I did a Synnd review way back in the Pre-panda days, and got so-so results from it.
Quick recap on the other Synnd review:
- 5 urls tested
- only one got full attention
- the one that got full attention ranks #1, page 1 POST Panda(s), but keywords were long-tail-ish and/or low volume and low competition, but to this day are some of the highest volume keywords bringing traffic to my site, according to CPanel AWSTATS
UPDATED SYNND Review: Results and Experiences
Results were/ARE amazing, and I’m not easily amazed.
URL being tested, is same one that got the full attention last time, but I went for a harder test of Synnd this time, I went for a MUCH harder keyword.
I tested this on 2 urls, one of which is the one alluded to above.
I have been using Synnd for about 4 months, coming up on 5 months in a couple of weeks.
UPDATE/EDIT: I used their Enterprise Level member for this test, and divided the promotions credits equally between 2 urls, 3-4 keywords each url
Also, I only used/tested the social linking impact/aspect, (bookmarks, social news, Facebook Likes, Google +1s etc… and didn’t use the Press Release module, nor the article submissions module, nor any of the other non-social linking modules)
URL #1- The one that saw good results for the low comp, low volume keywords in the previous test, but now being tested for a harder keyword.
For the MAJOR traffic, High comp, High Volume term, here’s how the SERPS history went:
Had LinxBoss running on this url and this KW for months, had a Page 4 ranking that was pretty solid.
Removed LinxBoss from the mix, to make this a clearer, standalone test of Synnd.
The first 2 months did NOT go well, there were issues with my campaigns and some never-seen-before-by-them anomalies with my account, so I had a slow start there, and basically saw nothing from this, because my accounts weren’t running to maximum capacity for the urls and credits and what-not.
- Some of this was my fault, didn’t watch a training video
- Some of it had to do with a confusing non-user-friendly back office, user interface
- and some of it had to do with the aforementioned anomalies
We got things sorted, I contacted support, got a really nice, knowledgeable guy named Dan (must be a “Dan thing 
) on gmail chat and Skype. He took a look at my account and got things sorted for me.
So, at around the beginning of month 3, we started to see some movement of the first url the one with history with Synnd.
- Went from page 4 to page 3, at the bottom, sat there at bottom half of page 3 for close to 3 weeks
- Then it moved up to the top of page 3 for about a week
- Then it went to the top of page 2 for about another week.
- And today, it’s at the bottom of page 1 40k Global exact searches volume term
I’m REALLY hesitant to recommend things in general, but I think that over 4 months of testing, albeit with only 2 REAL month’s of effective and proper implementation of their service, that the results achieved using only a portion of their modules… deems giving Synnd a thumbs-up.
One other thing that makes me recommend getting this service is, the rankings are going up, and yes while we might experience some dancing up and down in the search engines whilst link building to something we want to rank for, in this case, the dances have been less volatile, and more stable, and overall, what I’ve seen is rankings increases.
I’ve never seen this url DROP down significantly.. except maybe one spot or two which is indicative of a pretty solid and stable SERPs movement.
So, with all that being said, I can feel better about the recommend, but I also pointed Synnd at another url, for testing purposes.
Synnd review for url #2
Old domain name, I had put HIGH PR backlinks at it to rank page 2 for another really competitive keyword with massive volume, and for that keyword, I’m ranked page 2 with just 18 High PR Links.
So what I did was, I used Synnd to get the social signals for 3 other keywords in the site title, EXCLUDING the keyword I use my own service for.
While not exactly long-tail keywords, they’re definitely less competitive but have decent traffic, 2 of which have over 1k global exact searches a month.
Rankings for the 3 “other” keywords the aforementioned domain url got Synnd attention from
#3 – 1300 Global Exact searches
#6- 590 Global Exact Searches (UPDATE: Now #1 for past 2 days)
#15- 3600 Global Exact Searches (UPDATE: #10 now, 3 days after Synnd campaign for this url and kw stopped)
Before Synnd and after I got my own high pr links to this domain url for a keyword not targeted here with the Synnd test/review, these were all page 4-6
About the 2 urls being tested here… One did a lot better than the other whilst getting equal attention, so that’s a bit of a mystery, and the only thing to differentiate the two sites is one is an active site, and one is a dead, no-longer-being-published-to kind of site.
Also, about url #1, the one that got Synnd attention pre-Panda…it’s going on 3 years old for publication date, so it’s not like Google snapped it up as a recent publication and it’s riding a wave of search-engine-loving content freshness or anything like that, which gives even more weight to the fact that Synnd took a really old article and got it some social signal juice and made the url rank a lot higher than I expected it would.
Frankly speaking, I considered a page 2 ranking for this keyword via Synnd a success, and maybe that’s where it will end up if the url drops in search results, as has been known to happen when a url reaches page 1 and get some attention.
But for now, it’s page 1, for how long I don’t know but boy am I tempted to throw some other types of links at it, but that would ruin the review, know what I mean?
If you’ve read enough and want in on Synnd use this affiliate link to save 30 DOLLARS off any Synnd paid level by applying > DISCOUNT_30
Is this a mandate on Social Signals as a ranking factor? Apparently so…
People talk about link diversity all the time, but for this test, only social signals were being tested.
Can you rank with social signals alone, via Synnd or other tools and services?
Possibly, but I can’t say for sure, so I’m NOT by any means saying that you should get Synnd and use just Synnd to try and rank your sites.
Devil’s Advocate time…
Synnd gets you social links and signals, yes, but a lot of their Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts giving the Tweets and Likes and Plus 1s are empty accounts with no followers, and following nobody, which makes these accounts somewhat spammy in nature.
So how is this authoritative social linking? It’s not authoritative social linking as far as quality of social links are concerned…
But it IS authority-like, quality social linking if you look at it from a search engine’s point of view…
Please explain WTF you’re talking about now Dan (great now I’m writing to myself) when you mention authoritative, quality social links from CRAP accounts?
I spoke to Dan from Synnd about this and he said that all of the accounts that give the social links are all based on, created on tied to… different IP addresses.
Which then brings us back to link building in general, people say you should get link diversity and backlinks from different IP addresses, and Synnd social linking is a microcosm of that idea, meaning that… if you are supposed to get different link types from varying sources, then you can take this idea and drill down a bit further and think…hmm if I’m going to get social links to add to the diversity of my inbound link portfolio, shouldn’t the links I get from this link TYPE be diverse as well?
That’s the only thing I can think of that explains why Synnd works, maybe you don’t need ALL types of links to rank something, just a diversity in whichever linking type/style you pursue.
NOTE: I am not a fan of stating that you need ALL types of links in order to rank for something, but I do recommend that if what you’re doing so far isn’t working. For example if you’re doing just article marketing and aren’t seeing much movement, try high pr links, or social links, or DoFollow blog commenting, or other stuff…
More Devil’s advocate stuff…
- What about TribePro?- never used it, heard it’s good
- What about SocialAdr?- used it, no likee, please read read the SocialAdr review
- What about getting social linking blasts from marketing forums and places like that? Those are one-hit wonders and never worked for me, as the linking and activity wasn’t steady and constant.
- What about using Bookmarking demon to create tons of accounts and bookmark, tweet, FB like, and Google +1 them towards your urls? You’re not gonna get unique social links from unique IP addresses in the VOLUME that Synnd delivers…
I’m going on vacation the the Dominican Republic in a few days and wanted to get this Synnd review “out the door” early enough before I leave, so as to address any comments or questions you (my Dear 12 readers might have.
One last thing, I like automation, my time is too valuable and too limited to actually DO anything myself like create accounts, and write articles and stuff (except here on this blog o’ mine)
I got the Enterprise Level membership with Synnd to review this and to use this as easily as possible. I just want you to know what membership level I joined at so you don’t expect the same results with a lower, or free level membership with them.
Hope you like the review on Synnd, check out my affiliate link here to save 30 DOLLARS off ANY level. discount code is DISCOUNT_30 if you think this review is worthy of affiliate credit, thank you
Please ask any questions in comments section, as I’m sure I neglected to mention some details you might be interested in before making a decision on this…
ALSO, please read users’ comments below so you can see others’ experiences with Synnd as well
Additional notes: People want to know how to allocate their Synnd credits; since Synnd’s working for me, all I can say is use the following ratios for allocations. I didn’t come up with this, it was done for me by whomever sets up my campaigns, but if you have a lower-than-enterprise membership, just look at what you see here and divide/allocate accordingly
Bookmarking = 49/day
Social News = 21/day
Twitter = 11/day
Facebook = 25/day
** +1s aren’t enabled yet** 
{ 154 comments… read them below or add one }
← Previous Comments
If I used synnd on an old site that I have not built links to in more than 6 months, will this hurt the site’s rankings? can i get tweets, bookmarks, and likes to more than 1 url a month or is everything just focused on one url?
Synnd will absolutely hurt your rankings. I have been using for about 12 months. Tested across multiple domains and servers using varying strategies.
At first things look great but lately it appears that Google is able to recognize artificial patterns in social signals and then discount them and subsequently penalize the page/domain.
IMHO … STAY AWAY!!!
Hi Rick,
I read your feedback here and I’m wondering if you could please give me your SYNND username so I can investigate your account? Your experience would be totally out of line with every member we have in our SYNND network, and I’d like to review your website and campaigns to see what you are talking about.
The other reason I’d like to know who you are is because we have had similar post, worded exactly like yours, in other forums, and when we asked the person to reveal who they were, so we could help them, they never did…and later we discovered it was a former company employee who continues to engage in childish behavior and pretends to be a real SYNND member, when in fact their story was 100% untrue and fabricated.
Like any business, we have our issues and fall short from time to time, but no one has ever verified a situation like the one you describe. If this were true our membership would not continue to increase, as it has, especially since Penguin, and the reason is because SYNND is effective. With our new update that we are rolling out from Sept 5th 2012 on we expect the impact of SYNND to only increase further.
Also, whenever we find a SYNND member who has encountered genuine problems or needs help we always try to do what we can to assist them. Once we get this new update completed I will come back to this forum and explain some of the new features and services we have incorporated in this recent SYNND update.
Thanks,
Thomas
Hey there I am new to your site, I enjoyed reading your reviews im over everyone always praising software and being non critical. Syndd looks interesting, i just came across epic traffic that seems similar in nature to a degree and wondered what you thought about it. I guess you can only bookmark for a start, and they use proxies. I have used social addr and not got very far.
Cheers
G
they guys at syndd are terrible at managing discounts or their own accounting…. they have no idea where they stand +, but the service does work.
We want to apologize for any issues that people have had recently with billing related struggles for SYNND. First, we have had nothing but nightmares with Infusionsoft (don’t use it if you are thinking about it). Then we decided to offer PayPal based on demand, but their API is terrible and inflexible for a multi-level subscription business like SYNND. Additionally, they have a known issue with blank pages at the end of a sign-up, and this means that new customers do not get their login information
We finally had to stop offering it; too much trouble with their base API. This was also impacting the discount process.
So I again apologize for any issues, we are moving to a new billing system and a newer version potentially of the PayPal API. If anyone still experiences problems with the discount offer, please send an e-mail through the Contact Us page at SYNND.com and we will take care of you.
Best to everyone’s success.
I realize now I need sexier content for this service. I can’t find any writers (that I can afford) that can make an acne or colon cleanse article that could reach the first page of Digg.
A question for Dan from Synnd:
While researching Synnd, I found the following forum comment (dated June 2011) :
“Most Bookmarks they place on sites like Stumbleupon, Reddit do come from diverse IP range. But, within 24 hours they get deleted. So, if Synnd gives 25 positive votes on Reddit, the Reddit system gives 24 negative votes immediately to make your listing a spam listing. On a similar note, you will see that the Stumbleupon submissions don’t work either.
“On some newer Social Bookmarking sites on which they submit your sites, the submissions will last for a week or so. The algorithms of these SB sites are able to identify that the submissions are spam.”
Dan from Synnd – is this accurate?
Elise, I saw that BLF/TP thread a while back… some of the points are valid,and some are probably just valid points, for 11 months ago. I’ll let Dan address those questions about link permanence…
Here’s what I’ve been doing, I’ve been shopping around for a mix and match slew of services that can basically do what Synnd does, and the time its taking me to go thru all those garbage fiverr service offerings and what-not is just not panning out for me. In a lot of cases the wanna -be Synnd-like services have had negative SEO effects on sites tested.
I see a few people who are contributors to Marketer’s Relief saying the following:
1- Synnd’s credits system is a mess, their vid tutrials aren’t good
2- They like the effects of the Synnd service
I’ll keep hunting around to see if I can find services that will do what Synnd does, and maybe for less, but my time’s been wasted already by suffering through fiverr garbage seo stuff. If I pick a top-notch Google Plus 1 service, and a Press Release service, and a bookmarking service, those will all end up costing me more than Synnd does, if it’s quality automation, if such a thing exists.
We can be of several schools of thought here…
1- Hunt and gather to find cheapest, most effective slew of services and offering that are tantamount to what Synnd offers. Upside is potential cost-savings, downside is time-lost. If you make 500/day for example…and spent half a day, or even a week trying to gather together some cost-saving services to save 50/month, that’s not good business in my eyes but will save you money
2- Take the middle road here and do higher-quality automation with Synnd
3- Take the highest road and outsource all of the tasks that Synnd does for you, costs a lot more than you’d think
I don’t do much biz-talk here but something I think more people should think about (without me sounding defensive or brainwashing here) is… when the focus is on saving money, income generation becomes less of a focus and income drops. When focus is on income generation and NOT on cost-saving, then income increases… and all of the above are moot points.
I think Synnd needs a lot of work,
I think it’s rolling out new stuff in a very weird non-satisfactory way,
I think they have SO freaking much to share that’s not being shared
and I know the philosophy that’s in there somewhere is, and has been working well for people.
I also understand that if I had a product that I cared about and it was a labor of love (MR for example) then I will focus more on quality than quantity and will roll out new info and tools once they’re ready and not put something out for sake of putting something out….
If there’s good long term Quality control, then you/it/they will be worth waiting for, and yet with all that being said, the Article Submission for Synnd has been in Alpha/Beta for a long time…credits system makes sense (to them), new features could be rolled out sooner, and I DO appreciate their stance on Plus 1s, but there should have been a solution for this by now, too
Dan, thanks so much for taking the time to give such a detailed reply. (I don’t say you’re the best for no reason).
It’s certainly a minefield out there when it comes to buying social signals.
Agree with you absolutely on the value of time and automation – nothing like “paralysis by analysis” to eat the profit. I’m not by any means looking for the cheapest service, and don’t mind spending more on multiple providers if it gets better results (without too much extra time and messing about), so I guess that’s why I raised the question above. Mostly concerned about ROI – as in sticking power, quality, etc.
I’m about to take the plunge and try out a few different things – I’ll keep you posted. If you don’t hear back, assume I’m in Tahiti (or got a day job).
Love the shirt, by the way.
@ Elsie – regarding retention. THe same is true of any service that posts on most of these BM sites. Often you link is kept, but it’ shuffled further and further down the levels till it’s 4 or 5 “back slashes” from the domain root, and eventually archived (or deleted altogether).
I dono’t think permanance is a metric for social signals. Keeping them going all the time is what I suspect is required. Continuially updating them. In Synnds case going in and changing your campaigns regularly, new tags, descriptions and content.
And that’s Synnds biggest issue for me. The interface and clarity are pretty poor. It takes ages to approve campaigns, and it’s only by logging in the next day you see any issues that might have occured. The credits sytem needs clarification. I’m none plussed about the way aspects of their system are turned on and off (Google +1, articles since I’ve been with them)
The automated campaigns lack the substance that I would have, the comments are too small and too generic. So we are stuck with an obtuse credit system and a cumbersome web based interface.
Though automating Google+1 is like inviting the IRS into your home when your busy moving cash to your offshore bank account…a stupid idea at the best of times.
Sounds like I’m not a fan of Synnd?
Well, I do like it. It’s good. But like many others I’m looking for something that let’s me do the same thing – just a whole lot easier.
Dans point on price is 100% valid.
While looking for “cheap” you risk dropping your ROI.
As my Grandad was fond of saying “You won’t win a raffle if you don’t buy a ticket”
Question Dan: If you stop using the social signals by synnd for a site, does the rank fall?
We always appreciate feedback, good or bad, so I will try to address each point:
1. Old Forum Post about :
“Most Bookmarks they place on sites like Stumbleupon, Reddit do come from diverse IP range. But, within 24 hours they get deleted. So, if Synnd gives 25 positive votes on Reddit, the Reddit system gives 24 negative votes immediately to make your listing a spam listing. On a similar note, you will see that the Stumbleupon submissions don’t work either.
“On some newer Social Bookmarking sites on which they submit your sites, the submissions will last for a week or so. The algorithms of these SB sites are able to identify that the submissions are spam.”
***RESPONSE: There is some confusion here. When a story is submitted to a social news site, such as Reddit, Reddit can elect to remove a story. We give a LOT of guidance in the training about what type of content is social news worthy. 99% of the time, if a story is removed, it is pushing a product or service, which is a no-no. Also, we let members know that if they do manage to get it through and the story sticks, if it is crap, it will be voted down…so they need to decide whether it is quality content that fits one of the 3Es: educational, enlightening, or entertaining.
***IMPORTANT: SYNND is merely the vehicle, it is the members’ content.
Regarding the bookmarking being spammy, no issues. They are coming from real profile accounts connected to each member. A SYNND member decides whether they want to recommend content or not. If it is of poor quality, it will not go far in SYNND, or on the Net for that matter.
2. Credit System:
The system is intended to be straightforward. We post the cost of each promotion that occurs through the SYNND content community area. With the exception of commenting modules (social news and blog), all are 8 credits with the exception of Facebook which is 20. We could simplify it and say you can promote X pieces of content and you only get X,Y,Z of possible social recommendations. This is not what 99% of members want. We give you the capability of the system and an instant audience of now more than 30,000 members who review, curate, and recommend quality content. No having flexibility to decide what content you want to promote more and how you want to promote it is not ideal.
Not always, but usually the only issues that we see with issues around credit confusion comes when members set up too many campaigns without taking the advice in the training area to start with just a few to see how their credit metrics look the next day.
Also, all the metrics they need are visible from within the dashboard. Just click on the colored square and you can see how you are spending your credits. Too high, just adjust down inside the campaign.
3. Cost:
We recognize that every marketer wants to get the most for their money. Totally get that. When the last round of the Google hammer came down, we had 2 customers who notified us of being impacted. Both had been involved with artificial link building in a big way prior to joining SYNND. That was it. I did have MANY who joined SYNND after sending me data from using 3 other “comparable” services. Prior to Penguin…a LOT of indexed pages. After Penguin, almost none. Why? Because they are leaving a footprint. Do you pay a little more for SYNND? Maybe. Price should not be the only factor you consider, as these customers I mentioned could have thrown their money in the garbage to get the same result. Now they are coming to SYNND to try to get back to where they were. It was MORE, not less expensive. We actually reduced credit pricing 20% last month as we passed along the benefit of some efficiency improvements.
Finding another service that can deliver social signals is not the question. The same way that you can find someone to give you links. The cheapest is not always the best, and as we have seen recently, cheap can be expensive if it destroys everything you have created. If you are trying to build a business, what does that cost? There is always an investment.
4. SYNND Holding Back Information:
This is surprising actually. We do free webinars frequently just to answer any/all questions. We do not hold back. Our CEO put together a long video to help and I was told that, “it gave too much information.” What??? We have another webinar regarding Google in the next week or so…again for free(!), which should be the most well-informing of anything that we have seen.
I respect your point about just putting something out there (quantity vs. quality), but I do not feel that we have done that. The only correct way to test something is to…test it. We have always talked about SYNND as a developmental community. Members give us excellent feedback. The article module was tested, upgrade, upgraded again after Google’s changes, and will be released. G+1 was fine, but we saw issues with fluctuating widget counts (we were not alone), and an issue with their own analytics not appearing to match the widget counts. We got tired of being inundated with tickets on something that was outside our control. Someone said that we should have launched it by now. We can’t until we see this resolved. We continue to monitor it weekly. We clearly want to re-launch it.
SYNND will always be in Beta as we will never be satisfied. It is more of a frame of mind than anything else. This are constantly changing, so we want to change with it.
5. Closing:
We accept that we are not perfect, far from it. That said, have we raised prices…no, we just dropped them. Do we continue to add more and grow development for SYNND…yes. Do we listen to what members want…yes. People wanted video distribution, this is almost ready for testing. Press releases, same thing. We will also continue to do more to help improve ranking (a lot in testing), more around analytics, and more on education.
I again appreciate your comments. We will continue to improve.
1. I’m sure there are some people submitting self-serving articles to digg/stumble etc., but they are obviously flagging “spam” accounts and voting down the articles they promote no matter what they are about.
The bottomline is most articles aren’t going to be digg worthy and any account that’s consistently voting up non-digg worthy articles are going to look suspicious.
Hey Dan,
Been scratching my head all day to figure this out. Basically, it’s about Synnd versus everyone else.
There’s one thing I can’t figure out.
The only edge Synnd has over other social bookmarking offers is that it can bookmark your urls via different ips worldwide.
Here’s the thing, how would Google know that your urls are being bookmarked from different ips?
Let’s say the bookmarking site Mylinkvault. Each bookmark (regardless of ip source), to Google’s eyes, would just be a link from Mylinkvault. The link itself is hosted on Mylinkvault which has one IP (hosting).
If Google cannot see the difference in IPs in each of the bookmarkers, does it make a difference?
The only reason people use different ips with social bookmarking is to prevent the site itself from deleting the accounts right?
Any thoughts/feedback on this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
This is exactly what I thought, and if you pay $97/mo. or so, and this is the distinguishing feature of SYNDD you want to make sure it matters.
So I asked support whether Google could pick up on IP diversity. The response I got was “Yes, Google and the social networks can tell”, and then a shift about Penguin hitting people using competing social signals.
I asked directly again whether IP diversity matters to Google, and the response was nobody knows everything about Google but we do learn a lot, which left me puzzled. I felt the question was being avoided so I took the response implied as being, “Yes, Google has no clue about the IPs being posted from.”
Personally, I’ve seen no tangible benefit so far worth the fees charged. Just clarifying, by tangible benefit, I mean tangible SEO benefit on the site I’ve used SYNDD for. But I should add the site and keywords ranking for are quite competitive. If you do want social signals though, then SYNDD does offer a reasonable service.
It is cumbersome setting up campaigns — I dread it. And the time-investment + cost-investment I may discontinue. But for now, I’m continuing with it.
Just a hunch on my end of things, but for the dozen or so URLs I’ve tested that HAVE seen tangible seo benefits from Synnd… maybe they saw results merely because their lack of social signals was being resolved, addressed… and they rose in SERPs merely due to a glaring need having been fulfilled.
I just don’t think that a LACK of social signals is a serps-killer, but just trying to think of reasons why Synnd’s not working for you when it works on everything I try it on…crap sites too
Hi Daniel,
I’ve only tested it on one site and it is competitive for the keyword I’m SEOing for.
It might also depend on the social signals that get used. I’m running bookmarks, Twitter and Facebook campaigns… what do you use?
It’s not so much about Google recognising them as the better bookmark sites accepting them in the first place. Multiple submissions from the same IP or range of IP’s often leads to accounts bans. Once they are accepted, nost to not carry the IP “DNA” forward for google to interrogate when their crawler comes around to index.
Hey guys
Synnd is a really cool platform.
have been using it for 5 weeks now. none of the bookmarks have indexed, how long does it usually take?
yet to see any results but i am positive they will come soon!
Thanks for the in depth and honest review you have written up. SYNDD has been recommended to me so just trying to check it out.
I’m in a great confusion whether to buy synnd or TPN…. Don’t know wat to opt for…
Apples and oranges here, comparisons-wise. If you read both reviews and ensuing comments you’ll see both are NOT recommended by some commenters, and recommended by others. I still use Synnd, am happy with it, and TPN is crying out for a re-review, so…. might wanna go with Synnd here.
Social, video, press releases, article marketing…. not too bad….they also have seminars
Hi Daniel,
I’ve been following your reviews for a few months now and have gotten a lot of great info, so thanks for keeping it real. I’m glad to hear that you and a few others seem to be having some success with Syndd, but my experience was a NIGHTMARE… After seeing no serp movement for three months on the Enterprise plan ($297/mo), I started being double and triple billed. Luckily I caught it soon, but this could hurt many larger businesses that may not be paying close attention to their subscription rates. Anyway, after bringing my issue to the attention of their billing department, I got a response from co-owner Dan Gronsbell explaining that Syndd was experiencing problems due to a 3rd party billing migration. As a business owner I understand that these things happen and I accepted his apology along with a refund for the extra charges. But the following month the over-billing continued to occur. When I contacted Dan again, he tried to convince me that the charges were legitimate until I took the time to itemize my bank statements for him. At this point he conceded and offered to cancel my subscription and refund the over-billed amount. This was in April… It is now June and I have yet to get my money back. I had to dispute the overcharges with my bank when he failed to honor the refund he promised and I now spend my spare time filling out investigation forms and talking with bank reps. DO NOT GIVE THESE GUYS MONEY… Their ACCOUNTING IS A MESS and I have yet to see any proof that the results from their service are worth the time and money invested… BUYER BEWARE!!
syndd is terrible it sucks, they have no idea where they stand dont buy it…it didnt work for me either
@hernan. While I get your frustration, it’d be more helpful if you’d give some detail to allow readers to make an informed decision based on your experiences. Social noise is more effective in certain circumstances than others. Put a bit of meat on the bones mate and tell us what you did and how you did it.
1. their point system is erratic
2. their billing system is confusing and they never took into consideration the coupon from linkvanareview
3. their support system sucks, they first deny it and then you have to scale it back until you convince them its their mistake
4. Finally for the price you get better services in the market its expensive
Cancelled with them weeks ago. They are still billing. Paypal dispute opened.
Seems I’m no the only one.
They really are shocking
Synnd reps if you are reading this. Cancellation procedure followed to the letter: Ticket ID: QGX-218-21064
Paypal dispute number should be in your hands now.
Your whole billing and subs system is a shambles. Get with the 21st century. The whole idea of raising a manually moderated ticket to cancel is a joke. Essp as you clearly don’t act on them. How many Paypal disputes are you going to get before they refuse you as a merchant?
Provide a “Cancel Now” button like everyone else providing a similar service has for ten years or more.
I expect a refund processed within 24 hours.
Just found out the contact page on Synnd (where – following Paypal’s advice I tried to “contact” the vendor) now returns a “email app does no exist” error page.
Smooth move Ferguson
I have been following the recent discussion with some disappointment. As a member of the CS team, we respond to every ticket with as much accuracy, attention, and speed as we can. In fact, I personally spend a lot of time with members on the phone and doing screencasts, often times in areas totally outside of SYNND itself. Why…because we highly value the success for every client.
Regarding billing, I am aware of Andrew’s situation. He is correct in that there was an issue with Infusionsoft, which I have actually discussed in this area before. Just a few customers were being billed weekly rather than monthly. Not a single customer’s situation was not resolved.
Results with ANY system will vary. We have many, many customers, including Daniel McGonagle, who reported excellent results. We have many customers who have been with us for years and rave about the results. Are there some who will not see results, but the vast majority of the time when we look into their account we find that the system has not been used as we advised or their site/content needs improvement…SYNND is a leveraging tool and cannot make up for certain shortcomings. Here are some examples which cover 95% of what I see:
1. A member decided to use it their own way, such as spreading their promotions too thinly across different sites
2. Not accounting for the competition correctly and have selected the wrong level (not enough promotional firepower). This is common, whereby a customer is shooting for heavily competitive terms (i.e. high ROI potential and thus competition), and are not investing enough (probably not under-investing just in SYNND actually). If there is money to be made and competition is high, one has to determine if they are investing enough to capture their goals
3. Did other things that the SERPS frowned upon
4. Started too fast and threw an enormous amount of promotions on a URL without any build-up and without having any social popularity beforehand. Also have too little content syndicated in general relative to the competition in their niche
5. Little market research done; poor keyword depth, poor/incorrect/no anchoring –> poor site structuring, poor keyword usage diversity and over optimization
6. Promote only what is on their blog and nothing else (e.g. no YouTube videos, podcasts, Web 2.0 blogs, press releases, images/pictures on Flickr/Photobucket, etc.). So nobody outside their those who find their blog find their content of interest, which also limits their inbound linking diversity
7. Members often times are not utilizing SERP-based RSS (Feedburner, Yahoo Pipes, etc.) to even help their content be indexed, whereby crawled social signals are leveraged. There is often a misunderstanding that every link that results from SYNND will be indexed. They incorrectly do not see the value in initial crawling and then a likelihood of future indexing. The indexing will become harder as social is used more and more, but crawling is still an acknowledgement, and is highly valuable if the member has had the content they are syndicating indexed. Webmaster tools or another system need to be set up to monitor; WE monitor this so we know crawling is happening
8. Etc…
So when it comes down to it, there are thousands who see success with SYNND; how could that be if it does not work? Again, this post was written from someone who said they DID get great results. It works, if you are in a position to leverage all the other work that you have done, have a SYNND level aligned with your niche/keywords, and have followed our suggestions. Some see results in 1-2 months, others longer depending on many factors outside of SYNND. There are no silver bullets, and it will always take some experimentation to determine what works best for you. We do try to help as much as we can.
As a CS person, among other roles, I can personally say that ANY member who contacts us at the support desk for help receives it. While our team strives for perfection, we acknowledge that we always have room to improve. For every 1 less than positive comment we get, which we try to make right, we get 100 that tell us that we go the extra mile.
I welcome anyone to always contact me through the support desk or by e-mail: inquiry@synnd.com.
Dan
SYNND
To provide an additional data point, in my previous reply, I mentioned that one of the reasons for not getting results was #1, not syndicating enough content for a particular site. Andrew stated that he did not see results…here is a summary of what was done, and validates one of the most common mistakes, related to point #1:
1. he was running 23 campaigns on 15 different sites, which means mainly 1 campaign and on a few sites 2 campaigns per site which obviously isn’t going to help anything.
2. he was running a lot of FB likes, tweets and social news, not much bookmarking (should have been), but none of the sites appear to have social widgets to show these social signals (i.e. social proof)
It is just not enough to run one single campaign on one URL of your site and expect any movement at all.
I have been a Synnd member for over a year. Yes, Synnd has had some growing pains, (don’t all new companies) but the three owners are hard-working men of integrity who really care about the success of their members. The customer service is excellent and I receive feedback and answered tickets within 24 hours. Feel free to email to verify that I am the real!
Hmm the discount code is not working anymore
Hey Daniel,
Long time no speak! Anyway, wanted to give my own input into Synnd. I’ve been an on again off again user since it’s inception (which was in ’09?)
Anyway, their FB, Twitter, and G+ module is extremely erratic (at best) and in fact my own account hadn’t gotten any of those services in over a month because of an software “upgrade”.
Their customer service is responsive, if very vague and will not answer basic questions like “what is your projected time the upgrade will be complete”.
Hello All-
I have chimed in from time to time. We have taken both positive and negative feedback and tried to improve on SYNND. Here is an update to address certain questions…
Google +, Facebook, and Twitter are all active. We have done a number of updates in the last week, and over the next 2 weeks, our Twitter capability will double (again) and G+ and FB should also see sizable improvements.
Our video syndication module has been up for over a month and I get glowing reviews on those who are implementing our (or their own) proposed strategies. We have a document in the training area under Video Overview that is a full content map.
The bottom line, everything for marketers now centers around video. We cover the top sites (and growing almost weekly…with Pinterest and Tumblr about to be implemented). So take SYNND’s ability to distribute your video to the top sites with unique supporting content (titles and descriptions), nobody else does this, and then run promotional campaigns through the other modules on top of EACH VIDEO SITE URL…it is huge!
We also have our Web 2.0 / Article module almost ready (sites like Squidoo, Blogger, Ezine, etc.), and are going to have an image syndication module (images are huge, like videos). So a lot coming and a lot there already.
@Kurt – as I assist with support, I wanted to let you know that an vagueness in responses on dates is by no means on purpose. G+, FB, and Twitter are completely different modules than you would find elsewhere because we are not promoting through a small group of internal network members like others, but are going to these networks directly to find interested parties. Just think of the difference in IP diversity this brings. This has been an amazingly difficult developmental process for us. The results are now being seen. If you have any further questions, by all means, ping me in Support.
Happy New Year to all, including Daniel.
Best,
Dan @ SYNND
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