I get a lot of questions via email and comments about the link building services I currently recommend so I thought I’d take some time to explain a few things.
#1 – This list of recommended services may change at some point as newer and better link building tools and services come out.
#2 – Some of these services are only good for a certain amount of time, like 4-5 months or so due to their limited capacity for generating effective quality links on an ongoing basis.
#3 – A major oversight was made by me in my reviews and is worth noting here…
Right now, here’s the skinny on the Top 4 services I am recommending:
BLS - they got hit with some power-users who disrupted the auto-posting mechanism and this tied up the backlog of links being distributed, therefore they made a change to how they operate.
Nowadays with BLS you can only get 1000 backlinks a month per member. The Generation-X linking they talk about includes social bookmarking but this SB-linking is done on their sites that host your snippets, and that’s part of what makes it such an effective service.
Due to their limited capacity for generating effective backlinks ad infinitum, this service is recommended for 4-5 month’s use tops, but is definitely a great service to use for a while because it uses a method of linking I like to call Promoting the promoters.
LinkVana - I haven’t used this in a while and am actually kicked out of their affiliate program and also disallowed from joining as a paying member for requesting a refund when I didn’t get my login details after 3 days. The affiliate links you see on this site belong to another member who is offering to write 25 100-word snippets for you as a bonus for joining through her link. I earn nothing from those sales but don’t want to waste the effort spent to rank decently for terms related to Linkvana.
Makes me wish I got a different domain name now, oh well.
Linkvana worked well when I used it way back when, but I had to cancel my membership there when my hosting company shut down my VPS without warning, but it did work well then, but nowadays I see a lot of better ways to spend 147/month. It’s still listed in the top 4 because it’s effective backlinking despite the price.
Blog networks like My Article Network and Unique Article Wizard, and my oversight:
Most blogs built with WordPress are NoFollow now, so the backlinks obtained via these networks are getting a lot of NoFollow backlinks. This means there’s less value to be derived than from an entire network of DoFollow blogs linking to you, but there’s still benefits to these links.
What makes Unique Article Wizard so unique and better than your run of the mill blog network like MAN and Traffic Kahuna and Neurolinker etc… is that it has a wider reach and allows for the perfect mix of backlinks:
The perfect mix of backlinks?
Varied anchor text- can mix it up here and use varied keywords as anchor text per article, this is good for seemingly natural backlinks as you don’t want all your backlinks to have the same anchor text keyword in the hyperlinks.
Using naked links - Naked links are links that are straight urls like http://yourimtoolkit.com as opposed to an anchor text-ed backlink like Internet Marketing Guide
Variety of link sources - With UAW you get a very wide range of sites, subnets and IP addresses to get links from. You also get links from blogs, article directories, Joomla sites and so on…
This means UAW is perfect for getting a variety of:
- DoFollow links
- Nofollow links
- Naked links
- Links from blogs
- Links from directories
- Links from Joomla sites
- And is great for syndicating your embedded Youtube Videos on hundreds of sites to push up the page views naturally, and those sites gets link from YouTube (minimally promoting the promoters) thus pushing up its rankings, too
So my oversight was that I’d never mentioned the whole “NoFollow blog networks” thing on any of my reviews about link building services that generate backlinks from blog networks.
Again though, Nofollow links have their place in natural link building since it’s yet another style of link attribute attained and not all blogs in all blog networks are set up this way.
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Dan,
You can still join the Linkvana affiliate program without having an Linkvana account. You have to contact them though from their contact page.
I’m not sure if it’s true or not but, Linkvana isn’t as effective as it use to be because I’m fairly certain there are some dead blogs that stop working, of course I’m just speculating.
I’m also thinking Dave will do a massive overhaul to Linkvana, to see what’s working for 2009 or so. I think he’ll probably decrease the size of the blog network, throw out the dead ones, and use what’s working now.
If this is true, then the links you can get back from Linkvana will be worth more than it use to. I think he might limit the blog post per project, and add a comment section to Linkvana, to add comments for the blog posts… of course again, I’m just speculating.
The reason I’m saying all this is because Dave is doing a big change to a seperated blog network, which is why I’m speculating that Dave might do the same for Linkvana.
Elbert, thanks for the info.
LinkVana is good as it is, but when BLS and SE Nuke and UAW cost less, they might get dropped as one of the top 4 best-bang-for-the-buck services.
When LV drop blogs from their network, I think they keeps those domains active, and merely remove them from acting as a link source.
Otherwise they’ll end up like 1waylinks; a blog farm/link farm network of useless upside-down-link-juice sites.
I read other SEO blogs, too and they say that LV keeps adding blogs to their network, and they have to in order to keep charging what they’re charging.
As for BLS, it’s doing fine… somewhat. A bit disappointed now. :/
Still, though, I wish Chad and Colin would follow what Dave is doing.
Hey Elbert,
they’re adding a whole bunch of sites to their network very soon and will keep the older domains but may remove them from the network as links sources.
Actually, I think they’ve been doing this all along
That’s a good point. They did say that they’re always adding new blogs. I guess they’re just throwing out the blogs that stop working and adding new ones that’s currently working now.
What interest me is adding comments to your blog posts. Dave said something this will make the blog network more organic and more natural to google, while at the same time, more spider activity to that post.
That’s a good feature to add, for sure. Especially since people will be hitting these high PageRank sites once the blog commenting tools and URL harvesters find them, and will be leaving comments. I wonder how much extra work this make for LV though since they’ll have to find someone to approve/disapprove comments made…
I have a suspicion the comments will be made by Linkvana so no moderation will be necessary.
I also highly recommend Unique Article Wizard. Very effective and for the price it can’t be beat.
Dan where did you hear about the 1000 links per member per month from BLS? If that’s the case, depending on whether or not the links end up boosting my position in the SERPs, I either need to get a second account or find a different service.
As it stands right now I’ve got about 32 active niche sites, and my goal is to keep getting them 4 links a day pretty much permanently. With the 1000 link limit, I could potentially use all of my links up in 1 day.
Doing the math, I’d need 4 BLS accounts just to cover the sites I have now. I’m following my own twist on the Google Sniper method, just targeting slightly tougher, higher traffic keywords than George suggests and building backlinks to them. As a result, I create new sites every week, so that link limit is kind of a deal breaker for me.
I chatted with Colin from BLS and that’s what he told me.
The BLS links ARE effective so you might need less than you think/day. Best way to use BLS is to use their spinner extensively, link to 3 different urls on 3 different domains per snippet, so no one snippet is linking to the same domain.
I guess you could say this is a footprint-proof method for using BLS snippets-linking.
If you want a steady stream of hordes of links, use Unique Article Wizard. It’s more work, and more writing but the link sources are more diverse, you can stagger your submissions to keep the links coming in for a long time, and it can be 100% automated.
UAW links aren’t as powerful on an individual basis as the BLS links are, but they’re far more numerous and you can tap those links osurces for a very long time, perhaps 1-2 years, since their network of sites, blogs, and directories is constantly growing.
Also, UAW articles can be 100% outsourced: you pay their recommended service, give them your UAW logins and outsource all your article writing and submissions directly into UAW using an interface they developed for just this one service.
Also, (I asked this in my other reply),why isn’t SE Nuke getting you all the links you need?
Does it only work for developing Web 2.0 sites and building up the link juice of those sites which end up linking to your money sites?
Thanks for clearing that up Dan. Even if I dropped down to 2 links per day though, I’d still end up using all my links for the month with 16 of my sites. Unfortunately my niches are way too specific and mutually exclusive to be able to implement the footprint-free strategy you suggested for most of my sites, but I have a couple it might work for. Thanks for the tip. As far as staying on board with them, I’ll see how it pans out. If I end up hitting 1st or 2nd for my keywords in a couple of months (most of my sites are currently sitting in 3rd position) then the increase in sales will be more than enough to justify getting as many accounts as I need.
Personally, I’d like to see some kind of “elite” membership at BLS that allows unlimited links per member for something like $147 or even $197. Maybe throw in the bonus that elite members can use it for SEO clients too, or some other special feature. That would get me on board permanently.
SENuke is great at what it does, and gets me plenty of links, but I don’t like relying on 1 type of site for all of my links, and it’s very footprinty. What SENuke works brilliantly for is getting new sites indexed and ranking decently right away, and adding some link love to new posts on existing sites.
I look at automated link building tools and services like this: Constant steady services like UAW or BLS work great as foundation link building that keeps a decent degree of link velocity and steady link juice coming in for your site. Things like LFE, SENuke, BlogBot, etc. work great as supplementary “burst” link building. The foundation services make the spikes stand out less.
I agree with mostly everything you said here, can’t risk spike traffic until you have steady stream of regular, regulated foundation link building going on, which UAW does really, really well.
However, UAW can be set to as many submissions as you want, really so if you want to be ultra-aggressive you can, bu tit will still take at least a week form start to finish because you still need some articles approved by blog owners.
Personally, I could care less about how quickly my sites get indexed; it’s what you do with them once they ARE indexed that matters, since they’ll all get indexed eventually, especially if you submit a Google Sitemap…
Since SE Nuke seems mostly geared towards building Web 2.0 properties that link to money sites, I consider that a ultra-foundational, and solid link building because you’re promoting the promoters there.
Using LFE to link to your “promoters is best way to emulate what SE Nuke does, except LFE doesn’t build Web 2.0 profiles, and properties, just blogs and pliggs.
I think an LFE-built network is pretty much the same thing as using UAW, except that:
UAW’s network is full of indexed sites, directories etc… that for the most part are trusted, decent quality sites, thereby giving their links staying power.
LFE can be used is ways UAW cannot, as you probably know.
I understand your points about BLS….
Don’t forget that you can always write a similarly tagged post or supplementla articl eon your site, that’s similar in title and tagging to your #3 ranked site, then work towards getting it to “meet up with” the already ranked #3 url to get an indented listing.
If you can’t be #1, then be #s 3 and 4 with indented listing, as that supposedly gets more traffic than #1 and #2 spots, when visitors see indented listings to choose from.
As always, enjoying this discussion, the weekends here’s for me and I will be back in a few days, stay in touch,
Dan
can you tell me how much you have to rewrite an article so that it can be used with UAW? is it sufficient to just use synonym replacements or do I have to completely rewrite each sentence of your original article?
Eric, they walk you through the steps to re-write the article so it’s step-by-step paint by numbers spinning, and you end up with 3 article versions each of which spins itself into more versions base don modular block placements and re-placements
I asked the original question just to find out how unique the article has to be in order to get the most effective links. Can you just a change word or two in each sentence or do you have to completely rewrite each sentence?
UAW’s interface “asks” that you rewrite entire paragraph blocks. I’ve never done any testing of the exact uniqueness required for optimal results, but from what I’ve heard, getting them to 30% uniqueness from original, other article versions is best practice. The more unique the articles are, the better the links will “stick”, but at some point when you have an articl eon 800 directories and sites, the 3 articles you write can only “grab” so many SERPs positions, but I find that I get hundreds of trackbacks, ie. sticky links, per article just b following UAW’s interface for rewriting each paragraph twice.
Your question is a hard one to answer, and that’s my best answer, shoot for 30% uniqueness, but follow UAW’s interface for results like I get (hundreds of sticky links/published article.
Hope this helps,
Dan