Only slightly on purpose, I’ve added a new spin on the Great Link Building Service Experiment in the past few weeks. I’ve been neglecting the link building services! I haven’t actively posted any links to any of the sites in the past 4 weeks. All the sites stopped receiving new backlinks around April 1st.
Based on the past results and how busy I’ve become lately with my other sites, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. One, to see what would happen to the rankings if I ignored the sites for a month. And two, to use all the services to drive links to a review site I created last year that is for a seasonal based product, with sales peaking in mid Summer and then again in early December for the holiday season. So far I’ve seen a nice rise in keyword rankings for that site. After the summer I’ll crunch the numbers to see if the months worth of cost and effort was worth it in sales and increased traffic.
That being said, I plan to redirect the links back at these sites starting on May 1st and see what happens.
A bunch of people have asked what the competition looks like for the main keyword I’ve chosen. Like I’ve said before, on a scale of 1-10 for difficulty, with 10 being most difficult, I’d put my three word keyword at a 4 and the two word version at a 6. For reference, I would rate the keyword “insurance” a 10 on this scale, “car insurance” a 9, “car insurance quotes” an 8, down to “children’s toy car insurance policy” a 0. A snapshot from Market Samarui for the three word keyword:
I took this last week when the Build My Rank site was at position 5. No idea why MS is reporting 5 page links and 11 home page links since I’ve only linked to the home page. Probably just a bug in their link reporting.
Week 8/9 Link Building Service Results
Oddly enough, after a month of no new links, the Build My Rank site is still moving up and actually turned a profit for the month. It costs $59 a month, and so far the site has generated $67 in Amazon affiliate commissions for the month of April. Long term the site is still in the red since I’ve paid for BMR for 3 months running now. BUT if these rankings stick it could easily become a $500 a month site for me.
And also oddly enough, the Unique Article Wizard site which originally had done nothing is now sitting on Page 2, while the LinkAloha site has dropped to Page 4. Seems like Profile linking works, but only as long as you keep making the links, while article marketing seems to hold it’s position better when link building drops off.
Here are the Week 8/9 Results, remember this is after 1 full month of no new links:
Week 8/9 Update
My own manual SEO efforts (.net)
- Google Rank: None in top 200
- Pages Indexed: 9
- Yahoo reported Backlinks: 6
I’ve given up on my own SEO site. I’ve decided to keep this site as a sort of scientific control site and make no links to it. It shows that the other services are working and it’s not just on page optimization that is causing them to rise in the rankings.
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UniqueArticleWizard Site (.org)
- Main 3 Word Keyword Google Rank: 25 (-6)
- Harder 2 Word Keyword Google Rank: 200+
- Pages Indexed: 7
- Yahoo reported Backlinks: 4 (-4)
The UniqueArticleWizard site popped back into the running about a week ago, and even with no new links has not taken much of a hit in the rankings. Of course, it hasn’t broken page 1 yet either. While it’s certainly provided a benefit to the rankings here, it’s not enough to make the site any money on it’s own.
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- Main 3 Word Keyword Google Rank: 30 (+10)
- Harder 2 Word Keyword Google Rank: 188
- Pages Indexed: 8
- Yahoo reported Backlinks: 76 (-48)
What’s interesting about the 1WayLinks site is that the number of reported backlinks continues to drop week after week since I stopped making new articles, but the ranking hasn’t really been hurt all that much.
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- Google Rank: 42 (-27)
- Harder 2 Word Keyword Google Rank: not in the top 200.
- Pages Indexed: 9
- Yahoo reported Backlinks: 30 (-2)
The LinkAloha site took a decent dip this week. Apparently if you want low value profile links to help, you need to keep building them week after week. We’ll see if this service pops back up in future weeks once the links start flowing again.
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- Main 3 Word Keyword Google Rank: 4 (+1)
- Harder 2 Word Keyword Google Rank: 114
- Pages Indexed: 8
- Yahoo reported Backlinks: 13 (-2)
The BuildMyRank site continues to dominate, even four weeks later with no new links made. It’s even moved up! I can’t wait to see if these kind of rankings stick in the coming months, since it will become my go to link building method for any new affiliate site I create.
How to explain it? I think it has something to do with the high PR sites and they way the posts are distributed and linked. UAW and 1WayLinks rely on user donated sites for their content distribution, which can be covered on other outlinks and have little or no PageRank. LinkAloha makes profile links on forums, which will never be linked off a high PR page for any amount of time. With BuildMyRank, every post I make spends time on a PR1-5 page, sometimes even with a link to my site on that high PR page. In addition, they ping and create backlinks for each and every article to make sure it gets indexed.
Whatever it is, it’s working far better than any other service and I like that more than anything else!
Click here to go to the Week 10-12 Update!
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Just a quick note to thank you for taking the time to run this experiment. Very interesting results although rightly expected. Good, original content still appears to give the most valuable link strength.
Hi there,
I’ve just had a quick read through your blog & feel interested to find out a bit more about you! Internet marketing has been a hobby of mine since I started something called ‘The 30 Day Challenge’ back in 2009 where I have been lucky enough to learn a fair bit of free information about blogging & affiliate marketing. Just thought it might be nice to find out who you are & maybe chat about Internet Marketing : )
http://www.facebook.com/jlagatule
Hey,
Just wanted to say I love your blog. Tons of good information on here! Your data is really good and I am going to be coming back to check it again. I first saw you on the Warrior Forum and then came here.
Because of you I am using LinkAloha so I will see how that works.
Just caught up on all your posts on the link building services reviews. Great to see such a high quality review being carried out on all these services. Having used 1WL myself for the last few years, with some success, I’ve been looking to try something else to supplement those links. I’d already seen some good reviews on BMR but your detailed review (Thanks) has convinced me that I should give it a go.
Hey Guys, I have been using Link Aloha for a month and 1/2 and canceled it today. Through my own SEO efforts, (my research tool is Market Samurai) i had about 35 of my medium traffic (10-25 visits per day) on the first page of of Google consistently. Usually from 3-10 on page one. Link Aloha was giving me a nice little push up for 8 of my page two or three ranking keywords. It put them on page one with the 2 link a day program . Great! or so I thought… As of yesterday, Google sand boxed me! Link Aloha is the only thing that I’ve been doing differently. There is no sure way to tell if it is indeed the culprit, but I’m pretty sure that was it.
Be Careful!!
Are you going to do another update? It appears that G did another small algo tweak on May 6th and lots of people are reporting drops. Would be interested to find out if your sites are still ranking (if they are, it surely proves that these algo changes are nothing to do with links at all)
Hi there,
Can you tell me when your next update is? I’ve been following this experiment in both the shortened version of warrior forums and here. It’s great and thank you for it, but I’m now dying for an update.
Many thanks for all that you do.
Colin
Hey ElectronPlumber,
I’m glad I happened on your thread over on the WF and your blog here. I’m at a point in my site building, back linking that I just can’t do it all myself and I’m looking for ways to automate/outsource. BMR is at the top of my wish list today after trying to chase down dofollow, high PR blogs and forums to comment on. After some research it seems that the relevant, contextual link has the best chance for indexing and is the most effective these days. I’ll second what teatree said about the algo tweak. Looks like I’ll do a little test of my own and grab that free 10 link deal at BMR. Thanks for sharing and keep up the good work
I really hope you will continue updating this experiment, however it has been a long while since the last update, so I fear that it will just fade.
You left us in the dark regarding what will happen after you start building links again
Also in one of the previous updates to this experiment you mentioned you would do a Tutorial for ‘Buildmyrank’. I could really really use that, as I want to use the service, but I fear that i dont know exactly how to use the service regarding anchor text etc. I dont want to waste the $$ until im ready
An update is coming I swear!
I left you in the dark because I haven’t started building the links again. That is, until last night! I submitted new UAW and 1WayLinks articles and plan on writing another 10 BMR articles tonight.
Did you consider testing out 3 way links? It’s also by Leger (who created 1 way links).
Angela, I actually tried 3waylinks for 3 months on an existing site and found that it did absolutely nothing for my rankings. And even if it did work, the links in the network only stay if you keep paying.
Once I was in I did an analysis of the other 250 or so sites that had links added to my site and found that every one I checked was doing terrible for their chosen keyword as well, which really sealed it for me but I gave it a few months anyway just to be sure.
1waylinks is great. TheBestSpinner is great. 3waylinks is a waste of money.
Thanks for giving objective advice and other information about starting and ongoing ways to succeed.
Thanks for information and advice about scam offers as well.
I’m just plodding on with no experience,no clue maybe.
At least thanks to you I’m now able to spot money soaking online offers.
That’s a start anyway.
I’m surprised that some of these linking services seem to work.
I thought they were 100% scams as well.
Thanks as well for your hard work.
Great info on this site. I’ve been debating between UAW and BuildMyRank for a while. Since new to internet marketing and don’t have a decent portfolio of websites, I didn’t want to plunk down a much of money just to build up one site. Thanks and keep it up!
Any update on this? Would be awesome to get a final review and see where the sites are now.
Doh! Sorry Adam, I keep meaning to go back and add “breadcrumb” links between all the different posts in the experiment. I added a link to the Week 10-12 update above!