Every once in a while I get approached by link building services owners to do a review of their products, and sometimes they even listen to my recommendations…
So here are some recommendations for all link building service providers who run blog and site networks for link building.
Table of Contents – Services covered here: 
- My Article Network, A.K.A. MAN
- Backlink Solutions, A.K.A. BLS
- Unique Article Wizard, A.K.A. UAW
- SEO Link Vine, A.K.A. SEO LV
- EZArticleLink
- The Link Juicer, AK ATLJ
- LinkVana
My Article Network - the flaw here is a serious one in my opinion. They have a setting where you can limit distribution to X # of sites. So when you tell MAN to send your spun article to 200 sites, and there are 50 site sin the network that auto-accept and auto-publish your content, then you’re not limiting the IP diversity potential because the auto-approve sites are getting your content first and foremost every time, leaving you with less new sites to get backlinks from.
Pros: big network, outsourcer login area so you can hire writers to do the writing and spinning for you
Cons: need to be able to track which sites are auto-publishing every time and leap frog over them at first, then maybe come back to them later to fill desired quota of how many sites you wanted to publish your articles on.
They also need to incorporate a submissions rate feature so not all links go out at once, but if I remember correctly, they do have some sort of way to stagger your submissions so they’re somewhat scheduled. It’d just be nice to know that your links aren’t going to come in all at once
Backlink Solutions - they do more with less here because of their Gen-X linking. They get links to the snippets linking to your site in the snippets and they direct link to your site using social bookmarking.
Pros: easy spinning, good quality links, links to your links = power
Can schedule and drip feed your links
Cons: BLS needs more sites in their network and to include RSS as part of its links to your links method. Would also help to have an outsourcer login
Unique Article Wizard - still a great service that does a lot of stuff for you on the back-end that you don’t realize like adding new article directories to submit to on your behalf, they provide emailed submissions reports, and they have a directory where people can pick up your articles are republish on their sites, much like EzineArticles does, but your articles are being promoted via your submissions on others’ sites therefore UAW has a viral aspect to it that no other services have (yet)
Pros: viral aspects get articles republished over and over for a long time to come, submissions reports, large network of sites, submits to sites base don categories selected which is an added “coolness” factor, and their interface is easy to use.
Cons: setting up multiple resource boxes is pretty time-consuming but worthwhile to do. Should allow users to save resource boxes linked to a project so they don’t have to be pasted in each and every time for new articles.
Should also allow for rotating keywords and anchor text in the article body, and make it so the body of the articles place the desired anchor text in random areas of the article body, so the anchor text links and anchor text links positions aren’t the same in each and every article (a footprint that all article syndication services have).
Also needs outsourcer’s login area because most heavy Unique Article Wizard users end up outsourcing their submissions at some point.
SEO Link Vine - from what I see so far (still in pre-launch phase) they do NOT have an outsourcer login, but their training videos and interface are superb and easy to follow.
It’d be nice to know if/when we got an article published by their network via email so we, the article submitters, could send some links to our links.
NOTE: I do realize that therein lies the possibility of “revealing the network” but any enterprising individual could do this anyways, (by submitting articles to each and every category and noting the sites that published their articles) but the more knowledgeable article writers and link builders would LOVE IT if they could increase the link juice of their submissions by getting links to their links, which means we’d like to know the site slinking to is, and not by waiting for Google Alerts and/or trackbacks/pingbacks to let us know when something of ours has been published somewhere.
EZArticleLink - this is proving to be a very effective service so far, but the real value here is in the combined results form article submissions and the bonus links you get. One without the other doesn’t WOW me, but you get both when you join so kind of a moot point.
Kenneth from EZArticleLink actually listened to some suggestions I had during the launch phases and has added more links-to-your-links features that make it work well/better.
Pros: You get links to your links because your submitted articles are getting links from other directories hosting or linking to your submitted articles. They’ve incorporated some RSS and social bookmarking features much like the BLS Gen-X linking does (but not quite, BLS has a special unique thing going on there that I won’t tell other services owners)
Cons: People are confused by the whole “set up this article directory script” thing and also confused by set-post-only settings, don’t really where the links are coming from, and some people have reasonable concerns about installing/appending an article directory script on their site that gets filled with unrelated content.
Members also erroneously think that this is reciprocal linking because need to install the article directory script in order to receives backlinks to that site (so they think it’s reciprocal linking.
This isn’t a drawback related to effectiveness of service but a CON/drawback about how complex and confusing the whole system seems, at first.
Also, it is great that articles and new article directories are getting indexed faster, which was EZArticleLink’s major issue at first (IMO) but now they got things going a lot better. It’d be great(er) if articles linked to each other using main keywords in the article instead of just linking to article urls on other site
The Link Juicer - currently rated 3d of 4 best link building services due to its pricing and variety of links generated/provided. Not the most powerful links in the world, kinda of anemic really, and the best way to use this service is to follow their recommended linkng pattern, NOT direct linking.
Pros: good variety of links from social bookmarking and WPMU sites, and may other kinds, who knows?
Has a built in spinner GUIDE which shows you how to spin your text properly, and also has a uniqueness checker that tells you “hey buddy you need to spin this article some more if you wanna see results!” OK maybe not that exact quote but the points the same, they expect and recommend a certain uniqueness percentage from you and give you warnings if you don’t meet their uniqueness standards.
Cons: the spinner is excruciating to use a real PITA, and it seems to take a lifetime of spinning to get just one article spin to acceptable uniqueness level.
An unacceptable percentage of the pingbacks and legit trackbacks given out by TLJ-generated content doesn’t get indexed which means we, the link recipients need to do more work to get those links to our links indexed.
NOTE: If I wasn’t using this automated link building tool, I’d have canceled TLJ a while ago
Suggestions: TLJ needs to develop[ a system like BLS which gets backlinks to your backlinks via RSS and social bookmarking and I believe they’re in the midst of doing that (good job Peter!). BTW, this feature addition is what made EZArticleLink work much better at getting links to links indexed faster and better, so incorporating this will make The Link Juicer a better performing service.
Note to Peter (owner of TLJ) - it seems like the best way to see good results with TLB is to adhere to your recommended linking pattern/strategy so it’d make sense to add area in campaign setting to take notes of all the urls you want to cross/inter-link so it can be randomized, yet automated
LinkVana - still over-priced but still ranked #4 on my list because it’s the only service I’d turn to if I needed some truly powerful links for some url that had plateaued in the SERPs (stopped rising in rankings)
Pros: Powerful links, and their added features show they’re serious about the success of their members.
They keep adding sites to their network to keep things link juice productive
They added an article directory from what I heard
They’re adding comments to some posts to make the sites seem more natural
Cons: Some people I know said their links weren’t getting indexed, which is really hearsay, but the main drawback to this system is that it’s WAY more costly than $147.00/month for this service because you have to write 100 words for every link you generate, or pay them or your writer to do this for you.
Suggestions?: None, the kicked me out of their affiliate program because i demanded a refund after not receiving my login details 3 days after signing up, so screw them, plus they wouldn’t listen anyways and I’m pretty certain Dave Kelly still knows more about SEO than I do.
P.S. My writer’s affiliate link is the Linkvana affiliate link you see on this site, and her bonus is that you get 25 free blurbs written for you if you stay with Linkvana more than 30 days, by which time you’ll be sick of writing blurbs anyways)
That’s all for now, a special thanks to Peter Adamson and Kenneth Koh for listening to ideas and being truly committed to building a better mousetrap/link building service for their members.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Daniel, thanks for all the good overview reviews. As mentioned before there seems to be a lot of link building services popping up these days. After thinking about it, this is good. Competition will hopefully deliver better value to us, the user. Of course it takes time to sort these services out, but in the long run it should provide all of us with better choices.
.-= Ric´s last blog ..Membership Sites Are They Worth It? =-.
Sure thing Ric. This post will be updated, especially for Link Dozer, but since it has some new features coming out I decided to not make my Pros and Cons suggestions just yet, but to wait for their latest updates.
One thing more services are probably going to do in near future is community-thesaurus and RSS incorporation, but I doubt if any will trying to make spun content appear more unique and less footprinted via randomization of anchor text/hyperlink positioning and mixing up article lengths.
Spun articles, even with a certain degree of uniqueness are still going to give some sort of footprint because there are other factors that go into content uniqueness besides words (article length, same anchor text links, same positioning of anchors etc…)
BLS is tops for me. There are only two issues I have with the system both related to outsourcing of content. (1) you can only provide high level topics, In other words the topic to outsource is limited to the keyword. So if you are promoting Real Estate there is no textbox for you to provide in more detail which angle the post should explore within your niche.
(2) When outsourcing, the text box to enter your destination URL seems limited in characters. So if you have an SEO optomised URL (with a very long-tail keyword phrase) once you get you delivery of snippets, the end characters of that URL are truncated and have to be re-done before submitting. This becomes a case of redoing 10 or 20 URLS.
(3) Reporting is not that good. Once you submitted your “project” it is impossible to track it later (few weeks down the line) by either Title or something meaningful. Result of this is that you could over optomise for a keyword/URL not being aware you had already done it in the past.
Other that these three gripes, the system is super cool, quick and it works
Hey Jose, thanks for your feedback. I usually recommend against outsourcing with BLS simply because it’s pretty easy to generate your links. I outsource a lot of writing on the various services I test and use but BLS isn’t one of them simply because I could get my quota of 1000 links/month with about 3 hours of work.
Yes, their tracking and REAL frequency rates for projects/campaigns is a bit misleading, but that’s all part of the randomness they’re trying to achieve for you.
I track progress via manual searches, and really only do a bare minimum of snippets creations per url/anchor text so nothing goes to “waste”.
Every system has its quirks, bugs, and flaws but as long as the end results (rankings) are good/better, that’s all that really matters.
I’m glad you like it, BLS and UAW are the 2 services that I get the most thanks for by readers, and it’s no coincidence that they’re the top 2 recommended services right now.
Thanks,
Dan
This is nice list .i want to if the website textlinkbroker is genuine or not to get one way text links? jose ,can you share what is your opinion about their link building service.i am thinking to them.
Hi Dan, just found your blog -great content! Just wondering if you had a chance to test Traffic X Multipler? It creates WPMU blogs and posts automatically….would love to see your review on it.
Thanks!
Thanks KC,
Traffic X Multiplier sounds a lot like Link Farm Revolution. Check out this Link Farm Evolution Review for some details on how it works, and my opinion of it.
Thanks,
Dan
Hi Daniel,
First of all keep up the excellent work. Yours is one of the few sites that I refer to regularly.
I am being emailed by some webmasters in order to do link exchanges. I have read some different opinions of reciprocal linking (some say it still works, some say it no longer works while others say it can even hurt your ranking). What is your opinion on reciprocal link building?
Thanks,
James.
Hi James, reciprocal linking does work to a certain extent, but normally it is done is such a way that the participants only get links to home page urls, and doesn’t cover inner url linking so it’s not something I do, at all…