTER we join like how a network is set up how many sites it has, how many unique IPs, how are they different, who’s running it etc…
Who’s running the show? SEO people, enuff said
Who uses their service? SEO people and some SEO firms that do reputation management , so…enuff said again
Background information on My Link Club
They have upwards of 35,000 sites but they’re on about 1500-2000 domains, and residing on about that many unique IP addresses.
The “sites” are grouped, and categorized, which i s unlike most blog network link building services that have all these general categories that act as repositories for submitted articles. What they do is try to put your content on their relevant groups of sites, so if you’re writing about health related stuff, then your content will go there (to the relevant groups of sites) first and foremost, then elsewhere to fill the link quota of your campaign.
This should be an interesting test, because My Link Club and the testing we’re going to do with it is going to answer the following questions:
#1- Will we experience the law of diminishing returns with backlinks from same IPs, or
#2- Does #1 not even matter if the sites we’re getting links from are relevant to subject matter? (quality and relevancy vs. IP diversity)
#3- The power of getting (repeated) links from relevant sites amidst relevant content, is it more powerful than links from non-relevant sites?
How does My Link Club work, operationally?
- You join/register,
- You order a package
- They write articles for you and syndicate these articles to their network for you/us.
So it’s hands free link building here, and they do this by writing you/us an article, mega-spinning of articles that contain your keyword (and anchor text), give those articles a bunch of titles, and submit it.
Their syndication process works a bit differently (A.K.A. randomly) from what Ryan told me.
Example: If you ordered 3,000 links for 5 different urls, that doesn’t mean you’ll get exactly 600 links per campaign (3k divided by 5). I found this to be a weird way to do things, but every services has its uniqueness element and My Link Club definitely has a different way of syndicating content.
I’m OK with the randomness factor, by the way, but this is the stuff the FAQs and sales letters don’t tell us unless we ask detailed questions.
The real downer for me is the order in which your 3,000 or 1,000 links are generated:
The don’t work several urls at the same time, but instead work the first campaign for a while, then when that one is well under way they start the next one.
I REALLY don’ t like how this works, because it means that in order to get 3,000 links in a month for say…4 campaigns, I’d have to get 700 links to a url in week 1, then 700 to another in week 2, 700 more to a single url in week 3 etc, etc… and I think that’s too much linking activity over too small a time frame.
NOTE: they should at least set up the blogs to schedule the syndication over the course of one month, not blast out 700 spun articles in one week then move on to the next url/campaign.
My concerns with how My Link Club works
If I’m getting 3,000 links a month to the same domain, or even 3,000 links a month spread out over 2 domains, then after a month I won’t be getting backlinks from unique IP addresses anymore, and the law of diminishing returns (repeated links from same source devalues the weight of newly acquired links) might kick in, thus making this a one-month-wonder of a service.
Getting your content spidered, and links indexed:
My Link Club is a private network, so the quality of their network is important to them, as they won’t have a service people will use if it doesn’t work anymore (ie, links not getting indexed) so they do some stuff on the back end of things aside from pinging new posts to ensure that everything they publish on their network gets indexed.
During our talk I referred Ryan to this post on Twitter linkwheels which has some tips on developing automated index driving for his network, hopefully he adds some more indexing power into the system/service (it can’t hurt Ryan! 
only help).
What can you build links to?:
Another common question and concern with some networks, as most don’t allow any linking except to domains you the user own, which I think is a big mistake because some people have websites that have substandard site designs and set up whilst entities like hubs and lens are trusted and it would be great to be able to send a few links to them to boost them in the SERPs, since they usually respond well to content backlinks.
My Link Club wisely allows you/us to link out from their network to web 2.0 properties, and they even actually recommend it, as it’s something their reputation management people do (link to press releases, article directory articles, hubs, lenses, wetpaints etc…)
Final Notes:
After ordering this I got a 404 error when returning to merchant, and when I tried to add more than one campaign, I got redirected to a payment option, so this new interface of theirs has some kinks that need to be ironed out, seeing that I don’t really need 3,000 links to any one url that badly, but would like my links spread out over several different urls and campaigns
Recommended?
No, not yet seeing as how I just joined, and this is just the usual informative initial review post. I will reveal results in a follow up review
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
On thier site it just says you get ‘any number of url/keyword combinations per month which can be changed after every report’? Does that mean you can only chose one url per month to get 3000 links?
I think they changed a few things since your review, can you clarify?
Not sure what they’ve changed since my initla review in first 30 days, but when we did a check on the URLS generated, about 50% of them didn’t exist any more.
To answer your question…. You can only do ONE url at a time, but you can edit the campaign at any time, too so it’s more like doing one url at a time, with option for switching things over to a different url later.
I don’t recommend MyLinkClub at all now, was very disappointed to see 50% of the links not even in existence when I ran a crawler check, plus some posts were on non-indexed sites (very unexpected) , and pages (expected).
Once I hear they’re doing things better and really, truly DO own their own network, not an WPMU or LFE network, plus implement some indexing solutions…then I’d go back and try them again
This is an example of what I said earlier, I would not want that happening to my main site what with link velocity being taken into account, could really make your site drop in rankings and I would have paid them to do it lol!
Hi Dan,
I wonder how’s your result on the last test 12/27/2010 with My Link Club so far ? I am interested to sign up, too
It’s a heck of a lot better than it used to be, but I still don’t see it as being too, too powerful yet. Just another (somewhat effective) link generating tool. Link counts are going up on url being tested, but rankings increases are fairly slow, we may need a whole month’s worth of links to see the destination url move past page 4 (where it now ranks, up from page 9)
Thanks for the tips, Dan ! I will hold for awhile then but I am still looking forward to hear your final result in weeks’ to come.
Daniel,
Was the move from page 9 to page 4 attributed to MLC or were you doing other BL activities?
What level of competition is the URL?
thanks
Hi,
i read an arcticle about MLC and want to try out this service. Do you have any updates. I found out that they work together with linklicious to get a much better success rate.