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 my HIGHPRLinkJuice.com 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** 
Download Targeted Subscribers Wordpress Plugin Here
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Which campaigns did you run to get those results? Bookmarking? Social News? +1? What was your daily quota with each campaign?
Thanks for the question, I knew I’d forgotten some details (see?)
I ran Bookmarking social news, bookmarking likes and then added in +1s about 4 days ago, when I saw that it had NOT been checked off.
I think Enterprise Level is like 20-30k promotion credits/month, and I had these equally divided over the 2 urls mentioned
Hi Dan! Are you familiar with socialadr? Seems like a cheaper alternative to Synnd.
Anyway, thanks for the great review.
Is Synnd the new #1 link building service you mentioned a few weeks back?
Hey Jason, please read the review I did on SocialAdr, and no Synnd isn’t my next #1 top rated service. speaking of which I’m kind of glad I held off on publishing that review because I’m starting to see cracks in that service alluded to, we shall see
They grabbed my attention when they said they had “manual review proof” blogs in their network. There was nothing special about their blogs compared to BMR. If anything the content might have been a bit worse. The homepage links didn’t really do much for me.
I think I might be better off with a High PR Contextual Network + BMR (or even Authority Link Network for the lazy).
Briggstown, what are we talking about here… ALN?
TPN
Awesome post, will miss you when you’re on holiday
Hope you have a blast, though!
When I saw your post, I thought, readers can learn a lot from what you’re doing. I mean, all the gurus can talk about “improving reader experience” and all that but you’re really walking the walk here
Ok, now my 2c about SYnnd:
I signed up about a year ago so things may have changed a little. However:
1. The process is slow and steady, as you’ve mentioned. I wanted to use this on a news-y site to get social media traffic, that wasn’t going to happen.
2. I seemed to constantly get fewer credits worth of stuff than I was meant to, each day, when it did work.
3. Most importantly: the freak issues that you talk about seem to be a constant thing. For my first two weeks or so, things weren’t moving, due to their backend issues. So I just sat there like a fool while someone tried to fix it for me. Then finally when they got it working, I got fewer credits than I was meant to, due to another “freak glitch”. So anyone going in needs to be prepared to deal with these kinds of issues. And needs to be on the ball regarding what’s going on, and if you think there are issues you need to actually push their support staff (who are actually quite good) to fix it for you.
4. Since Synnd wasn’t working for me and things were still messy, I wanted a refund. They were not happy about this, I had to msg them a few times, including forwarding the ticket where they responded to my issues and categorically stated that if I was not happy they would refund me. Sure they would. They refunded half the money (from memory) because I had been with them two weeks (and not getting any service due to their own issues, not my fault in any way). Plus I had purchased extra credits of about $100 which were completely unused and they refused to refund those.
So.
That’s my opinion of Synnd.
(And it’s not much money, but the attitude of not wanting to refund, despite it being 100% their fault, that really got to me. Cost of doing business with a “big player” like Synnd I guess.)
However, results are all that count and your results seem to be stellar.
I guess someone with $100-$150 per month to burn, plus a lot more patience than me, plus the willingness to stomach and unexpected extra “cost of doing business” could go ahead with this.
Oh and regarding the issues – the previous review you did of Synnd also brought this up. So I think “strange isolated issues that we’ve never seen before” are a common feature of synnd.
But back to the point – when I develop a bit more patience I might go ahead and get Synnd again. It certainly works (from your review), and now I know I need to bust their chops asap if things aren’t working.
But when you think in terms of ROI: $100 a month could be used on HPBL services to get quicker results I think, and for cash-poor time-rich people, BMR might get good results at $60ish per month and a fair bit of time (ALN and ALN services are also an alternative to BMR I guess). I think it goes back to what you say about spending a bit, getting the cash, reinvesting.
And to make my comment longer, I will say this:
I think even after a site ranks, synnd can be useful for adding credibility and “proof” for rankings. So even if I seem my keywords ranking with just some HPBL and BMR links, I might get synnd for my “authority” money site.
Enjoy your vacation Dan, we’ll miss you and (we 13 readers) will be waiting for your next post. Btw- anyone’s blog I should read when you’re gone? Splork seems to have diverted into US politics
Hey “post”. thanks for a great read/comment/feedback etc…
Good points about Synnd’s isolated issues being more of a recurring nature that isolated. I could have received Synnd for free, and decided against it so I could get the “regular member” experience.
The beauty about using Social to rank sites is it makes it really really difficult for your competition to ascertain your inbound link portfolio to then try to copy, meet and exceed your backlinks portfolio. your competitors will see a site, or page on site of yours, see MAYBE… that it has 30 Tweets, and think… well, he/she isn’t ranking for this due to 30 Tweets, ReTweets, must be something else.
Same goes for using Linxboss, it works really well sometimes, and their links don’t show up as credited links on any backlinks checkers, thereby confusing people, if people were to try and copy your IBL portfolio
but I digress…
Yes, Synnd’s interface needs works, and the anomalies are more like tendencies
Read BlueHatseo guy, he’s good, very technical, too smart for a mouth-breather like me
In full disclosure, I am a co-owner of Social Media Science, which includes SYNND. I came across this post so I hope that it is ok to weigh in on certain topics. It is always great to get a fresh perspective on SYNND from users.
Regarding the dashboard, it is “clunky.” We have several updates that will be released in the next 1-2 weeks that will make it, “less clunky.” There are a lot of moving pieces with SYNND, so it can be harder to make it pretty. Several important changes will make it easier to set up campaigns in Enterprise, and provide all membership levels a much easier time with understanding credit spending and ability to change that on the fly. We hope it improves the user experience.
Getting past the alter-ego schizophrenia, I love it when a service comes together. Amazing results. Is there any other site will real reviews of all the seo crap out there? I’m in because of this review. Synnd should be happy about it too, and should take a long hard look at the customer service falters. Thanks, again, Dan.
Thanks Pardner, I Skyped them the url to this review, they’re active and image-aware and image-conscious, etc…
I hope to see the other Dan and/or Charles on here
Dan (the other Dan) is a tough reviewer, and while I may not agree with everything in it, he appears to have taken it through its paces (again). It is cool that he shares his insight openly.
I did want to respond to the customer support comment. We recognized a few months ago that improvements needed to be made. Even today, it is not yet where we want it to be. We have gone through two major changes in the last 2 months to improve support. In the past, we have spent so much time on development that we did not address other aspects. This includes support, which as I mentioned has just gone through some major updates, as well as the system’s interface. As we add to the modules in the system, we are also re-channeling energy to give the user a better experience and help them gain better results while keeping the cost of the system about the same. Actually as we have added features, overall the system has gotten less expensive for users.
We are committed to offering the absolute best value and will take suggestions like this and make improvements.
Dan,
Thanks for the great overview of the service. I’m going to try it out with your aff link. I’ll post the results here in a bit.
Have a great vacation.
-Gerrid
Thanks Gerrid, for best results, don’t spread yourself too thin with credits allocation, put everything towards a url or 2 that has a shot at ranking, disperse the allocations too much and i/we/you may never know wha tit takes to use the service effectively. you might need 100% of the credit for 3 months to see results, and it may/may not be worth it ROI-wise, or it may works wonders for 50 urls all at once.
Just saying, it’s a bit of a leap of faith, despite the in-depth review and what-not, and I realize that (leap of faith for the enterprise level i mean)
And thanks again for using my aff link, this site runs on those… EDIT and Dunkins
Would the basic $97 per month service be enough?
Yes, it might be if you focus it all on one url, and 3 keywords or less, if it’s a competitive term. Here’s thing though, form what I see with social linking, the rankings stick, whereas if we build links via article marketing for example, the rankings might drop off a year or so , or even sooner after being attained. Something to think about… so you could move from one url to the next, and all the way down a “line” and rank one url after another, and enjoy the longer-standing SERPs that we’re accustomed to
Thanks Dan
Went through your affl link.
Went to test their lite version
“SYNND Lite is restricted to 120 credits
per day ”
http://synnd.com/synnd-lite/
When you click through the link to test it now comes up as
“Only 12 promotional credits per day”
Either they have poor language skills and are talking about different things..which is a worry.
Or
Their promo page is BS.
Which is it.?
Mike
Mike, thanks for using the aff link, I never checked the promo page, or their opt-in or webinar presentation page, figured it was newbie stuff.
Funny thing about seo services and link building services is, it seems like people are so passionate and determine dot rank their sites that user interfaces are lacking to a degree not seen in other types of recurring fee services, like Adsense guild, or any of a number of other membership services I can’t recall names for right now.
We ALL want results, I buy from people’s aff links, too if the reviews are solid and real, but sometimes I will not recommend using a service due to it/them having a poor sales page and/or poor customer experience, and just go find something better, user experience-wise.
I might have to write a “how Synnd could be better post”, hopefully they have some interface changes coming soon
Here’s Tip 1 for Synnd- tell users to get a tool like Twitter Adder, or make one and have it provided free of charge for us Synnd users, and have us/them use a Twitter Adder-like tool to add followers and follow people automatically. It’s real easy to do (Twitter Adder, it’s automated to a large degree once you set up some parameters, some specs) and it would negate my point above about lots of the accounts not following or being followed by anyone.
Thanks,
Dan
In December, we moved to a 10x multiplier because there were some complexities in trying to do credits in decimal based increments (e.g. 2.5 credits). We have a lot of sales pages through different gateways on the site, and every time we thing that we updated all of them, we find one.
Sorry about the confusion.
Now I am grumpy because I notice 25% of my BMR posts (old, closed account) are on PR 0 sites. Seriously?
Am going through shades of worry as I try to decide on a backlinking campaign for my new baby (soon to be authority site, hopefully). It makes some cash already but I’m a stingy gal so… Have you had a look at ALN? There are hands-free aln services which are nice, $50 monthly handsfree vs $60 monthly with a lot of effort for BMR … Sorry to be OT but trying to decide the best combo for a new site… may just suck it up and go re-sign-up with Synnd for this site…. (along with HPBL and ALN/BMR/????)
Hey there “gal”.
I’ve heard of those ALN services, best to use them as a service instead of using ALN itself, in my opinion. Why bother buying a domain with GOOD Pagerank and then use it to get those PR 0 links, why not just buy 10 domains with PR and build yourself a private network?
Just saying…
also when you log into BMR in your back office, you’ll see they’re Page Rank distribution for their websites in the network, and you should see how many of them are Pr 0s, so it’s not a huge surprise to see 25% of your posts going on PR 0 sites, especially when PR 0 domains comprise approx. 25% or more of their network
Hey Dan,
Did you use the Article Submission or Blog Commenting service? Also, I think they’re working on the issues that you mentioned. Before you login there’s an “updates” page…
Here are two of the updates:
“7. Friending module reactivated
Due to previous performance issues we deactivated the friending module. This will now be reactivated again and will make automated friending/following requests on all networks that support this feature. This will provide a more complete profile for new accounts in order to conform to the higher standards we are constantly seeking for every part of the SYNND engine. Considering the huge amount of accounts we’ve got in our system this will take a while to become visible, as we do not want to encounter any suspension issues.”
And
“8. Avatar/Profile module newly introduced
We now have a module that takes care of profiles and avatar images on all the networks that support this feature to increase the natural authentication components that are normally present on quality social based networks. The same is true for this module as for the previous one with regard to the time it will take to become visible on all sites.”
Hi William thanks for the question, I totally forgot to mention that I didn’t use blog commenting, or article submissions, and just used Synnd for social stuff, that’ sit.
They also have a Press Release submission module in BETA, and I was asked if I wanted to use it, but what I was really looking for with Synnd is to get definitive proof on what social linking ALONE can do, and they seemed like the best service to do this sort of test with.
The results I referred to in this post were achieved via bookmarking, micro-blogging, tweets, likes, and very recently..Google +1s
The Avatar profile thing is important because it makes the accounts look more natural and fleshed out,and it’s a good idea.
When I last used Synnd years ago, their article submission module was in BETA then and I think it’s gone through overhauls recently, too. which is a bit disheartening because after a year or so these REALLY smart guys should be able to throw together something like an article marketing demon, or article marketing robot fairly easily.
With hundreds, maybe even thousands of Synnd users, they should be able to deliver quite an expansive optional article-sharing network too, even if its a fairly ineffective one like Myarticlenetwork, which is a middle-man network
Middleman networks are those networks in which users can Host other users’ articles on their sites in in exchange for publishing articles to others’ sites in same network. REAL easy to do with a submission interface and a custom PHP script or even a plugin
Did you install the remote automator software? If you did, how many credits were you able to get back from using it?
How did you set up your campaigns? For Example, I set up up a bookmarking campaign with “Max. Promotions” set at 250 and “Daily Max.” set at 10.
Should I set a higher “daily max”?
Hey, I got the Enterprise level membership so it would be more automated and hands-free for me. I asked for an equal dispersion of credits across all the social linking types, not really sure what the exact number of credits are for each.
I would put all of its firepower towards a url or 2, at most, just to get a good idea on how it works, if at all…for you, then if you see results after a few weeks, make a decision then whether you want to further those positive effects, if any… for those few urls, or to expand outward a little. The best way to see if this works is to put more of its usage towards fewer urls and kws, and keep kws to 3 maximum per url.
Daniel thanks for your SYNND update Review,
Im curious about if you just used the 14,000 credits per month or a higher one?
With your review i saw that SYNND will help other linkbuilding techniques to not start dancing around from pages , instead of that it will just bounce places on the same page which will give you a huge advantage when we would like to be more agressive on link building.
Hey Aldo, what we should get from this Synnd review is that Synnd alone works for ranking things. Not as a complementary to other link building types of service, but as a standalone service. I got the Enterprise level 14k credits and divided them equally between 2 urls, so it was 7k credits each.
url. The urls moved up steadily in the serps, and if they went down it was only 1 spot which is unusual for dancing serps as you probably know…
Will it help other link building techniques? Of that I am 100% sure, because it works as a standalone utility.
I got some testing ideas for this that might be insanely good for using Synnd for. I’ll get up on that when I return for vacation.
Good to see you back here commenting again Aldo, seems like it’s been a while,
Dan
Yeah, im working hard on my adsense niche sites which im doing good. I would have to say thanks to you since my backlink source is from those reviewed by you.
I will check Synnd some day near the future and see how much it will help me on rankings my niche sites.
I’m planning to see how many low competition keywords from different sites it could handle in other words make the reach the top 3 spots with just 14k credits.
I will be waiting for your review about the other linkbuilding service you were talking about that you think will be or is better than BMR as the top 1 of your list.
Hey Dan,
Wouldn’t that be too much to throw all or half of credits to only one URL? Say, 14K monthly is suddenly throw 450 daily to a single URL… Wouldn’t that be enough spike for G to blacklist and penalize a site?
Hey Peter, good point good question. Since these social links don’t really show up too easily with backlinks checkers, and since social linking is more of a presence-giver not a link surge/link blast kind of thing, there doesn’t seem to be too much of (or any) backlash from the search engines via rankings drops, or url disappearances…when putting a lot of “emphasis” AKA promotions on just one url. I haven’t tried putting tens of thousand sof promotions credits on a new content piece though, just older urls, and main domain urls…
If your question is geared towards putting a lot of social link juice towards very recent content on a fairly new site, then yes…maybe it would be prudent to “slow your roll” there, and just drip-feed some social to that, in that scenario (newish site with newish content)
Thanks,
Dan
Hi Dan
I use Synnd and have been with them for well over a year, I have a lifetime membership and it does seem to work nicely, along with other tools.
Having said that, I have to disagree with the following comment:
“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.”
How in the world do the SE’s know the IP address you used to register with, say, reddit? Or even Facebook?
The only thing the IP diversity does is prevent FB , or Twitter or whichever site you may be using, from tracing all the accounts back to one source and ban/remove them.
Marco
Thanks for doing another review on Synnd, Daniel. I am hesitant to try them again after a really terrible experience the first time with constant technical problems, bad support, and lack luster results. I think the enterprise level is the way to go if you are going to use Synnd though. If it’s not hands off you can waste a lot of time just setting up your campaigns. But this makes me want to try them again, just not sure if 4 months paying $150 a month while be a worthwhile venture.
Jon, thanks for the comment and feedback. It seems like you need a LOT of social firepower to produce some rankings results, yes…but what I like about this is, these kinds of serps movements seem a bit more permanent than rankings gains achieved via other methods (art mktg, link farms, content farms, etc…) so I try to look a tit from a bigger picture point of view by thinking about semi-permanent to permanent rankings for certain terms getting achieved this way, which in long run is less costly. It’s just the short term ROI that’s difficult to justify. If you decide to go back with Synnd, try using Enterprise Level on a url of yours that’s slipped in rankings recently, let it ride for a bit, then see if serps slip after you achieved rankings then ceased Synnd campaigns on that url for that keyword, or those keywords…
Thanks,
Dan
Jon-
I am very sorry that your initial experience with SYNND was less than desirable. When you are ready to test it again, please reach out to us. We continue to do a lot to make the user’s experience better, and will also be adding some new modules shortly. Although not yet publicly announced (oops), we are getting ready to effectively reduce the cost on both Pro and Enterprise (more credits, same price). This should make it even more effective while keeping more coins in your pocket.
Dan,
You mentioned that you were using the Enterprise version of Synnd, and you also mentioned that you had problems initially setting up the campaigns. So I’m curious… did you set the campaigns up yourself for your tests, or did you use their “Campaign Specialists” to set up the campaigns for you?
Thanks,
Jason
Hey Jason, good question
The main reason I got the Enterprise version was the automation aspect, including the campaign specialists… I suspect that what these specialists do is, they write the spun snippets to be used in whatever social linking gets done, because I see that somewhere in my campaign setups, and I know I didn’t do those myself. Aside from that, it seems that if I didn’t check and double-check my campaign stats, credits, promotions etc… that I’d never have known if things were progressing as properly and as automated as I’d like.
Whenever I saw something I didn’t understand nor like, I emailed support and got an answer within a day and then Dan (mentioned earlier in this article) took a look at my account and campaigns and got things fixed, and tweaked. Not everything that didn’t do properly was Synnd’s fault, just an fyi…
So yes the campaign specialists did do something, I’m just not sure exactly what was done by them, and what extra stuff had to be done to make everything work perfectly (eventually).
Thanks,
Dan
Dan you mentioned that most services forget to have a good interface for customers. What are services offer the best 2 or 3 interfaces for link building?
Unique Article Wizard is good, intuitive
SCN (seo content network) is pretty good but could use some new feature
LinxBoss is OK, their tracking stuff is kind of a joke, their L4L thing is still a mess, but it’s easy to add sites, urls and kws there so I like it still
BMR takes some getting used to, been using them for a while now and I still end up doing the wrong things sometimes, but it’s clear and to the point once you get to know it better.
Synnd is NOT a good interface, but like most of these services, once you hack your way around, it’s not bad either.
Some services that had great interfaces had poor results so I won’t even mention them
Woooah there horsey.
UAW has a good interface?
While it’s imporved a again over the past 6 months in terms of results (while AMR and other submitters have begun to fail in comparison) I always thought the interface was lousy. Press the wrong “page back” button at the wrong time and “bye bye 2 hours work”. Inputting the 3 versions of stuff and waiting the (sometimes several minutes) for the website to acknowledge you had done it, then having so many different ways to add content that it was more confusing than helpful.
They really needed to offer an offline solution for at least organising your content and then having an “upload” or “publish” button. Having a complex system like UAW entirely online on slow responding servers with flaws in the UI.
Then you DO get an article in (100% hand written from scratch) only to get an email from them 2 days later to tell you they have submitted zero of them because they have found an “error”
I would rank UAW as the third worst intereface I’ve used from a major product.
I WOULD recommend UAW again from a results point of view, but what’s stopped me going back is the interface. IMO it’s the pits – so frustrating, confusing, laggy and cumbersome.
Now it’s a viable option for syndication I think Noel should seriously consider.
a) Adding more sites of a similar type. He ‘s got his networks mojo back results wise, now run with it. and..
b) Spend a few grand developing an offline GUI
Hey, Dan.
What is the cost of one single action (vote/like/tweet/link) in the system? 1 credit of 10?
Thx.
Peter, it differs, since they place different values on different promotion types.
FB likes might be more valued and require more credits allocation than social news credits for example.
I haven’t really figured all that out myself, I just use all modules and try to keep the quota allocation the same for all the modules.
Hope this helps some…
Thanks,
Dan
In your opinion what would be the best thing each of these services you mentioned could all do to improve their interface?
As consumers, when we start using a service is there anything we should be looking at (interface related) to give us any indications about the service?
Yep, general tasks are 10 credits, FB likes – 15 and G+ – even 30!!!
You know, when I was reading salespage it was clear to me that they offer 500 actions, meaning 1 credit = 1 action, that’s why I signed up (your aff). But that wasn’t true… I consider this as an attempt ro decieve customers. All you get for $97/MO is 50 daily actions max. Total BS!
Moreover, during the few days of running RA (their software that comes with PRO plan) it brought me average 60 credits/day. Can you imagine? Not 500 but 60 credits!!! That means 6 actions per day for $97 bucks! And no attempt from staff to fix and/or compensate credits. This is total BS!
For that money I could buy around a 1000 DAILY actions in Onlywire + TribePro.
I ordered refund and will never buy from these idiots again. Sorry if my comment will scare somebody from buying but I believe ppl deserve to know the truth.
Peter-
We conversed briefly through the support desk, so I understand your concerns. In fact, your comments alerted us to the need to expand upon our entire section regarding credits/promotions.
The primary source of the issue was that we did not alert new people who sign up for Pro that it takes a few days for their remote automator (RA) to connect to the central system and the network as a whole. This is actually why we give 2,500 credits up front as a bonus, because it will help users get going while their RA does what it needs to do. After this happens over the first few days, the normal usage of credits can get going more fully.
I am not making any excuses. It is understandable that you were bothered by the slow start because we did not explain it well enough. Sometimes when you are so used to seeing something, it is hard to bring a fresh perspective. This has now been updated throughout our communication with customers. You live and learn and improve.
SYNND is a unique system, and I would like to see if we can turn this experience around. We have thousands of happy customers, who have used it with great success. If you are open to it, I would like to make it right. I will send you my contact information in hopes of doing so.
Hello again.
Seems like the guys are very dedicated and interested in satisfying every single customer. I have never met such a good personal approach. I must say, they convinced me to try again and to extend the test period for some time. Hope the service will work out just right.
Meanwhile, IMAutomator opened more PRO slots, I jumped in right away. Will split test both services and let you know.
BRGDS.
@Peter
As much as I have had issues with the people at Synnd I can say that they are honest people, yes not the best customer service, and a few too many hiccups, but they are not dishonest. The issue with the 500/60 credits, or any confusion with the description is due to the fact that they switched from 1 credits per action t o10 credits, BUT at the same time they also mutliplied the credits you get/or you already had by 10, so for example I went from 25,000 credits to 250k. This was done to allow for 1/2 actions, so where before this was not possible, by going from 1 to 10 credits, they could now charge 15 credits where earlier they were not able to charge 1.5, but you still get the same number of ACTIONS.
Hope the above makes sense, it’s late at night here..
Dan, what is SCN (Seo Content Network)? I tried googling it but no luck?
Marco
http://www.seocontentnetwork.com/
This service looks like a little expensive on the highest price but maybe it will give it back results for very competitive keywords.
What type of keywords have you tested on this Network Daniel?
I emailed you some of the keywords, sort of impressive eh? I will try other types of keywords, too (again) and will probably keep this as one of my “regulars”, but that’s just me. I’d rather use 4 services known to work, costing me 400-1k/month than to try and outsource link building for 10-20 sites and not know what my results are going to be
Thanks for the comment and replies to the email,
Dan
Totally Agreed With you, I dont matter to spend 1k / month on backlinks for something that will let me compete with bigger site niches so i could reach much more people…
This way it will be very very easy to manage the creation of building 12-20 sites per month if needed since the link building is a pain! and since the content creation and outsourcing the wordpress posting is very easy this days.
I would be waiting to see which services you will be keeping for your linkbuilding…
Thanks a lot Dan, I will keep you updated on my project also
Hey Dan,
So its Synnd, SCN, BMR and what else? Would you recommend SCN over Linxboss?
@Marco
That’s not the point. I mean that 50 daily actions (500 credits) do not cost $97. I thought it would be 500 daily actions – then it seemed like a good deal, but not 50.
For example, for that money you can buy 4850 daily actions from IMAutomator and around 1000 in Onlywire+TribePro.
They’re honest? Yep, but that doesn’t enough. I do pay for result, not for just honesty.
Peter, I have yet to find a perfect service/product. Some are better than others. It seems to me that what works best for you in IMAutomator, Onlywire, and Tribepro.
I have known other people like you who do not like Synnd, I have also known people who love it to death. I have known others who didn’t like it, but came back and gave it a second chance and loved it, and I have know others who stopped using it after a year dissatisfied.
I merely say all this because anyone who reads Daniels reviews provide information about services, SEO advice, and recommendations on which services you are okay spending money on and which you shouldn’t spend money on. There have been times when Daniel admits his previous assessment is no longer valid and the services are now no longer recommended, or in reverse scenario he now recommends the service.
I respect your experience and your concerns Peter, they are helpful to the overall discussion.
Hi Daniel, does SCN allow for scheduled posting?
Yes sir it does
I used Synnd before as well and tested many aspects of it.
I think the concept is great…..but after years of trying….I’m done.
That “nice/knowledgeable guy Dan” that you spoke with in Customer Service is a crook. I could go on and on, but it’s not needed….you will see for yourself. Did you happen to get that email today about the issues…..notice they were blamed on outside software….all bull!
There’s been soooooo many problems on and off with this company and all they care about is getting your money monthly….not about the quality of service.
There are way too many other companies out there that do a better and faster job on all of my promotions that I’ve discovered- so I will NEVER go back to SYNND.
J
Jess, thanks for getting the comments back on topic, sorry for your bad experiences with Synnd. Dan’s not a crook, if you think otherwise you’re entitled to that, and I respect that and I respect him, too.
Could you please list alternatives to Synnd that do similar things (particularly rank kws)
I’m not being sarcastic or defensive here, and welcome whatever courteous reply you might have
As do the readers (14 of them now) of this blog
Thanks in advance,
Dan
I too would like to know of these Synnd alternatives.
“Jess”-
Normally, I would just suggest that we discuss an issue like this offline, but disparaging someone by calling them a crook on a popular forum setting deserves a fair reply. I will apologize to Dan for having to do this on his blog, but SYNND’s reputation and mine deserves to be made whole especially when what happened is as I stated in my e-mail broadcast today (which was done in good faith to explain what was happening). Based on the date of your post, January 27, I am assuming that you are talking about the e-mail I sent about Infusionsoft. This is all that I can figure. They recently made an update which cause all of their automated billing not to work for many customers, us included.
This has been ongoing for some time, but here are several chains that verify what I have stated. Per our communication with Infusionsoft…
January 25-
“[Dan] currently my tier 2 person is running the fix on all the applications that were effected by this. I will notify you as soon as he confirms that your application has been fixed.”
January 26-
“[Dan] I heard you were able to talk with Blake this morning and he was able to give you a current update. I thought that I had a solution yesterday, by going in and manually invoicing the customers. It turns out that this isn’t possible right now on most of the subscriptions, as they are missing an invoice button. I will continue to update you through out the day about the progress the development team is making. I forwarded your case information and emails to our Customer Advocate team, so that they can get in touch with you about your account.
January 27-
“I apologize I wasn’t able to follow-up with you until now. I was able to talk with our developers a couple of times today, and I am told that the script is nearly written. They were finally able to pinpoint exactly what is causing this issue, and there should be a script available for us to run within the next day. I have made my product manager aware of you specifically, and have set up for them to email me as soon as the script is available…”
We currently have several open tickets that are being addressed. If you would like you can contact the person at Infusionsoft who has been handling this for us. Today the new script appears to have fixed the problem. I am sure that the Infusionsoft rep would be willing to vouch for the extensive issues that we have had since the end of last month.
I am definitely not alone in having issues with Infusionsoft. There are stories about glitches that have killed businesses or at least cost them a lot of money. We experienced several severe issues. I have already opened another ticket with them to audit all affiliate and customer payment records to make sure that everything is back to the way it was before.
I will again apologize to Dan and other participants in this review. We are not perfect, but do try to treat people fairly. Everyone at our company works extremely hard to do the right thing, and I appreciate others here who have defended me and our efforts.
Jess, if you would like to further discuss this issue, let’s do it offline. Again, I would be happy to get you in touch with the person at Infusionsoft who is helping us with these issues.
Noticed TPN mentioned a couple times above, and remembered you were planning to do a review. Do you have a verdict on them yet?…and also wondering if you heard any good/bad things about another service called High PR Society?
Verdict’s out on TPN, haven’t tried High PR Society yet
HI Daniel, where can I find the TPN review?
Marco
I am curious with Google’s most recent algorithm changes that no longer show tweets/re-tweets or facebook posts, how effective doing anything but Google +1′s with Synnd is? Has anyone done any studies since the changes?
I know for conversions that having Facebook likes on page is helpful, but I am more interested in its effects on SEO keyword rankings.
Article Marketing,
Can you please send me the link to the report you are referring to, about Google no longer tracking tweets/re-tweets and Facebook? To my knowledge this specific change has not been made or discussed. Perhaps you are referring instead to the recent announcement that Google search results now include content from your Google Plus friends and contacts as well as your Picasa account.
Obviously there is a concern among some that Google might one day try to “squeeze out” sites like Twitter and Facebook, especially as Google’s Plus+1 network expands and begins to compete for some of the same features, users and advertising dollars.
Speaking as someone on the SYNND executive team, I can say that any MAJOR changes in the way the top search engines treat one or more of the social networks that SYNND utilizes to produce its social proof outcomes would be a concern for us.
However, since to my knowledge this is not the case, let me briefly share my perspective on these issues. If Google were to literally stop tracking and using networks like Twitter and Facebook they would immediately and automatically be devaluing their own service, as their search results would EXCLUDE some of the world’s top information centers. I do not believe this will EVER happen.
Instead, it is more likely that Google may begin to slowly increase value and produce better results when we incorporate our personal profiles and establish our presence within their own Plus+1 network. Testing has demonstrated that this is already taking place. My belief is that Google stands to lose too much if it blatantly devalues or disregards ANY popular network.
Instead, I see them already positioning Plus+1 as the business persons CENTER of operations. Rather than devaluing other specific networks they are going to reward you for orchestrating all of your content, interactions, relationships and social media right from their superior (implied) Plus+1 command center. In my view, this is an ingenious strategy…and one that appears to already be attracting advocates.
After all, business owners are extremely stretched to the max as they seek to determine the best way to manage all of their social media and business interactions. If Google gives them some additional SEO juice, social clout, brand awareness, and management leverage, just for inhabiting their Plus+1 platform, they can systematically marginalize their competition without ever having to devalue ANY competitive network. If by engaging Twitter from within Plus+1 Google manages to make Twitter more powerful and effective, then it has essentially elevated itself, not by tearing down others, but by making all things better through association with Plus+1.
Currently SYNND supports Google Plus+1, but only through a pure Social Signal voting process. However, as we continue to explore and test it we believe that many additional opportunities could emerge. Most of these can only be fully unearthed if Google cooperates through an open API access or joint venture developments…either of which could work for us.
OK…I know…this is a VERY long path to providing an answer to your question. So forgive me if what should have been a quick trip to the mail box turned into a FedEx excursion around the world.
Regarding how SYNND impacts ranking…just read Daniel’s test results and some of the reports from others in the comment strings above…or contact SYNND support for some examples.
Thomas Rozof
Hi Tom, thanks for stopping by.
What “Article Marketing ” AKA Dan is referring to is search results not showing Tweets, and RTs and what-not, and probably won’t be showing FB stuff either, lots of SEO blogs write about this stuff, but what he’s saying is…
there used to be a time when recently retweeted content would make it to the TOP of the search results for certain kws.
For Example, My Twitter account name is GetBacklinks, and if you typed that in a search (which nobody does) you don’t see the Twitter account;’s Tweets, just maybe the url for the Twitter account.
It’s common knowledge to me and to Article Marketing Dan that Tweets aren’t showing up in search results as frequently as they used to, if at all… I stopped checking once this seemed to go away
If I can ask, how did you set-up the keywords for your campaign? Did you just provide them with the keywords you were targeting?
Hey Dan,
I wanted to purchase a Synnd membership through your affiliate link, but another SEO guy just had a webinar where he worked out a 31% ($67/month for Pro) discount and bonus 15,000 credit (in the 1st month) if you buy through his page. Can you work out a better deal for us with Synnd.
Also, I wanted to mention that the Synnd reps used your “buy backlink” ranking example in their video -> might be a way to get us a discount to sign up through your link…..
Anyways, let me know……I haven’t signed up for Synnd yet, because I wanted to give you a chance to send us a better (or at least) equal Synnd deal before deciding which affiliate link to sign up through.
Thanks
Hi, thanks for letting me know about that.
I’ve always felt, and hoped that bonuses weren’t needed if people know they can trust the reviews.
But I also know marketing, and I know some people will read my review then go search again looking to get more for their money, via bonuses and discounts and what-not.
To do this (offer bonuses) would create more work for me and make me seem like more of an affiliate commission driven reviewer, but more importantly, it would make me seem less trustworthy.
If I’m wrong about that, and if I can maintain perceived trustworthiness, then I can get you discounts on pretty much anything, but I prefer to remain “purple cow” like in how I run things here.
With all that being said, I’ll see if I can wrangle up a discount link for Synnd in the next few days.
I care more about my readers, and legitimacy of my reviews than affiliate sales and I hope I don’t sound too preachy her,e or too dumb of a marketer, but that’s the best I can do, will do, ok?
Thanks,
Dan
Exactly Daniel! Thanks for saying it more elequently than I did (I was on my iPhone and I was curious if a study had been done to see how effective Synnd re-tweets and Facebook posts have been since the Google Algorithm change that Daniel just described).
Daniel,
OK…I think I miss read his statement then…as I understood him to mean that Google was no longer tracking, factoring or considering Twitter and Facebook content in any form. Sorry. Yes…in terms of ranking and displaying actual Twitter results I agree and we too are seeing this (on Twitter anyway). However, (now that I’m finally focused on the right issue…[slap on the head]) we believe a lot of this behavior on Google’s part has just as much to do with Twitter itself. It would take me too long to share all of what I mean by this, and you guys are savvy enough that you probably already know what I mean. Search bots are not a “one size fits all” operation. Our testing increasingly shows that when a site’s internal architecture is setup optimally that this will allow the site to be more fully indexed. The bot gathers more information, easier, faster and can segment and categorize a sites content more effectively, thus returning a more robust and multifaceted result.
Twitter’s internal design and even it’s coding can often present problems for Google (and I believe several have written on this already). Also, the quality of content being pushed through Twitter is on a path toward increased degradation, with more people (I have actually written Twitter with some suggestions for this…but good luck on that act of good will ). These are just two of several reasons why Twitter itself might be causing its own poor SERPS.
However, in spite of this, we see no evidence that Google has stopped factoring in Twitter’s capacity to generate social proof results…which are acquired from Twitter (as they are from other social networks) in various ways. There are so many of these that listing a few might be helpful:
1. A social signal is a social proof result (i.e. the number of tweets/re-tweets recorded in your Twitter widget). This is being tracked.
2. The popularity or sssname of the person/brand can also be a social proof factor.
3. The degree to which a social proof factor is being “liked”, “voted”, “tweeted,” “dug,” etc. is a factor similar to “linking “associations.”
4. The SPEED by which your content is being syndicated and passed on by others is a huge social proof factor. Google calls this “freshness” but there is really a lot more to it.
5. The DEGREE of social proof is also a major factor (e.g. 5 Stars instead of 3).
6. SCALE and REACH can be a major factors.
7. The DIVERSITY to which something or someone is represented in major social networks can be a social proof factor.
These and many others are already creating influence throughout the net. As we continued to track, monitor and catalog these emerging factors, we also began to encourage people to stop thinking of SEO in terms of linking ALONE. In their most basic form links are a type of proof, yet most old style conventional linking strategies have had very few social elements driving them (until recently). If you take my statement at face value, that linking is a form of proof, then you will more easily understand our contention that conventional linking is in the process of being replaced by HIGHER PROOF STANDARDS, and that from here on out these STANDARDS will be rooted increasingly in SOCIAL FACTORS.
For example, we already see the search engines penalizing sites, pages, articles, etc. if their rankings are based ONLY on traditional linking strategies. Why? Because Google knows that if these links are valid and have been acquired naturally that there should be some CORRELATED NATURAL SOCIAL EVIDENCE TO back up and substantiate this LINK PROOF. If there is NONE, well, this is not natural. If a site is truly popular someone, somewhere should be talking about it, LIKING it in Facebook, voting for it in Digg, and re-Tweeting about it somewhere in cyberspace! Therefore you will see search engines begin to increasingly penalize for the absence of this, as well as for the absence of many other social proof factors that should be present if a site is everything its links crack it up to be. From here on out, search will gradually be morphing into SOCIAL SEARCH…elevating social proof factors higher and higher as it goes through this evolutionary process and moves to the factors we have been tracking and anticipating since 2008.
I do not want to get all science fiction on you here (and I promise not to ) but to me it’s very obvious that all digital expressions and forms of “ranking” are seeking to be more faithfully represented through a higher, humanized manifestation. OK…sorry…I guess I did go there. What this means to me is that old style, conventional linking factors represent the LOWEST ranking life forms and do not have the capacity to take us into the more highly refined, diverse, global and multifaceted social proof and social recommendation outcomes that search has been incrementally migrating toward since the day it was birthed. Conventional links were never designed to take us beyond a very basic degree of ranking.
Although Google has only recently admitted that it’s factoring “new” social signals, we know they have been including these for some time.
Daniel, I probably should stop here as I had not planned on sharing all this. But I very much appreciate your commitment to a highly and more scientific process for testing any system you encounter. On that note, you may want to take a look at some of the more standard SEO conventions that do not appear to be present uniformly on your main blog here. I mention this only because we see a very clear relationship between what we call, “Core SEO Axioms” and the capacity of social proof factors to take a site into its full ranking potential. I remember that when you conducted your first test of SYNND a couple of us (Joel…my research director and me…I’m the CEO) looked at some of these and found many missing elements at the time. I may ask a person on our team to do another quick review of your site so that we can eliminate anything that might prevent you from realizing an unhindered testing environment…which we know can be a drag on some forms of social proof.
Another way of stating our core belief is to say that the search factors that we believe to be central to ranking and valuing anything on a website are already among us…and have been here since the dawn of civilized society…their just waiting to be digitized and socially confirmed.
Hope this helps,
Thomas
Hi Tom, thanks for the reply, good response here.
A couple of things here people should get form your reply and this Synnd review
1- Search is going Social, no doubt about it. What makes Synnd work is diverse, unique IPs giving the social signals, pretty much the same as getting diverse IP backlinks… so this means more value is being given to social signals now, for reasons you mentioned.
Self-generated Link Building as a practice is a gaming of the system (algo), with social signals being more valued now, Synnd allows us to game the system, as does any other similar style service, so the idea is still the same. When we ascertain what’s newly valued there’s services for that, or as they say in this mobile age, “there’s an app for that”.
2- there’s plent yof ways to skin the cat (rank websites). some niches don’t inherently get social links, and some should have some social presence out there. I OPINE that whatever algowe’re dealing with now, knows what’s what, what niches they wanna see social signals for, from, to, etc.. so social signals are NOT necessary for all niches, for ranking purposes.
But me, today? I consider it necessary for most of my niches, but this doesn’t apply to everyone.
3- On-page stuff that you mentioned, yes it’s important, but not just for getting everything on a site indexed but for making the whole overall schema of a websites have more of an LSI-type of effect when the search engines decide upon rankings.
What I mean by this is…this site is about link building and link building services. lots of topics covered here, but not all, bot far more than most other sites…so… THEORY says my site, if designed optimally..would rank effortlessly due to the content on it, IF optimally designed for search engines and people.
THEORY also states that activity on a site and length of content is an important ranking factor, as is the age of a site, the PR of the url, etc…
This Synnd review url has more content on it about Synnd than Synn’d blog, almost, and far more content on it than other sites writing about Synnd, and yet this review url isn’t ranked tops in the search engines for the words Synnd , or Synnd review?
Why? Because the OFFpage isn’t there, and perhaps the site architecture isn’t up to snuff
But.. If I throw some self-generated article links, blog comments, any old backlinks at this, then then url will be tops. I could do this in a week if I so chose, and it’d be easy
Point being… some people decry the use and practice of self-generational backlinks, but it works
Some people say to reduce OBLs, fix the on-page and you’ll rank better, but fact remains that it’s still a bit of a mystery exactly what constitutes super-perfect desired by search engines site architecture, and instead, building backlinks by whatever method still works and is easiest non-voodoo way to rank websites.
Links are still king but it’s slowly getting away form that, which is why I decided that doing a Synnd review was super-critical to the readers here, and for my own well-being too.
tom, I don’t dispute any of your points here.
People have been talking about social being the new “thing” for years, but now it’s finally true.
I still don’t believe in doing relationship link building because it’s so laborious, but again… I do see a change
a change away form unnatural anchor text-ed link building
a change away form the old algo ranking factors
a change away from “the most amount of anchor text backlinks wins” strategy.
Even a change away from tiered and layered linking as a safe and panda-proof link building strategy.
Here’s what’s happening nowadays as you know, Tom…
Google is coming up against some struggles, more than they have now… To hold on to their top spot as a search engine, and to hold on to their revenue streams (PPC for one) they have to own more… more page 1 real estate, more PPC space, more benefits to PPc-ers (like giving only them the data from searchers, while others get stuck in encryption land) and so on…
The value of their search engine is decreasing,hence the push to own more, control more and get more out of their PPc-ers, and to give more to their truly valued customers, their PPC-ers. Most searchers trust organic results more than PPc ads, but searchers, AKA the USERS of the search engines…aren’t being rewarded, therefore the Google product that is their search engine is on that slippery slope.
Plus 1, +1, Postrank, and all their other acquisitions and recent behavior in last year or so show them on a slippery slope and they’re trying valiantly to decrease their slowly falling market share.
Google isn’t going anywhere for a long time but it pays to have eyes wide open and to watch the subtle changes so they don’t Slap up down in some way.
Social signals and presence and socialite behavior is a more important factor now, and like any new important factor, it can and will be gamed, and used, but it’s not THE factor, not yet anyways.
There’s hundreds of factors taken into consideration in the algos, it would do us all well if we remember that some factors are more important than others, and that no ONE single factor will be THE thing to do, not for a while anyways.
To RANK:
analyze the on-page of the top 20 urls for that kw
see which ones are trying to rank for that keyword
mirror their on-page as much as possible
get similar backlinks as the competition (merely to level the playing field as much as possible..it’s sometimes impossible to do though since their links are older than yours, for one, and secondly, you might not be able to get backlinks form same place as them)
get high PR links
get traffic to the url
get social traffic and signals to the url
get links from related sites and/or good sites via guest blogging or article exchanges
interact with site visitors, as it’s allegedly a somewhat important ranking factor (but not high on list)
Those are the big ones…
Thanks for the discussion Tom,
Dan
hi dan im a big fan
you said you like synnd because of the diverse ip addresses,
but can google see me ip address on twitter or facebook?
Hi Joe, that wasexactly my comment a few days ago. The answer is no, Google can’t, so it doesn’t help you in terms of Google, it helps you in terms of Twitter and FB not banning those accounts as they appear to be real accounts coming in from different Ip’s
Hi joe, thanks for the question. I think Marco answered it properly, thanks Marco.
Most services or offers that get you these kinds of links end up having massive amounts of accounts deleted, therefore Synnd is sort of better than services that DO provide what they promise (100s of social mentions) but they for the most part have no staying power due to many of their accounts being deleted.
Thanks,
Dan
Hi Daniel,
I found out your great blog only today while I was looking for a good tool for backlink creation.
I don’t target English market because English is not my primary language so I am afraid to write bad content on my blogs.
I consider myself a newbie. I started on IM in 2010 so I am still learing from people like you and your readers.
Saying that, which affordable tool would you recomend to someone who basically makes some money with adsense and a few affiliate programs?
A tool that caught my attention was Link Farm Evolution. Do you think it still works after recent Google updates?
By the way, your affiliate link to Synnd is not working properly today. I tried to visit the official site and I got an error.
Sorry to post a off-topic comment here…
Regards,
Hi, glad to have you here. To answer your question I’d have ot know the keywords you’re targeting and the competition and what-not.
Thanks for checking the affiliate link, it seems to be working fine to me, might be their Infusionsoft software gone soft again
Dan
Hey Dan,
Why does Synnd work but SocialADR does not? They both offer the same service. SocialADR now even offers Facebook and +1s. So what does Synnd do that SocialADR does not? I’m considering one or the other and it seems that for half the cost of Synnd I could get Social ADR. Thanks!
William
Hey Dan,
I just worked out some numbers… For the Enterprise account at Synnd you pay $150. For the $150 you get 14,000 credits. That sounds like a lot until you realize that each action (bookmark, tweet, etc.) costs a MINIMUM 10 credits. Bookmarks, tweets, and social news promotions are all 10 credits a piece. Facebook likes are 25 credits a piece. Blog comments work out to about 40 credits a piece.
For $150 this is a TERRIBLE deal.
Think about it…
Url 1:
100 bookmarks – 1000
100 Social news promotions – 1000
100 tweets – 1000
100 Facebook promotions – 2500
50 Blog Comments – 2000
Url2:
100 bookmarks – 1000
100 Social news promotions – 1000
100 tweets – 1000
100 Facebook promotions – 2500
50 Blog Comments – 2000
That’s all you would get. For the WHOLE month. For just TWO urls. For 150 FREAKIN dollars a month.
The amount of action you get is not enough to move you in the Serps unless you’re targeting terms that have zero competition.
You can’t use it for more than one or two Urls which I can’t figure out what the purpose would be because hardly ANY marketer I know is just trying to rank ONLY 2 urls.
Sorry to sound like a Negative Nancy but this is outrageous. I think Synnd sounds awesome and at first when you find out you get 14,000 credits per month (and EVERYONE assumes 1 credit = 1 action) but when you realize that even a lousy stinkin’ bookmark costs 10 credits you realize that $150 buys you pretty much nothing (unless you’re ranking ONE url).
Am I wrong? I’d love it if I were.
Good news then Bill, you’re wrong, insofar as that Synnd will only rank you for non-competitive terms.
All I can suggest to you is that you try the “better-value” SocialAdr and let me know how you do in the rankings on test urls before during and AFTER SocialAdr campaigns. Then do same thing with Synnd, and you’ll have your answers
Hey Dan,
Thanks for the response I’m glad I was wrong!
Synnd sounds powerful. Do you think its power would be diluted across 20 urls?
Yes, it would , just like anything of a finite number has its’ effects diluted when divided and split up multiple times
William,
The fact that you took the time to isolate each feature in SYNND and compared our prices to the competition shows that you take your marketing budget seriously, which is very smart. I wish more business owners did this.
However, there is a critical dimension that you should not overlook in your desire to save money. To truly determine which marketing product is most cost effective you must (as Daniel suggested) be ruthless and thorough in testing how one product feature compares to the next in OUTCOMES and PERFORMANCE. In business (especially online business) you quickly learn that MOST marketing products do not works “as advertised.” Additionally, the only way for anyone to acquire this knowledge is to learn how to conduct effective online TESTING.
You sound like a very serious and committed marketer (and one who possess a great deal of passion …which I commend). As such, I encourage you to go beyond superficial, singular factors (like price alone) when determining which product to support. The reason our mother company is called SocialMediaSCIENCE.com is due to the value we place on the SCIENCE aspect of online marketing. If you are a regular visitor to Daniel’s blog then you know he values this as well.
Having said this let me share my answer to your question about the cost of SYNND as compared to other services. When you engage in your own testing, and compare SYNND next to a service like SocialADR (and any others that contain the feature set of SYNND) we believe you will discover that SYNND outperforms each of them…and most by a significant margin.
NOTE: Please know that I’m not implying that Daniel necessarily agrees with my claims about SYNND. Likewise, he does not disagree with these claims either. Because he has not yet tested SYNND for all of the outcomes I’m highlighting, his current position is that he can only affirm those results he has tested. (You can gain a better understanding of those marketing outcomes produced by SYNND that Daniel does affirm by reading his whole section above on SYNND.)
However, I do want to highlight one aspect of SYNND that sets it apart from the rest of the field and one that we believe validates the extra cost people pay for our service. It’s a feature we have tested repeatedly over the last three years and it’s central to the design and technological uniqueness of the software. In a sentence its this: SYNND executes EACH and EVERY campaign, promotion, Like, Tweet, syndication or process through a unique ISP level IP address attached to a desktop computer owned by one of several thousand SYNND members who are located around the world. Please read that statement again. No other service that we know of executes their bookmarks, votes, recommendations, Facebook Likes, Tweets, etc. in this manner. This is one of the primary reasons that our members do not see any degradation or erosion of ranking or social proof capital once these optimizations have been established specifically by SYNND. For example, when the Panda update hit our members reported either no impact or an increase in positive outcomes.
We are not saying that SYNND is the only product of its kind that produces results. However, we have observed that those products that manage to produce at least some performance do so by using Proxy IP’s instead of the highly inferior systems found in cheaper software that is based on the customer’s personal desktop IP address alone. Yet even Proxy IPs are not recommended as a good long term solution, and never when a great deal of scale is required. Because we have tested Proxy IPs extensively in our own software, we know that once you reach a certain scale of volume you often see a diminished impact, and in some cases all of the positive results can be gradually wiped out in a short period of time. This happens mainly because Proxy IPs will eventually create a clear footprint that is traceable by the search engines. We all know that search engines are constantly becoming more sophisticated. Knowing this, we decided to create SYNND with a proprietary system that could execute EVERY SINGLE marketing and social proof process from a unique ISP level IP address attached to a single desktop computer.
The cost of creating this highly complex, one of a kind technology, is the main reason we have to charge more for our services. With over four and half years of JAVA based programing (and more to come before it’s completed) SYNND has over 1.3 million lines of code and represents an investment of well over a million dollars. Additionally, because of the complex nature of how SYNND executes its promotions, almost all of the modules have to be constantly optimized and some require redesign and rebuilding from time to time. This is the reason that you will sometimes see SYNND modules’ down for repair from time to time.
Also, SYNND continues to add more marketing modules as its development proceeds forward. In fact, this next week we release our new Article Marketing Module that support an initial 75 article networks, with another 250 added over the next four months. A new RSS system that can significantly extend the promotional life of most current SYNND modules is also under development. All of these new modules are made available to our SYNND members at no extra cost and members can apply their SYYND credits to these new modules immediately once they go live within the SYNND system.
All of these reasons help to explain WHY we charge a bit more for our software than some of our competitors (although we are not the most expensive). The bottom line, however, is that there is one reason and one reason only that you should ever pay more for SYNND, or any other product, and that is because it is MORE EFFECTIVE and produces the results you desire. When a marketing product yields positive results it also generates more income for its user…which is why we are in business. If a product is significantly more effective in generating income it becomes CHEAPER in the long run to use it. Those marketing products that compete with SYNND on price may appear on the surface to be a better value, but over time they can end up costing you many times more than the expensive, yet higher quality, products.
One of the sad trends we see among people signing up for SYNND is a complete misunderstanding of how modern online marketing works. We see what can only be labeled as an epidemic of online marketers looking for and expecting QUICK, EASY and CHEAP results. Much of this is due to the rash of “Get Rich Quick” products that continue to flood the market in record numbers. Sometimes we test these just to see what these online gangsters are pushing. We have yet to find a single product or service that has lived up to its hype. Most of these products are DESIGNED from the start to make money off of you…and not through their product. They know that only a certain percentage of people will take time to seek a refund. They count on one thing and one thing only for their success: Our gullibility.
Because of this unfortunate trend many likewise expect to rank for highly searched for and competitive keywords in the span of a few weeks, which almost never happens. When you are presented with a claim that says someone can accomplish these quick rankings please be sure to read the fine print, especially examine the exact keyword they ranked for in their example…as this is often where the funny business is located. All of our best accomplishments at Social Media Science, LLC have occurred because we have taken the proper amount of time to develop and grow each opportunity. When we apply this standard to SYNND we regularly produce page one rankings for highly competitive terms. When a site owner uses SYNND properly to naturally and methodically drip their content through all the relevant SYNND modules, the results over time can be stunning…and SEO rankings is only one feature of SYNND…and probably not it’s most powerful outcome.
Ironically, some cheap products can produce a faster result than SYNND when it comes to rankings. But in every case we know of these ranking quickly fade to positions far below from where they started and often never recover. Keep in mind that Google is obsessed in its commitment to weed out any UNNATURAL process or manipulation that is being used to impact search results.
At this point I would normally go into great detail about the quality control we administer at SYNND to insure that our powerful marketing engine is not used to push through SPAM content or pure sales focused garbage. So…let me just say this: Our dedication to patience and quality will only increase as SYNND grows, so that nothing but the most effective content is ever distributed or gains mass exposure through a SYNND promotion.
Finally, we have thousands of members, many who have been with us from the beginning and yet have remained even when we encountered some difficult growing pains. Believe me, you will find some criticism about SYNND, and in many cases it is deserved. Yet the members who have stuck with us understand the uniqueness of the SYNND system and many have written us to say that, even with our sometime irritating stops and starts, they cannot duplicate the results they achieve with SYNND through any other software or service. It’s this kind of member that keeps us committed to making SYNND 100 times better than it is today. Our goal is to reinforce and validate their loyalty and to deliver to them a marketing system that is so powerful and disruptive that it becomes the REASON for their extreme success…and I continue to believe that we will accomplish this.
I hope these answers have helped to address your questions. If not please write me directly or contact our support department at SYNND.com.
(Daniel…sorry if I took up too much space here
Sincerely,
Tom
Great review Dan. I appreciate the detail and quality. I signed up for the 14 day free trial and will give synnd a try. Thank you.
Hi Brian, please don’t sign up for Synnd, I wanna rank #1 for seo services someday, too
Just kidding glad to see you on here,
Dan
Synnd is giving me excellent results by adding to the “LSI” style approach I’ve taken with a couple of websites. I do link, but individual posts atrt to rank for keywords based on social factors alone. I can cancentrate on linking to the main URL or key pages while individual posts get attention, bookamarks, likes, comments (both Synnd and real) etc just from using the service.
If you have a “social site” one you post to several times a week and engage with the community, then Synnd seems to have a far greater impact that if you have a “set and forget” style site.
But then with social media promotion – which Synnd does, that’s the whole point of the exercise anyways isn’t it.
In short, and based only on the limited stuff I’ve done, it’s horses for courses as far as I can see.
If you have a social engagement site you will get more benefit from a social engagement boosting subscription like Synnd.
Synnd just switched over to a new affiliate management system and I finally got my /our discount codes
click referral link to save 30% on ANY level. discount code is DISCOUNT_30
Hey Daniel,
Thank you for the discount! I was wondering where do we enter it in? When I go to the Synnd site and choose my package there’s no place to enter the discount code. Also, your aff link goes to the main Social Sciences blog and not to the Synnd site. You can get to Synnd from that site but I wasn’t sure if the cookie carried.
Dang it! sorry man, I didn’t think to verify the disocunt. I emaile dDan and asked him about that, thanks for your patience
BTW, here’s some social credits allocations for one of my campaigns in Synnd. People want to know how to allocate everything, and 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**
Awesome! Thank you Daniel!
Quick question – The allocation you listed accounts for more than 1000 credits per day (being that 10 credits per action is the average). Did you buy higher than the $147 a month membership? That would work with the 30,000 membership plan but wouldn’t get you very far with lower plans.
You’re welcome!
Bookmarking = 49
Social News = 21
Twitter = 11
Facebook = 25
________________
TOTAL 106/day X 30 days = 3k or so
http://synnd.com/order/daniel-mcgonagle.html There it is, sorry about the delays
Dan,
Could you explain the different between the Pro and the Enterprise? Pro says you have to “set up your own campaigns.” What exactly does that mean?
does the coupon still work? trying to apply but it says its not valid? Do you know anything Dan?
Did you try DISCOUNT_30 as coupon code?
Hey Dan,
Is this discount temporary? Should I hurry and sign up? Also, is there a LOT of work involved in a Pro account? With your discount on a Pro account I can get 40,000 credits for the same price as 14,000 on the Enterprise account. I have a site that I add a post to every day that I will be promoting so I need a lot of credits but I don’t have the budget to pay 300 dollars a month. What do you think? Is there THAT much work in a Pro account?
Hi William, PRO is 97/month, Enterprise is 147/month, so my guess is if you join at Enteprise Level with 30% discount, which I THINK is lifetime… then it’s 30% of 147, = close to 100/month for Enterprise Level, That’s the ONLY level I can really relay information to you about, seeing as how it’s the only level I considered getting, and still use.. (at full non-discounted pricing
)…
II would never urge someone to buy now, or soon, but my thoughts are… get Enteprrise, use discount, run 4 campaigns, let them worry about spinning bookmarking comments and using hashmarks for reTweets and such by getting in at the E level.
Maybe try looking at it this way… PRO level costs 97/month and you have to do some manual stuff there, but with discount you can get Enterprise level for same price and not have to do anything except enter in urls, and give some helpful KW suggestions…
I would start there, start slowly, ramp us if/as budgets and results allow
This is Dan with SYNND. I wanted to provide some important comments on some discussion from yesterday about promotion levels in SYNND.
For anyone starting in SYNND, you should NOT use promotion levels this high. Consider this. If you are starting from a basis where you have not established a track record of social popularity, you need to start more slowly. Social signals (Likes, Tweets, Votes, etc.) have shown through our extensive testing to have more lasting value than what you see with more traditional SEO methods –> IF, again, IF they are genuine, coming from unique user level IP addresses. Why? If you were Google, would you place more value on what a peer recommends, or what can be manipulated by individuals on their own?
Now… that being said, do you think that Google would find it strange if you went from nobody bookmarking your content each day, to almost 50? No Likes to 25? This is unnatural. You should instead, plan on using SYNND for the long-haul, and start off slowly, for a few weeks, and then build up towards higher levels. This shows a steady increase in popularity, which grows over time. Even more traditional SEO methods should start more gradually; you have to put yourself in the position of Google and ask how it would interpret what you are doing. 0 to 100 in short time is not a good idea.
We are getting ready to releases a LOT of new training material, whereby we go through each business model and recommendations on how to use SYNND. All will recommend a slower start and gradual increase.
While I agree with this, I have used other tools that do the same thing as Synnd but in a more “piecemeal” fashion.
With some I absolutely BLITZ with most I take the first 6 weeks to 3 months quite slowly.
The ones I blitz are the ones where the niche or product is spammy to start with. The chances are I’m competing with others who have “hacked” their way to the top – so I fight “like with like” but more and longer.
In general then I would agree.
I once bought a ton of Google +1 likes (almost 200 – delivered inside 72 hours “oooh dangerous” I know) net result was…as far as I could measure…nothing what-so-ever.
As a test it proved the point though, and you learn and move on. Normally a slow start and accelerating over a period of a couple of months (rather than days or weeks) is the key.
Mind you, this means everyone will sign up for the free “Synnd Lite” won’t it?
This might seem a bit newbie-ish, however I’ve only ever used social bookmarks for propping up articles or videos that link back to the money site.
With Synnd, signed up to trial, and going through campaign setup. The example campaigns are for a blog article and youtube. Did you use Synnd to build up your own blog sites, and would you advise using it for business sites?
I’ve just not ever thought of doing direct links via bookmarks to a money site, and especially not social signals. Makes sense to use on blog articles or similar which have backlinks to money site, since people will like an article or say a video… but a service page on a business website while not out of bounds, just feels a little unnatural especially if getting lots of social links and signals.
So just wondering if there is a difference in the nature of website/content that Synnd should be used for?
just wanted to double check this but is the discount definatley 30% because when i put the discount code in it says 30 dollars off
Hi, thks for the detailed info on Synnd review. I understand that currently Synnd offer 15k credit to Pro member. I kinda confuse is that, must I leave PC on, if I need the next 15k to be credited to my account for the next month or will it be automatic reset to 15k once one mth period over?
Also for 15k credit, how many social bookmarking can I create?
Thks
Hi Kiki-
This is Dan with SYNND. Your computer is to be on for 5 hours/day so that your social accounts can be updated and your syndications can be completed. If your RA is active during this period, your account can amass 15,000 credits. Each bookmark is but 10 credits.
Hope this helps. Feel free to use our support desk if you have any other related questions. We also just launched our new training area at SYNND.com. It includes information on each module and credit cost. It also has some very helpful info, including three videos related to:
1. Expectations
2. Results with SYNND (detailed)
3. Readiness checklist
Thanks,
Dan
Hey Dan,
Thanks for all your work on this blog… it is VERY informative. I used your link to sign up for the Enterprise Account (50,000 credits).
Okay, so I’ve been testing Synnd on two domains that I have NOT touched for one year. One was on the bottom of first page (local keyword, “city wedding flowers”) and another on bottom of second page (“city moving companies”).
Since using Synnd both sites have actually gone down in ranking. The first went onto the bottom of second page and the other went to 5th page.
Now, I’ve been doing this long enough that I’m familiar with sites dropping during ranking phase but is Synnd this powerful? I mean, is this normal? And if you saw something similar how long did it take your sites to bounce back?
I used 100 social bookmarking, 50 social newsfeed, and 70 facebook.
How did you link (Main URL or inner pages)? How long did you give this? Did you add any new content? Is Google going to have to assume that after a years dormance there is suddenly re-newed interest – which may be the case for “flowers” site at certain times of the year/
I’ve found Synnd is not a good “solo” a linking tool.
However, if you are linking and want a social network susbscription like Synnd to “round off” your campaign with “social noise” then that’s what it does.
Synnd is very good at boosting inner URL’s or sites that you add regular content to.
In my experience it has proved excellent at boosting the chances of aggressive linking campaigns “sticking” – but for pure SERP’s improvements alone, I’m not sure it’s the right tool.
Sorry for the buttinski, I’ll leave Dan to answer the rest.
Scritty
Dan…
I tried to signup via your affiliate link…. and use the discount code… but the SYNND signup page is giving me errors.
Can you check it out and let me know if it can be fixed.
Thanks!
Web
Please check back 24 hours from now I will try to get this resolved today, thanks for your patience,
Dan
This is the error I am getting….
$ Warning: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date Recurring Fee (every 1 month)
Coupon Savings: $set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected ‘UTC’ for ‘UTC/0.0/no DST’ instead in /var/www/synnd.com/order/coupon.php on line 32 117.00
Hey Dan,
Is the discount still working? I checked the coupon about a week ago and it appeared to be working, but now I’ve come back to make the order and it’s giving me a weird PHP error. Just wondering if the Synnd guys said anything to you about ending the discount. Hope I didn’t miss it!
- Pat
They might have changed away from whatever affiliate program they were using/struggling with in the past. I just need to update this, and will do it today hopefully. Had knee surgery Wednesday, been doing nothing but arranging, scheduling and doing interviews for Marketer’s Relief site coming soon. Dan form Synnd was away for a bit but is back today so I will get everything sorted today I hope.
Thanks,
Dan
Thanks very much for the quick reply, Dan! I really appreciate it. Get well soon!
- Pat
This is Dan from Social Media Science. We are changing billing systems, so the discount code will not be available for the next 24 hours. Please hold off signing up until Wednesday to ensure that you get the discount as this is NOT something that can be done after the fact.
Thanks,
Dan
Thank you for the update. Will do.
The discount is still not working
The discount should be working again. If there are any issues. Please leave a post. Thank you.
Dan
SYNND
Hey Dan,
Thanks for fixing the discount! I signed up, however, after I paid through Paypal I was routed to a blank screen. I also did not receive a confirmation email from Synnd (I’m assuming it would have login details?). Checked my spam folder. Nothing there.
Here is the URL that I was routed to after I paid. The page was completely blank.
https://www.synnd.com/order/process-paypal.php
Thanks for you help.
Scratch that last comment. Problem resolved.
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?
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