The concept is one that has been used before, which is to reverse the “old” style of keyword research where you took keywords you were interested in and went off and investigated their potential. Instead, Niche Reaper mass analyses millions of keywords, asseses the competition and tell you which are “green”.

Green keywords are those with good earning potential and low competition, as opposed to red which are lower value and higher competition. The name of the game of course is to find easy money making keywords.

This is what Niche Reaper does, it spits out a list of “green keywords” on an array of topics ready for you to build sites on. Instead of going off and doing your own research on a topic you think has potential, you log into Niche Reaper which duly informs you that “how to stop your dog farting” is a sure fire path to early retirement.

Not only that, it tells you that HowToStopYourDogFarting.org is available for registration, wow!

Well that is the plan, but I have a few reservations:

1) Earning estimates are cuckoo, as in over inflated.

2) I found some real clangers on click estimates where data was blatently wrong so had to keep double cheking in adwords tool to make sure Niche Reaper was still on planet earth

3) A lot of the terms are clearly not monetisable despite the wild predictions. They do not seem to be focussing hard enough on transactional terms. The problem is of course that the source data is notoriously unreliable, and is the achilles heel of any keyword research method. However, I think more could be done in terms of language filtering / weighting to improve the ratio of monetisable terms to blatent losers.

4) A lot of the terms are only monetisable with adsense, but Google is less tollerant of mass “Made For Adsense” site builders these days, which although not the fault of Niche Reaper is still going to be an issue when it comes to making money off this data.

5) Domains seem to be snapped up already, suggesting that you may end up competing with a number of other Niche Reaper users.

Now, point 5 is the real kicker for me.

Its pretty clear that very few of these keywords are actually going to be Green, by virtue of the fact they are listed as green in Niche Reaper, something like the Observer Effect, where the act of observing something changes its behaviour. In this case, the mere act of listing a green keyword in Niche Reaper is quite likely to turn it orange or red.

They may have a database of millions of keywords, but most are junk. I would wager 100% of the users will chase 1% of the terms, and thus, whilst HowToStopYourDogFarting.Info would have been a great term two hours ago, the fact it is going to be up against the very recently registered .com, .net and .org variants makes it a much less attractive proposition.

The solution to this is pretty simple:

1. Limit the number of users (which Niche Reaper say they will do)
2. Increase the size of the database, which is happening all the time

Regards point two, when you first log into Niche Reaper the screen you see lists new keywords being added in real time using Ajax which is a neat trick, along the lines of Googles own searches being listed in real time in the entrances to some of their offices.

Niche Reaper is pretty pricey for a keyword service of this type, with a monthly subscription of $58 or so.

The nice thing is that they do offer a long trial period within which you can cancel should you want to without losing any money.

I am not sure if I will keep this tool, to be honest I probably wont, but its worth a look. Its certainly the best thing of its type I have seen, but I am not convinced of its money making potential just yet.

I have a few domains to throw up as testers, ill post back at some point with the results.

BMR was de indexed a few weeks back (March 2012) and have shut down. They put up a blog post titled “Its been a great run” announcing their demise. As you would expect sites promoted with BMR lost rank, but not before making a good profit via this service, effective to the last! I guess late comers may have lost out on it which is a shame, but thats the way this stuff goes unfortunately.

For posterity I will leave my review up..

This post was originally published 14th September, but I re-date it when it is updated.

I recently signed up for the free trial on Build My Rank. You get 10 free posts to try the system before… you guessed it… the price goes up… never to be repeated offer… unless you have a large enough IQ to realise you can sign up with multiple mail addresses, in which case you not only get the offer a second time around, but another 10 freebies too. These sales tactics are so tedious.

One thing Build My Rank stipulate is that you must use original content, no spinning allowed.

To hell with that I thought, my general rule is never to give away anything that even remotely resembles decent content, especially when you are paying for the privellage, much better to catch your own domains IMO.

So, I duly whipped up a portion of spammy delight and fired it off to Build My Rank, and was surprised to find that 9 of them were rejected for being spinners.

Mein Gott! I thought, they must have real human beans behind that interface, real people… that… that actually give a flying fu shit about their network! Well, there is a turn up for the books!

Anyway, human beans or not, I was not about to hand over my precious verbage and decided to leave it alone. BuildMyRank is not scaleable, it needs a spinner, crap is king etc etc…

At the end of my trial I had a quick final mooch around and saw my solitary post sitting on a PR6 domain that, for a splog was pretty well looked after.

A fairly slow post count (for a splogathon) going out each day, 1-3 articles. I guess that is the constraint of not being able to spin!

So, after being pleasantly surprised and interested by this little gem I signed up and ordered 130 posts to be written by them.

BuildMyRank charge $2 per post and they are auto approve. You can choose to manually approve them yourself if you want, but to be frank, as long as they contain the title and anchor I specify I couldnt give a hoot what the wrapper looks like, so I just let them go out on auto pilot.

I started this review having spent $260 on 130 outsourced posts. Happy with those I subsequently spent another $250 on 125 more, so that is $510 plus the monthly fee of $59

$569 (now up to $1200 ) is a lot of money to be squandoring on splog juice, it will be interesting to see how well these do. (initial signs are good which is why I added more sites / invested more money).

It will be very interesting to see if the rest of the network is anywhere near as good as this first site (I have added a graphic below shoing the first 18 posts distributed by PR).

I am primarily testing (80 of the 130 posts) these out on a page that ranks #100 for its keyword (already up to #19, but now the real work begins!) and is quite competitive. This page is on an established site that ranks for related terms. It will be an interesting one to watch.

The other 50 are going out on a site that is stuck in the mire, but that is not a good test as I have all manner of garbage being heaped upon that site at the moment.

One feature that I really like with BuildMyRank is the transparency within the system. Reports measure the number of posts that are indexed and also show you page rank distribution (I will post screenies once I have more data to share). I have not seen any other network do this, probably because their stats would be so poor. The fact Build My Rank are providing this data shows a highlevel of confidence in their own quality.

Below is one of their measures which shows the distribution of posts by Page Rank across their network. This only shows 73 live posts, but so far its a reasonable distribution, and, all the posts are indexed in Google:

I have another 250+ posts in their system. Some projects / URL’s have 70 posts pointing at them, so when I come to update the above graphic it should give a reasonable overview of network quality.

So, in a nutshell they continue to build thier network and monitor indexing rates. Indexing rates are not something I have seen other networks make available, but BMR publish a measure of it in their dashboard.

I remain pleased with Build My Rank. Their interface is slick, they have people working on it who seem to know what they are doing and it is certainly distinct from other networks. Thus far I like it.

Below are Some Updates I Posted:

Updated 21st September: PR distribution not looking quite so favorable now I have more posts out (93):

Most of my posts have not been sent yet, but Im already seeing good results on one of my main keywords having moved from nowhere (outside top 100) to position 11, I should hit the front page next week. This term returns 5.5 million results and has some strong contendors on the front page, If I can get position 5 I will he happy, that should provide a reasonable income for the time and money invested.

I also asked the guys at Build My Rank a couple of questions which I am going to post for you:

Me: Can you tell me how many new sites you plan on / are adding to this network and whether you have an upper limit in mind for these blogs. By that I mean, are you going to keep going and going posting thousands of links to these things which will result in partial indexing, or are you going to stop when a site reaches a certain limit (like Blog BluePrint state they will).

BMR: Right now we’ve got 750 domains and we add more every month.  Some blogs get disabled because the indexing rates aren’t what we’d like, page rank drops, etc.  We’ll work on those until the metrics improve.

As for post counts, right now the most posts any one blog has in our network is 110 so there’s a long way to go.  Because we don’t accept a bunch of spun content our blogs don’t get hammered everyday.  The primary concern for us will be when the indexing rates drop for blogs.  That could happen when they have 50 posts or 500.  That’s our sign to disable that blog and get to work until things improve.

Me: Would you mind if I re-posted your comments about indexing / number of domains in my review of your service?

BMR: Well the # of domains is a fluid number.  What you post today will be out of date in weeks.  Might be better to use something like close to 1000 domains.  Because we’ll be there sooner rather than later.

Updated 28th September: I now have 169 published posts, 215 queued and another 50 on order:

I am seeing improvements on the sites and keywords I am targeting with this system, but as I am using a slow drop (1-3 posts per day) it will be some time before the final results are in.

If you read my LinxBoss Review you will know that I cut that test short and decided to put the money into BMR instead. I complained that after a month of using LinxBoss I should have been collecting some longtails on that site. Since sending BMR posts to the same site I have started to see results. Of course, that site still has LinxBoss links pointing at it, and you could argue that the increase in ranking on that site is due at least in part to them, but I am pretty sure that the benefits I have seen on that site are from BMR. I am also sending links to another domain that is one year old. This domain has had some work done on it in the past, has PR and links but has never really ranked / made any money. That test will be an interesting one, but I think it will be a month before I can report back on that.

The site that was “stuck in the mud” has now moved up one position to #4, though I think that was due to another site losing position more than me gaining it. I also started adding content to that site as it is pretty thin and probably needs some more onsite work to get past the sites above it.

I have added more sites to BMR, two new sites and one aged site that I want to try to get earning. The aged site will be of most interest, it is 12 months old and I have a group of 5 keywords I want to improve rank on, and of course attract more longtails. I wont be tracking SERPs so much on that site so much as overall traffic and income.

The term that I was ranked outside the top 100 on made it to the front page and is currently fluctuating between #8 and #10. I am still hoping for top 5 on that term, and in terms of BMR submissions, I am less than half way through the queue for that site. Traffic has improved on that site, I seem to be getting more longtails for it.

Updated 15th October

I now have 400 live posts and 73 left in the queue and have just ordered another 230 260 posts from Build My Rank.

In terms of the PR distrubution, you can see the latest pie chart below:

Still a good PR distribution. I am still happy with the service, and have a little more to report on the results:

The site i was stuck at #5 for proved really tricky. There are some big sites above me that I was trying to slip past on the strength of better targetting. I know for a fact they have been spending a lot on SEO as their agents keep trying to buy links from me. I was using Build My Rank as a top up to everything else I was doing on this site, but it just would not budge, until yesterday . I have managed to leap frog a few sites from #5 to #2, though it is still bouncing around a bit. Also, as Build My Rank is a blog network, my posts will be slipping into the archives, i.e. no longer on the PR’d homepages. I am going to leave this one alone for another week now, and consider buying another 50 posts for it in another couple of weeks.

The other competitive term I was after for a different site, for which I said I would be happy with a #5 position is also stuck. I quickly went from nowhere to the front page, but have since fluctuated between #10 and #8. I still have more posts to run on that site.

However, I should point out that these posts have not drilled only the core terms, I always vary anchor text and mixed various permutations of the terms into the posts I bought. Whilst that second site has not achieved the rank I had hoped for on the specific terms, longtail traffic has increased substantially and so have my earnings. In terms of ROI, the work done on that site (100 BMR Posts costing $200) has paid dividends.

The site that was sandboxed is still sandboxed, that was perhaps an ill judged experiment.

The newer sites I added have responded quite well and I am making a few sales of those now.

Overall, things have worked out pretty well so far, but going forward I am going to do things differently.

Updated 04th November:

I think this will be my last update on this scheme, at time of writing I have over 1000 live posts and over 400 queued. The PR distribution is shown below:

I think 1000+ posts is a good sample and gives a good indication of the network as a whole.

I have now added a load more domains to the system. My plan is to send 50 posts each to a load of niche sites to try and move them along a bit.

I have been trying to outsource writing with limited success. I will persist with that but finding authors on a budget is never easy, particularly when you want to target tricky longtails. I have some good writers who only post a few per day, and some not so good writers who struggle to get their stuff approved. I think going forward I will use a mix of my own writers and those from BMR.

In terms of results, the domain I thought was “stuck” around #5 and was not worth spending more time is still hovering around #2 and I have started posting for that domain again using my outsourced writers. I now know its is only a matter of time before I take #1 on that term.

The more competitive phrase I wanted #5 on is still floating around #7 – #8 and I am not going to push that term any more. On that term there are over 15 million results reported in Google, the front page is covered in phrase matched PPC adds and titles from organic results. The top 7 results are PR4 – PR6 pages on PR5-7 root domains. I am sure I could take #5+ using BMR but the ROI is better in going after more longtails. In total I have over 120 posts published for that site now, not all on that one term, and not all to that page, but a good mix of terms to different pages. The results from that have been very good and I have probably recouped my total BMR investment just from that one site in the first 10 weeks or so.  So, I did not get the results I wanted on that specific term, but in terms of longtail traffic and income, results have been excellent.

Another older site I tried to move back up the SERPs from #10 is at #7 with only a few posts sent.

Another older domain I loaded which was not making any money before started earning again, I will persist with that one.

Update 07th November: BMR Closed!

A couple of things have changed recently with BMR. First the time to complete outsourced orders increased, clearly they had a lot on. Then the price of outsourced orders went up 20%.

BMR always primised to keep the post rate to their network reasonable by adding more domains to the network, but the fact is, there is a finite supply of PR’d domains on the market, and then there is the issue of acquiring more IP’s etc to host them on.

So, it seems that in order to keep their promises about maintaining quality they are closing to new members for a while. When they re-open they may have a tiered pricing plan, with post / domain limits depending on your plan.

This will be a bit of a pain for me as I now have a lot of posts and domains in the system, but I guess its only fair to pay in line with usage.

BMR have set up a waiting list, Im sure they will be back soon.

Below Are Some General Observations:

Link Placement: As BMR posts “the excerpt” to the front page on most blogs, only the first part of your post will appear on the homepage. For that reason, it makes sense to try and add your link in the first part of your post to get your links on the homepage / category pages, as per Shanes suggestion in his own Build My Rank Review on RichQuickReview.

None Indexed Sites: I have seen a couple of posts that have not been indexed in Google despite being live for a couple of weeks. Not good given the cost of the things. I managed to track one of these sites down (It is not possible to find the others as they are not indexed…) and found that that cached page was a GoDaddy expired domain page. My guess is that the other non indexed pages are similar, i.e. expired sites that have not been indexed. It would be better if BMR were to allow the sites to re-index / cache before posting, but as they need content for the new sites I guess its a bit “chicken and egg”. To be clear, the site I found is indexed in Google, but it has not been re-indexed / cached for some time, and will no doubt take a while to get going again. This does show that BMR are adding new sites to the network (this one was PR3), but also shows that sites are going straight from the drop into the network and may take time to “take hold”.

Quality of Content: I have now spent around $860 on posts with BMR at $2 each. Having looked at a few of these it is pretty clear they are non native English (which is to be expected at that price). I think going forward I will look to find my own off shored writers for this. BMR allows you to create author accounts for your own outsourcers and it should be possible to get similar posts done for $1 each, but I know from experience finding and retaining writers is a real pain.

Risk: As with any link racket, if the BMR network gets de-indexed then all your (my) money will go down the gurgler and sites will lose their rank again. That is the chance you take with these networks. Of the publicly available networks, BMR is the most secure in this regard. They have a more varied outbound link profile, original content etc. but they are by no means bullet proof. You pays your money and take your chances.

How I Plan To Use Build My Rank In Future

I will continue to use BMR in two ways:

1) To launch new sites, where I need fewer better links in the first few months of a sites life. The new sites I added to BMR have responded well, had I hit them with higher volumes from the cheaper spin and submit services they would probably have hit a filter / been sandboxed. As it is, they are making money.

2) Sniping profitable longtails. I am going to move away from trying to get higher level keywords with this tool. BMR gives you a lot of flexibility with the keywords you can target, and it makes sense to take advantage of that, whilst using less flexible products to drill away at the higher level terms.

Updated 18th Januray 2011

Ok of the two methods I tried above:

1) Using it to introduce new sites: I have seen little benefit from doing this vs lower quality methods, and would not particularly recommend using BMR on sites that are not already ranking, not if you are focussing on short term ROI at least. I am sure that when the sites eventually start to rank they will do better then they would have without BMR, but, if you have a lot of sites you can potentially promote and a finite amount of posts you can make, then I would suggest the second option.

2) Using it to pick off keywords on established sites works extremely well. The flexibility and comparitive quality of this network vs its competitors means you can boost specific keywords quite easily. This is where I have made most money with this system. Checking stats (traffic, rank, conversion rates) of terms on older sites for which I am not ranking #1 and re-visiting them.

If you found this review helpful and are going to take BMR up on their offer of 10 free trial posts, please Use My Affiliate Link and Reward Me With Scheckels while your at it

Current Rating for Build My Rank:

By comparison Article Marketing Automation only submites to blogs and was a breath of fresh air in terms of its interface.

Article Marketing Automation allows you to spin your titles and body to create “unique” versions of a given article. It has some inbuilt tools for rewriting where you can enter different versions of text into different boxes in your browser.

I never entertained using those features, its just too messy. Its much better to get a rewriteing tool like The Best Spinner or Magic Article rewriter.

Category selection is easy in AMA, but there is a captcha to solve before you submit.

And thats pretty much all I have to say, easy to use, decent interface, pretty cool on that front.

But, the important bit is not the interface, its the quality of the network. To build their network Article Marketing Automation decided that, rather than catch domains, find hosting and build a decent quality network like build my rank, they would get other people to do it for them. So they offered free content (crappy spun output) to blog owners to install the AMA plugin on their sites, and allow AMA to pump out their drool to their sites.

I guess there were not many takers as AMA then offered substantial cash prizes for whoever could add the most sites to the network.

How do you build lots of wordpress sites fast? Use WordPress MU (Multi User) as it was back then. Once you have wordpress MU installed you can create lots and lots of trashy sub domains and install loads of zero value blogs in very short order, and that my good reader is exactly what happened.

Now, google dont like zero value splogs on trashy sub domains posting spun link posts, so a lot of these splogs were de-indexed.

The network behind AMA is very low qualitly, just like SEO Link Vine which came along after it.

Should You Buy an Article Markeing Automation Subscription?

Probably not.

I have a subscription, but it is one of many. I use lots of these services and put the same spinners out across lots of networks. I like to get the best coverage I can for my nonsensical drool. AMA is good for that, they take any old rubbish you care to send their way, belched out on splogs no one really cares about.

So, AMA has its uses and is worth it for some people, but its low down the pecking order.

First off, software with a one off purchase price like Article Marketing Demon or Article Marketing Robot are the cheapest option, so noobs should probably start there.

Build My Rank is the best subscription based linkbuilding service at the moment, but is not spinnable. In terms of spinnable services Unique Article Wizard is better, as is the freely available EzArticleLink (ezarticlelink.com).

After that Article Ranks (which is the same platform as AMA) is probably better than AMA.

AMA is right at the bottom of the pile just above SEO Link Vine.

So, if you have all the tools mentioned above and want another to add to the collection, AMA represents the dregs of viability!

For those in a hurry, Article Marketing Robot is better for the vast majority of users. Its cheaper, quicker, easier and still gets lots of links. Article Demon is the better product, but only worth the extra time and money if you want to schedule massive amounts of articles to loads of sites and use the project management features.

A Quick Look At the Competition

Magic Article Submitter is bundled with Magic Article Rewriter, so is a good all in one spinner / submitter package. From memory Magic Article rewriter added $29 to the price of the bundle, and the rewriter (spinner) is one of the best around, so the bundle is good quality and good value, but Magic Article Submitter only supports a couple of target platforms (directory scripts), you cannot add new targets to it and it is nowhere near as slick as Article Demon, but, it works just fine.

Article Marketing Robot is around $79, I think you can get it for less with coupons / special offers (I will add some here later). It has 1600 target sites pre loaded and can do pretty much everything that Article Demon can, but its clunky, nastily laid out software, and I am not sure how easily you can add new targets, if at all.

Article Demon “looks” to be the cream of the crop, but is considerably more expensive at $129 with the old line “soon to go up to $197″. If it were $197 I would not have bought it, and would have gone with Article Marketing Robot, but, at $127 I figured it was worth a look.

Article Demon it supports more Article platforms than Magic Article Submitter, and the same platforms as Article Marketing Robot.

One of the features they are promoting is integration with captcha solving services (also a feature of Article Marketing Robot). One thing you need to consider when buying EdwinSoft products with captcha solving integration is that they mark up the price 100%. EdwinSoft effectively get half of your captcha credit. I guess this is no worse than services charging a monthly fee, and it is optional, and it means those that use the software most pay most toward its upkeep, but I still dont like it!

First impressions of this software are good, its pretty slick, as all EdwinSoft products are these days. The layout is very similar to BMD, and anyone that has used that software will be on familliar ground. For newbies, there is a series of high quality training videos to get you started.

The scheduler and other features are pretty much the same as BMD. You get a calendar view of months, highlight days and can add jobs to it for those days. You can then minimise Article Demon to the task bar and it will submit X articles per day as per your instructions.

The category selection (which is very important if you want your stuff approved) looks excellent… more to come on that.

The BIG negative at the moment though is that it only has 100 directory sites pre-loaded, all be it good ones. Magic Article Submitter has over 1000 and its only $29 if you buy it with Magic Article Rewriter. Article Marketing Robot, which is $79 and has 1600 direcotry sites loaded. EdwinSoft have been a bit crap on the target list front, as they are with BMD.

Article Demon does have a bonus of another 200 directories though, Im not sure why these are not pre-loaded. So, you actually get 300 directories with the purchase.

The good news is you can add your own lists of target sites. The import / auto detect feature on Article Demon is excellent. I took raw scrapes from scrapebox using basic footprints from the target article platforms and dumped the raw lists into Article Demon. It auto detected the platform and added them to the database. This is a very powerful feature. I now have 1800 directories loaded with more to come.

When loading up my target sites I hit a problem with ArticleSS, a wordpress plugin that allows it to be used as an article directory. The sites were not being recognised properly. I raised a ticket with EdwinSoft and within two hours got the following reply:

Thank you for your feedback. We have a very advanced plugin system built into Article Demon. It allow us to add new self-added sites right into the core and have it instantly pushed to our users when they restart Article Demon.

As I reply this ticket, the development team have added a new plugin (YOURWORDPRESS-2) into the server and Article Demon is now capable of detecting more variations of WordPress based directories.

Simply restart your copy of AD to download the new plugins.

Now, that is what you call support, and its not just because its a new launch, I have always had good support from EdwinSoft regards BookMarking demon, for example, a captcha problem I found was fixed in around 30 minutes. They are very professional.

Another useful feature of Article Demon which has been carried over from bookmarking demon is the way queues are built. When you create an author account, all the account details for each target site are added to a queue. You can process there and then, or go back and create another account, details for which are again added to the queue. To load accounts onto all 1800+ target sites I am testing takes around 5 minutes, but, this is a lot less time than the full registration proces. It is only when you process the queue that Article Demon goes off and actually registers the accounts, which can be a slow process. The advantage of this is that you can batch up very large jobs and then leave it running for long periods of time un-attended.

As a BMD user I really like the synergy between the two applications as I already know where most things are. For example, “preferences” where you set up your proxies, captcha solving services, threads etc is pretty much the same as in BMD, and is located in the same part of the navigational structure.

As with BMD you can use both byPass Captcha and De-Captcher, and can set which one takes priority. EdwinSoft are the only company I have seen implement this feature to account for down time of a captcha solving service. In short, if one service goes down, BMD / Article Demon will fail over onto the other service, so you effectively have a backup. Again, a great feature for un-attended operation.

The email account set up and confirmation process is also identical to BMD, and is a little convuluted compared to some other apps, but, it works well.

The synergy between Article Demon and BookMarking Demon will also be a benefit should I outsource some of these tasks, as outsourcers I use are already familliar with BMD.

Of course, if you do not have BMD then it may take a while to get your head around the way the queuing works, and take a while longer to understand why its done that way, and why it gives such an advantage (unattended operation).

Account Registration Results

I just ran Article Marketing Robots registration routine and got a little over 1000 successful registrations from the 1600 in the database.

I then ran Article Demon on the 1800 directories I have in its database. I actually batched up two jobs and ran registrationon 2 x 1900 = 3600 accounts.

From those I got close to 3200 accounts registered, so, nearly 1600 per account of the 1800 per account I started out with.

Another nice feature of Article Robot is the “Retry All Failed” button on the account registration page, so, you can retry the directories that failed to register. I did this but only got another 11 registrations, but its still a great little feature to have.

I registered my accounts on the maximum 40 threads.

So, in terms of registration of accounts we have:

• 1000+ from Article Marketing Robot
• 1580+ from Article Demon

But Article Marketing Robot did that out of the box, whereas I spent a considerable amount of time amassing the target list for Article Demon. Remember, out of the box, Article Demon only does 100 sites + 200 bonus sites which can be added on, so just 300 sites.

If you are going to use Article Demon, then you really need ScrapeBox to help you find the targets.

Article Posting Results

Ok so I finally got to the point where I was ready to submit my sites and started the job off. Article Demon uses the same “human emulation” that BMD does, which slows down the process somewhat, though, you can change these settings.

Whilst running the submission on Article Demon, I ran the same article trough Article Marketing Robot.

The results for reported successful submissions were as follows:

• Article Demon 694
• Article Marketing Robot 666
• Magic Article Submitter 200 ish (from an old run on the same article… for comparison, not to be confused with Magic Submitter which is a different tool)

Again, bear in mind that I spent a LOT of time building my own target list for Article Demon, whereas I have used Article Marketing Robot out of the box.

I am sure over time that Article Demon will get better and allow more and more targets to be added, pulling it ahead of AMR, but for now, the results are pretty much the same, and that is after investing  a lot of time getting targets for Article Demon.

In terms of the submission process, the category selection in Article Demon is a stand out feature. Its extremely fast. All you do is enter your keywords separated by a comma and it applies the best fit categories from each directory. You can preview the categories before you start the actual submissions. This is a brilliant feature as it allows you to edit your category keywords and target them for better results.

At the end of the process Article Demon again shows the “retry all failed” button so you can resubmit to failed directories, however, this did not yield particularly good results.

Reporting Features

As you would expect, Article Demon generates reports based on submission rates and verifies the presence of the links. This is a bit of an awkward process as you have to first run the “published?” check, and then set up your report. I was a bit thrown at first as no articles were showing in the report, then I noticed that you have to select the date ranges for your reports. I am never one to read instructions preferring to find out the hard way

The reporting is very comprehensive allowing you to sort on different parameters and export to a csv file.

In Built Spin Tool

I did not really use the spin tool in Article Demon as I own both “The Best Spinner” and “Magic Article Rewriter”. I use both of these programs regularly for different things. The Best Spinner is good for high quality spinners as it has a good list of user suggested synonyms, wheras Magic Article Rewriter has a better “once click mangle” process using the “Magic Tokens Database” which is an extra $20 or so.

However, I took a quick look at the in built tool in Article Demon and its pretty good, for an “in app” rewriter. It is certainly a lot better than the one in Article Marketing Robot, an has a decent amount of synonyms in it, and a synonym harvester, though, I did not figure out how to use that properly, I guess I will have to refer to the training material.

To be honest though, I would not entertain using anything other than a bespoke rewriter like TBR or MAR. Most of the time involved in article submission is in the rewriting, and I really would not want to do all that work with Article Demons in built tool. But, it is a good feature, and means anyone starting out can do what they need to without purchasing yet more software.

Creating and Using Accounts and Pen Names

Article Demon has a couple of nice features to assist in the creation of account and pen names, namely an “auto populate” feature, just click a button and it will add a name for you.

You can keep adding pen names onto the same account on services that support multiple pen names, a nice feature if you like to mix things up a bit.

Another great feature is that once you create multiple accounts and go to submit your articles, it will use a random account for the submission. I really like this, as again, it mixes things up for you. Of course that could be a double edged sword as you end up mixing different sites on the same account name, which may lead competitors to other sites you have submitted. However, you can also create multiple usernames per account creation run, which are used on many sites, so you can just enter user1, user2, user2 when creating accounts, which again, mixes things up a bit.

The fact that you can queue account creation, pen name creation as well as article submission means there is scope for creating lots and lots of different accounts with this software, far more than Article Marketng Robot.

The Scheuler

Scheduling in Article Demon is very slick, lifted pretty much as is from BookMarking Demon. You get pretty graphics of the calendar for three months down the sidebar, and can add jobs from any of the three queues:

• Account Creation
• Pen Name Creation
• Article Submission

I am not really sure what value queueing account and pen name creation is vs just running it immediately, well not if you are using proxies that is. I guess if you are using one IP address then it could be useful.

You can set schedules to run for weeks and weeks at a time with this software.

Scheduling is top notch in this software.

Proxy Support and Preferences

Like BookMarkign Demon you have a lot of control over the settings in Article Demon. You can load and test proxies, set response times on proxies before they are declared “dead”, control the number of threads, timeout settings, pause time between submissions to balance speed vs “human emulation”. You can choose to submit a maximum number of articles per run (from the queue), you can enabe / disable the “anti bot” settings which slow submission down if it detects too many failures, i.e. your IP being locked out. You can change the user agent of the browser.

You can control failure rates on captcha services, i.e. “quit after 3 fails”, and control whether you want to reclaim funds for failed captchas.

You can also control whether the app minimises to the task bar.

I am not sure all these settings are necessary for article submission, things like the browser agent switching seem like over kill, but they have been ported from BMD, so are available, if unecessary.

Article Demon vs Article Marketing Robot

I started this review as soon as I bought Article Demon so I was one of the first people to publish a review, and it has dragged over a couple of days as I kept scraping, entering targets, re-scraping to build my list. Then the submission process proved a little time consuming.

During this time I was testing AMR in parrallel, and could not help comparing the two products. Both are good, either would make a good purchase.

Article Markeing Robot:

• Cheaper to buy
• Cheaper to run
• Easy to use
• Fast (threaded)
• Has a scheduler
• Has reports
• Is pre-loaded with a decent target list

In a nutshell, it has all the key features you need, but no bells and whistles. I picked this tool up, registered some accounts, confirmed the mails, loaded an article and got well over 600 successful submissions reported, right out of the box. The interface its not refined or polished, but it works well, having pretty much everything you need no more than two clicks away from the main screen. The training materials are nothing like the slick videos produced by EdwinSoft (which really help with outsourcing). Overall thought, AMR does the job, and does it well.

Article Demon

Does everything AMR can, but better, with more advanced features:

• A feature to load your own targets and have them auto detect
• A PR checker to lookup PR of targets you add
• Proxy support
• Two captcha services can be used in conjuntion
• The scheduler is more advanced
• The rewriter tool is better
• The job queueing process is good for unattended operation
• The interface is slick
• The training materials are great
• The suport from EdwinSoft is excellent
• I got more links using this tool

I think going forward, as EdwinSoft improve the different plugins they use for the number of targets that can be added will increase making this software more powerful. That is not to say AMR will not respond by improving their own list.

Should You Buy Article Demon?

That is actually a bit of a toughy. If you want links from article sites you definitely want either Article Demon or Article Marketing Robot, the question is which one.

I think for most people Article Marketing Robot would be the better option. If you have a few niche sites and you want quick and easy links then this is a great product. You can just pick it up and use it. Its fast, simple, no frills link building.

If you want to push your article marketing as hard as you can, and are prepared to invest more time and effort, then Article Demon really is the superior tool. As mentioned, you need something like scrapeBox to harvest your lists, though I am sure these will be available for sale pretty soon (as they are for BMD). My guess is you will be able to pick up a good list for $20 or so before too long.

Knowing what I do now about these tools, I think I may well have opted for Article Marketing Robot, but, having already invested the time in setting up Article Demon I am going to keep it. Now my “show is on the road” so to speak, I think it will be a better tool going forward.

Also, I run these tools on a dedicated server where they can be left running 24/7 for weeks at a time. I think Article Demon is more suited to that kind of work than AMR.

So, I am sticking with Article Demon, but I think I will probably be in a minority there, at least a minority amongst “those in the know”, as I will wager most people will save themselves some time and money and go for AMR.

Updated 04th November:

EdwinSoft have now included another bonus with another 400 odd directories (I think). I dont know for sure as when I imported the list I only got two additional directories.

My own list is up to 3000 sites, however, there is an issue with WordPress sites. Article Demon will find and add any wordpress site that allows registration, for example, sites that require registration to comment. Those sites are not postable, so now, having scraped up a list of WordPress sites running ArticleSS I find my target list polluted with non postable wordpress sites. I have a plan to cleanse these sites and refine my list.

EdwinSoft also made changes to Article Demon to allow more sites to be correctly detected, but there are still Article Dashboard sites that are not importable, which is pretty weak when you consider the cheaper Article Marketing Robot includes them.

The batching of jobs really is proving to be a good feature for me. I can load up huge amounts of work and just set it running. The really nice thing is that you can add multiple account creation, pen name creation and article submission to the queue, then “run all queues”, or add your queues to the scheduler.

Article Demon will then pootle off and create the accounts before submitting whilst you take a well earned rest. This is a brilliant feature as it really opens up volume submissions. To explain further, if you use AMR, you have to run the processes for account creation before you can submit, which takes a while as it goes off to register on sites etc. Article Demon does not do this, everything is queued, which takes less time. So, you can build a massive task list for it, like “create 100,000 accounts,  then submit 100 articles”. You add all this to the queue, and then either run the queue or shedule it over a period of days. Very very good, this is really what you are paying for with Article Demon over AMR.

The other nice feature is the “projects” list, which allows you to keep separate sets of accounts and articles. I never mix accounts between promotions as it can lead people to more of your sites. What I mean by that is I do not want people clicking the “author” link on a directory and finding links to 10 other sites I have promoted. This is easily managed in Article Marketing Robot as you control which account you want to use per submission, but Article Demon allows you to mash things up a bit more within projects.

I now feel a lot happier with my purchase than I did a few days ago. After investing a lot of time in building my list just to “break even” with AMR I was none too chuffed, but now that work is done and I am pushing past what can be done with AMR I am glad to have the superior product in my tool box.

Think Carefully If The Price Goes Up!!

One final point, I bought Article Demon for $127. Their sales page says the price is going up to $197, and probably will at some stage, at least the price of BMD has gone up over the years.

At time of writing AMR is available for $77, and I believe has been offered for less with discount codes before. If the price of Article Demon does indeed go up, then I would have a VERY hard time recommending Article Demon to anyone but a true “power user”.

If you found this review useful please consider using my affiliate link when ordering Article Demon, and Ill let you have my target list, thanks!

The Link Juicer promises to build you links on Web 2.0 properties and backlink those links from other types of site, bookmarking sites for example.

I loaded up 5 test sites into TLJ and split the links accross them and let it run.

One of these domains was brand new. I usually test new services with at leat one new domain with no other work done on the site so I can be sure any links built are either organic or from the system being tested.

I let The Link Juicer weave its magic for 3 months, after which, the new domain showed a grand total of circa 10 – 20 backlinks in Yahoo.

I checked the reports of links dropped and found hardly any were indexed in search engines and a good many were deleted.

The links that did show up were largely on Web 2.0 splogs. Free blogs that had been created and had post after post of junk sent to them until they eventually get flagged and deleted.

The Link Juicer gives you reports showing where your links have been deposited. I have read stuff by other users suggesting that you can use the reports to get the links, and then bookmark them yourself to get them indexed… errmm.. isnt the point of this service that it does that for you, and “juices your links”?

If you have to index the links yourself then WTF are you paying for? Where is “the juicer”?

As mentioned in other posts already, I do not subscribe to the view that “it doesnt matter if search engines index your links as they may be counted anyway”. Nonesense, there are services out there that get their links indexed, and there are services like The Link Juicer that do not. So, you have a choice of services to use, which are you going to go for, the one that gets links indexed on its own, or the one that does not?

I saw no improvement in rank on any of the sites I was testing and cancelled after 3 months.

A very dissapointing experience, both in terms of the service, and the the blog with the “review” that recommended it. In fact, this “$$$review$$$” (on a site I had previously thought reputable and honest) was one of the reasons I started this site.

Current rating :

I’ll try to be as objective as I can, I am now a moderator on the support forum so it could easily be seen as a biased review so lets try and get past that for a moment and look purely at the progress and features of Sick Submitter.

In April, I was searching for a forum profile submitter that was not as expensive as Xrumer and allowed me the flexibility to add my own sites into any databases or submission lists.   I found sick profile maker (as it was known by back then) and it’s Brand New feature for the month of April was the new “Toolkit”.  Apparently the toolkit enabled adding of your own sites and also allowed editing of the “Source Code” of the actual submission process.   To me this meant 2 things,  I could add my own lists of sites that I have scraped, and potentially I could tweak the Submission Code (hereon known as the .sic file) to make it work on platforms other than the ones that ship standard with Sick.  This was enough to make me have a go.

So, paid up with my own lists ready to try out I fired up the Toolkit and used the clunky interface to make my own .sic packets (packets that work with sick submitter).  It worked really well, but the problem was that Sick Profile Maker was a little slow, it seems it wasnt made at the time to be hammering out Big Lists.  I soon discovered it needed to have packets of approx 100 sites at a time to run smoothly.  Well never mind, it still managed to do the job albeit slightly slowly, and I was still excited at making packets to work in Sick out of new platforms that might not be so spammed to death.

Fast forward a couple of months, and I’d been doing nicely submitting 100 strong packets all day, and I’ve even taken the opportunity to sell some ready made packets to the Sick User community.  100 sites in a packet going 1 site at a time is real slow though.

Enter Multi-Threading!

The sick development team knew it was one of the biggest requests so they went ahead and added Multithreading, along with Proxy support and an RSS submitter.   All of which worked brilliantly.

Fast forward to today (october 2010) and there are even more features available to Sick Submitter users.

The Sick Submitter market place for buying or selling ready made packets is become popular, and a couple of users like myself have created code that makes sick submit to lots of other platforms, not just the ones that ship with the submitter.

Today, in october 2010, this is how Sick Submitter currently weighs in for me,

I can register to 1000 sites on a variety of platforms in under 2 hours, all emails autoconfirmed.  Submitting your link to those sites will take another 1-2 hours.  There are ways the advanced user can bring this time down, and users with powerful PCs (my main machine is an average 2ghz 1gb laptop) can get even more speed.  Using all platforms, including custom ones I have coded .sic files for myself, some I have released to the community and those that others have shared or sold in the marketplace,  I can literally get 10s of thousands of links across a dozen or more different platforms.

Here is a list of currently supported platforms that you can submit links with sick submitter without having to buy any extra packets or templates from the market place…

Vbullettin forums
SMF forums
ExpressionEngine Forums
MyBB Forums
PunBB/FLuxBB Forums
IPBoard Forums
PHPBB forums
Mercury/Quicksilver forums
PHPLD Directory sites

Plus the list of RSS directories and the Pinger, these are all the platforms you can use with sick “Out Of The Box” as it where.
You can expect anywhere from a 50% success right down to 10% success rate (meaning regged/submitted/Live viewable link) on raw scraped lists depending on the platform.  For example with Expression Engine I can get upto 50% on my first run on a fresh list, whereas with perhaps the PunBB sites it can easily be as low as 10%,  but the lower success platforms tend to have a much higher potential target pool.  Obviously the trick then is to remove the bad sites from the list and continue to build on the Successful list, ending up with a nice big list of Successful sites.

There are a few platforms you can add to that list if you venture into the marketplace and grab some Addons from other sick users, including…

WPMU submitter, fully featured allowing Posts/Pages/Blogroll/Theme change and more.
PLIGG Submitter,
Statusnet Server Submitter, fully featured allowing Groups adding and creating
ELGG Blog poster
Wordpress Article site Submitter
WEBS.com sites submitter including captcha beater and comment spammer
A couple of different Blog Comment platforms
Article Friendly article and site directory submitter.

I think I have gone on enough, I didnt want this to be some kind of Glory Glory review, but more just telling you what sick can do.

Of course, sick has integrated Third Party Captcha service.  You can run as many sites as you like, creating a new profile for each as you go.

One subscription allows 2 installs of Sick Submitter (I currently have 3 subscriptions running on 6 PCs!).

How easy is sick for the average user?

Although you may struggle to write a new piece of code to start utilising a new platform that noone else is using sick for yet,  almost anyone with half a brain can get to grips with the regular features.  You need NO special skills to start using Sick Submitter straight away.  There are free packets in the forum aswell as small monthly packets available but the BEST part about sick is making your own lists and packets.  If you use a platform from the Standard list above, you simply Scrape a list plug it in and go!

At the price it is per month ($20) plus the new features added each month too, you really cannot go wrong with sick submitter.

This months new feature (october 2010) is SCHEDULING!  I have been testing it out and it works brilliantly!  I have one Sick install on a VPS and plan to setup an entire months worth of submissions on a schedule!

Now seriously, come on, the only thing I know that beats those features is Xrumer, and at $500 for xrumer you’d better know what your doing!  $20 is worth the risk for anyone, and I’d be willing to bet you wont be dissapointed.

A FootNote from Admin

A while back I found junk site in one of my niches pumped up to PR5, I fired the owner my tongue in cheek complements via the proxy registrar and that is how I made the acquaintence of 1buckPlr, who recently won the backlink building competition on backlinksForum.com. He achieved both the PR5 and his competition win using his favorite software. I know he has made good money using this software (as opposed to selling it, or selling his scripts for it). I managed to scrounge this review from him by allowing him to use his affiliate link to promote Sick Submitter… he gave me the review and said he was not bothered about the aff link drop.

I have not really used sick myself much as I have other apps that did the same thing, and, becuase I did not see the value in a “profile maker”… but times and products change. I am going to rate this beastie based on what I have seen Martin achieve with it.

Current Rating:

I say reluctantly as I have not seen anyone else promote what I have found to be by far the best directory submitter around and I have kind of kept it to myself for the past year.

Before we go on, this bit is important:

GSA WebSite Submitter is a stripped down version of GSA SoftSubmit. SoftSubmit is the same price but will post pad files to software directories and do directory submissoins, however, they have strict TOS that prohibit its use for craplink building and threaten to terminate your license if you use it for backlinking junk products and sites. However, if you are selling legitimate software products then get SoftSubmit instead.

GSA: The Best Directory Submitter

GSA Website Submitter is probably the tool all those “3000 manual directory submissions for $500″ are using and:

• Allows you to spin lots of variants of your listing at different character lengths (for different directory platforms)
• Supports captcha solving services like de-captcher and bypass captcha
• Has a very limited inbuilt captha solving capability, but really low success rate, hardly worth mentioning really
• Runs 100 odd threads and is FAST
• It has a tool to access POP mail accounts to auto confirm the mails sent
• It has several thousand link directories in its database
• Flags directories that require a reciprochal link
• It has all the categories for theses sites in its database
• It allows you to select long lists of categories using searches and order them by preference
• It will do a couple of thousand submissions in maybe 20 minutes

There are a couple of negatives to this software.

• It is not as user friendly as it could be.
• It does not handle sites were reciprocal links are required (I have been trying to get the developer to implement something for this but he is not keen)
• It is slow to add category lists
• It creates a mess if the captcha services go down

Categories are the biggest pain, it takes time to return them all, searching for them can be a nuisance, but it does work well. In short, when you select one category for one site, it will set the same category on any other site that uses it. So if you choose “shopping/consumer electronics” it will set that on every site that has that category. If you do a search for a category it will return a long list of available options which you can prioritised or deleted, and it will then go off and apply those to the entire directory list.

If the captcha service you are using fails, it does not default to another service, instead it starts popping up captchas for you to manually solve, it will not move onto a secondary captcha solving service. Also, during routine use you still seem to get the odd captcha popping up. For this reason I prefer to keep an eye on what it is doing rather than leaving it completely un-attended. I also recommend ByPass Captcha with this tool, which was added at my request. De-Captcher just isnt reliable enough IMHO.

A typical run will burn around $15 worth of captchas and get you a few hundred approved submissions (links).

Do Directory Submissions Still Work?

These submissions will get you anchored links on a wide IP distribution of sites. Why wouldnt they work? They will work as long as Google continues to obsessively bean count anchored links, the same as blog comments, article submissions and all the other stuff that SEO’s say “does not work” but really does. The reason people say “does not work” is usually because they have an alternative or a “secret” to sell you… but I digress.

In terms of measurable benefits I normally see a short term boost from these links as my submissions are listed on the “recently added” pages, but over time you will be relegated to deep internal pages.

Another thing I have noticed with these directories is that many order links by PR (Page Rank), but do not update the PR very often. So, if you can wait until you have some PR for your site before submitting you are going to get slightly better placements than if you submit a PR0.

If you can find the URLs it is worth backlinking these, as a lot of these directories are only partically indexed. A PR2 directory with 30,000 listings is rarely going to be fully indexed.

How Much Does GSA Website Submitter Cost?

Pricing is set to your local currency and there are several options available:

1. $50 per month
2. $170 per year
3. $519 permanent
4. $1351 if you want to run a submission service

I went for an annual subscription last year and will be renewing it in a months time.

I do not know how they track whether you are running a submission service, but I am sure they have a way to do this, they are no fools. I have used it on lots of sites to date, not all under the same whois details and not had a problem, so for regular IM work there is no issue using a general license.

This software allows you to make submissions that are just as good as manual subs, due to the accuracy of category selection and the ability to vary your anchors and descriptions.

Should You Buy GSA Website Submitter?

Well first of all there is a trial version you can play with to see if you like it (link below).

The question is not really whether you should buy this product, but whether you value the links it creates. There is no other software I have seen that works as well as GSA, its the only player on the field as far as Im concerned.

The only alternatives I have seen are a complex Xrumer Mod, that icanSoft rubbish that doesnt even submit properly to its puny 500 strong target list and semi automated products like SubmitEaze, which essentially form fill the fields to speed up your manual processing, but still take hours to submit to this many sites.

If you want the links from these directories then you want this software, period.

Download Trial Version or Order

If you found this review helpful please consider rewarding me with Sheckels by using my affiliate links:

GSA Homepage Listing All Products Including Website Submitter (and SoftSubmit for developers only)

Buy Website Submitter License

Download Website Submitter Trial Version

SoftSubmit is the Same Price as website submitter but submits to link directories and software directories. It is therefore much better value but is strictly for legit software developers so make sure you understand the TOS for this product before buying:

Buy SoftSubmit License

Download SoftSubmit Trial Version

But, it seems in this game it is not sufficient to produce a rock solid product that works really well. To make real money it seems you are better off producing some semi functional bit of crap and investing all your efforts in a “moron friendly squeeze page”:

• Nuke your competitors, blast them into dust and leave their families mourning their passing
• Rocket your site up the serps and increase your profits 1000% with this simple to use software
• Act now as the price cannot stay this low forever, the price is going up…
• Limited availability… this software is so powerful we dont want too many people to get their hands on it, it would end the global economy as we know it
• The doors are closing soon!
• For serious marketers only. Dont buy this product if you cannot see the value of getting a dumpster full of google cash deliverd to your paypal account each month

I like the last one best, I see that all the time, I like to call it the emporers new clothes routine…. ridiculous.

References to warfare (nuclear preferably), rocket science, general blasting, crushing, destroying sleuth, sneak etc are all popular themes on the moron swindle pages.

The other familliar face is the scarecity tactics … I love the “we do not want too many people to get their hands on this powerful tool” routine, as if these hawks will ever decline a sale (there are one or two genuine exceptions to this).

The *best* use of “the doors are closing” I ever saw was on WP Black Hat, his doors seemed to have faulty locks as they kept being blown open and shut every couple of weeks… “the doors of wp black hat are open, no no closed, I mean open, yes.. no ermm but… I dunno… I think the doors of wp black hat might be slightly ajar” … funny stuff.

Then its onto the testimonials which invariably come from ficticious persons, sock puppests or other people pimping their own junk products:

I love the “one of the good guys” and “I just have to speak up” lines, they always tickle me, you couldn’t make this shit up…

Hmm whats next, oh yes some freebies:

• Instant Google Cash Rocket Secrets worth $789
• SEO Competition Super Sleuth Report worth $399

Which of course are utterly worthless.

Some sites also use sock puppetry in the comments section. I saw one page for “teeth whitening” where someone “commented” that they were going to try it out and comment back with the results. They duly did this, and posted images.. not hyperlinked from an image hosting service tho… no no, these images were uploaded to the website itself, but comments forms do not allow image uploads.

I dunno if this stuff will ever change, I once thought so, I mean nothing stays the same for ever and you would expect this kind of junk to burn out as ingenious marketers began to come up with somthing a bit more original and effective… but I see no evidence of that. Perhaps these pages really are the zenith of Internet Marketing?

Anyway, look out for Link Veloci Tractor, it will be emptying pockets near you very soon

If you know about these systems, what makes a good one and what makes a bad one, then you probably need read no further then the following block quote:

Today I read a post on SEO Book where Rand Fishkin describes how easily they (his company) were able to programatically to identify paid links, and could not understand why Google does not discount these links.

Other stuff I have read recently talks of how Google is de-valuing:

• Article Submissions and Blog Networks
• Blog Comments
• Sidebar Links
• Profile Links
• Reciprocal links
• 3 way links

In fact, just about everything. If you believe these people, then nothing works, there is nothing left but good old organic links and everything else is discounted.

Ok so Google is against paid links and mass link building and wants an organic world. Well, more than any other company Google destroyed that possibility by obsessively bean counting links to rank sites. Google cannot rank on content, as it cannot (algorithmically) tell Markov generated drool from a literary masterpiece, such as Link Building Reviews .

On the flip side, consider how, why and when people engineer links to their site? The fact is most businesses have no possibility of attracting organic links to their site because they are boring sites. People write in forums and on blogs about hobbies, interests, entertainment. Very few of us are going to rave on about our car insurance, food blender or the chocolate bar we just ate.  So, big companies with the means create virals like drumming gorillas to promote chocolate, Russian Meerkats to promote car insurance and Mad Scientists calving up ipads to promote blenders.

Ok so virals can get links, but, as above, they rarely:

• link to the boring root domain
• use the desired keywords

And this is big budget stuff, a plumber in crapstow has absolutely no chance of getting an organic link to his 3 page business site, nor the time to invest in extensive “how to unblock your sink” tutorials.

So, for commercial stuff, what is left? Well, all the stuff Google supposedly discounts, paid links, Web 2.0, articles, comments, profiles… all the garbage used to prop up websites these days.

Google use links as a quality metric, nothing more nothing less. Google needs quality metrics, without them, there is no search engine. Can / do all these “discounted” and “de-valued” links still perform as quality metrics?

Absolutely, paid links in particular. Why? Because buying good quality links costs lots of money, and this in itself filteres out a lot of worthless sites.

If you have $10,000 per month to rent links, then it follows that you also have money to invest in good site design, usability and content. Furthermore, you are going to be matching your keywords closely to your services, after all, the way most large sites make money is by connecting users with products and services they actually want to buy, at the right price

So, it follows that a large site with money to spend on links is going to be sending traffic to useful pages that convert. No one is going to point $10k worth of links at a pile of crap.

As you sink lower into the cess pool things get a little more blurrey, but the same basic rules apply. Syndicating junk articles, trading sidebar links, bookmarking, profile building, squid pages, hub pages etc etc etc all cost time and money.

The more of this garbage you amas, the more effort you have put in, the more effort you put in, the more likely you are to invest in the site you are promoting to make it convert better and withstand manual review.

Blog comments are one thing that has caused a bit of debate recently, but, to get comments approved on a half decent wordpress site is very expensive. You have to read the article and post something meaningful. You may have to solve a captcha, like you do on this site. Too many failures and you are Akismetted. Sites like this one are not easily spammed, so, why do people assume the links are worthless? They are not worthless at all.

All of these links can be and are used as a quality metric. I think Google may deliberately continue to count paid links as they are still a quality indicator, whilst simultaneously penalising sites to try to keep a lid on things / keep up appearances.

The other thing is that my competitors have the same problem I do. No one links to their sites organically, because they are boring. If Google de-value my links, they also de-value my competitors links. So, as long as I have more de-valued links than my competitors I am still good to go.

Google analyse the internet. They collect data and use it to rank sites. What is the point in amassing this data only to throw most of it out again and leaving themselves less to work with?

If you take away all these links “which can easily be filtered out” what is left?