LinxBoss Review
September 3, 2010 by admin
Filed under Link Building Services
Linx Boss is an automated link bulding service I have been trying out lately. I have not been using it long enough to comment on the SEO benefits of this system, but I have a pretty good idea how it is going to pan out.
LinxBoss is a hands off system. You load your 5 target sites (on entry level account, you can buy more slots). You load your campaigns for keywords / deep links etc. Then forget about it. There is no article writing, no spinning. They provide all the content for you. It is a very easy system.
The interface is quite slick on this system too, it looks very professional.
One of the selling points of Linx Boss is the fact they will provide secondary backlinks, aka L4L (links for links) aka class C links. I will digress a second here on how links are classified (by some) into A, B, C:
- Class A – Internal links on your own site
- Class B – External links pointing to your site
- Class C – External links pointing to your class B links
So, what LinxBoss do is scrape your backlinks, check the sites to make sure there is a do follow link on the page and backlink it for you. The idea is to boost the value of your existing backlinks. They do not say how they are doing this, but the only options I am aware of for that kind of mass linking are Xrumer or “Whois” type links commonly used for indexing.
Ok so it all sounds pretty cool, but, any link network really lives or dies on the quality of its own sites. That is what you are paying for after all. If you want secondary links you can get those yourself with a one off payment for some software, you do not need an expensive subscription, so, nice as the L4L feature is, LinxBoss will sink or swim on the quality of its network.
So, I have had the pleasure of viewing some Linx Boss sites and am now ready to go on record as saying they are a pile of shit.
(UK slang: Cowboy – A tradesperson, normally a builder, plumber, roofer etc who performs shoddy work at an inflated price)
The best I have seen is a PR2 domain.
Most do not seem to be fully indexed.
The sites themselves are real shockers. They are splogs made from dupe article snippets. So, a miscelaneous snippet from a swiped article followed by your backlink. Your backlink is not even embedded into the text, it is kind of hanging around aimlessley at the end of the swiped snippet.
Now, I have some experience using swiped articles on caught domains, it ended badly. You can get away with using “so many” dupe articles on a site, but when you build an entire splog with them, they eventually seem to get zapped. So, in my humble opinion it is a bad plan.
I also read a post in a forum that you could find a large part of their network by googling a phrase match of their company name which was disclosed somewhere on their website. Now, that issue seems to have been fixed as they are using private registration and I was not able to find the company name, but, anyone who has ever seriously looked into building link networks knows you need to mix up:
- Whois
- IP addresses
- Nameservers (open to some debate)
Leaving WHOIS open like that is a major clanger and is not a mistake a professional network builder would have made.
Ok, so the splogs are nasty and they botched the whois early on, but what about their domaining ability?
Well, as I mentioned every site I have seen so far is a PR2, pretty weak. I took a look at the backlink profile of some of these domains and found most were propped up with very meager rashions of spam. Yahoo was showing less than 20 backlinks for these sites. One I checked was just showing a handful of links from Porn forum spam.
If you phrase match search the domain in Google you can find there are a lot more references to some of these sites from spammy activities of the previous owners of the domain. So, domains that seem to have been acquired in 2010 have spam links going back a couple of years previously.
Now, I know a bit about domaining and I would not bother buying these things for the $7 re reg fee, and certainly would not buy them at auction, or pay fees for closeouts on TDNAM, not for SEO purposes.
Of course, if your main motivation is to sell links as opposed to rank your own sites with the links, then all you care about is PR. You do not have to concern yourself with the quality of a domain, only the amount of green pixie dust visible in your punters toolbar.
Now, I have seen a lot of comments lately about “not worrying about the number of links reported by search engines”, that links can still be counted, and to concentrate on rank etc etc etc. Poppycock. If you have a choice of 3 companies to give your money too you want to pick the best one. If one company gets links indexed and another doesnt, then that is a pretty clear signal of a difference in quality between those two services. (I know there are exceptions to this which I am not going to go into, suffice to say, I do not think this network is such an exception).
I will update this post with more information at a later point in time, but for the time being, my advice is hold onto your cash.
Terminated:
After 1 month all I can see on the new domain, which was a clean test is circa 10 links indexed in Yahoo ranging from PR0 – PR2. Some of these are banned in Google. This is the result of a supposed 200 submissions to the network. The site still does not rank for shit. Decent links would already be getting me some longtails, I am still cruzing at sea level.
I know 1 month is not long enough to properly test a service, but at this point I am 90% sure is a waste of time. My only reason for continuing with this system would be for the purpose of this review / test as I do not belive it will increase my rank on my money sites.
So, the question I have to ask myself is:
“do I want to spend another $240 just to complete a review of something I do not believe in”.
The answer to that is no. I could never see myself recommending this service or adding an affiliate link for it. I do not want to spend even more money on the thing and time updating this post just to try and “prove” it is as crap as it looks. Instead I am using the money to buy more buildMyRank posts as that system is showing great potential (check out my Build My Rank Review).
Current Rating:
Ha. This is hilarious. Good points. Hey, you gotta test right? Test and then cut and run.
Yeah Ill give it a little longer to see what happens, but thus far, its looking pretty grim
I’ve used linxboss for about 6 months now. The first 3-4 months I had great results. I’ve got several top 5 rankings for some pretty competitive kws. (Not quite mortgage or diet level, but not 5 word long-tails either.) Recently though things have been slowing down on those higher competition kws. They haven’t dropped in the serps, just not rising any more. Could be that they’ve hit the limit of what those blog links can do.
I added a couple of new sites about a week ago and they’ve had a little movement so far.
I’m thinking that the reason that the rankings stopped increasing is because those are the only links I’ve built to those pages for a long time is the ones from linxboss. I’m kinda guessing that if I added some more link variety that I might get some more boost from the linxboss one.
You’re right though, the linxboss sites I’ve found are nothing to write home about but they’ve worked pretty well for me. Whether it’s worth $127/month is another story and I’m not sure if I’ll continue, but I have made my money back and more from the increased SERPS I’ve got from it.
CPA Network Reviews recently posted..Why Google Analytics Scares Me
Greetings,
Well, im sure LinxBoss can increase your rank on some stuff. They are providing anchored links on domains with PR, and some of the pages will get indexed. I did not really give it a chance to run. I had planned on a three month test, but honestly, when I saw the state of the sites I figured it was a waste.
If it was $29pm I would have stuck with it, but $127 is a joke for what they have in their network. It would not surprise me one bit if they wake up one morning and the whole shit pile has been de indexed in one swoop. Ive seen that happen to better networks than this one in the past.
As for your terms sticking… you are probably right, you have reached the limit of what these things can do for you and you need to do something else to supplement it.
Also, as these links age they will deteriorate. The posts with your links on are sinking back deeper into the archives of these sites, and these sites are only partially indexed. In short, over time, if things continue as they are your LinxBoss links are going to be on mostly non indexed pages.
LinxBoss are pumping 10 dupe posts per day onto low quality domains, there simply is not the quality in the sites to support that.
Anyway… glad it worked out for you and always good to hear from others that have used a service.
To each their own. I’ve had great success with Linxboss – it’s helped me rank for hard terms that make me several grand per month on their own – so it’s definitely paid for itself. I’ve had sites that I couldn’t rank well for 2 years, then I put them on linxboss and in 3 months their in the top 3 making me a fook load of money. It’s been my staple link building strategy ever since. I now have a 100 domain addon package, yes it’s costing me a couple grand per month, but the sites I have in the network that Linxboss has helped me rank for are making many times that by their own. I’d say about 80% of the sites I have in the system are ranking well for their terms, using Linxboss ONLY.
1 month is not long enough to do any kind of seo test, trust me. You need at least 4-6months of solid testing to make any conclusions – regardless of how good or bad you think the sites in their network are. Personally, I have many links on pr3-4 sites from their network, and some that are pr1-2 – so I think it just depends on what they give you.
Hi Adam,
You say:
“it’s helped me rank for hard terms that make me several grand per month on their own – so it’s definitely paid for itself”
and that is all that matters at the end of the day. You can justify any expence if it is profitable.
Ive read other stuff about linxBoss working, Im sure it does, it does get you anchored links on PR’d sites, but compared to other stuff around in a similar price bracket I still think it sucks TBH. The only benefit of it is that its completely hands off.
I know one month is not long enough to try anything, but as I said in my post, and in this comment, I think there are better places to put your money at the moment, and I was not about to sink cash into LinxBoss when I did not like the results I was seeing.
I really dont think the LinxBoss sites I saw will be sticking around for long TBH, in fact many had already been de-indexed.
Building sites with swiped article snippets is not a good plan… been there, done that, got wiped out.
Anyway, like you say, each to their own, if its giving you good ROI then there is no reason to stop.
Thanks for your comment… was interesting to hear
Yea the reason I like it so much is due to the hands off feature. I really value my time, and I hate doing my link building manually, so it’s a good investment for me. It is pricey, so you need to have sites that *will* make you good money from Google (don’t stick $1/day adsense sites on there, or you won’t even break even).
I thought I may as well write something here while im watching the bears get waxed by the patriots right now.
Ive been using linx boss for over 7 months. One of my client sites in on this system since april and his site ranks on page one top 3 for a huge 2 word phrase. This is not an internet marketing business, this is a real off line business.
I will say this though. I have no clue what would happen to his rankings if I stopped getting links from them. Obviously those links would fade to the back of their blog network and would likely get de indexed. In that case I would probably lose rankings.
I also use their system for new sites. But what I have been doing is putting them into the system for only two weeks, which will give me about 100 links. Then I take them off and start doing a lot of article submissions over the course of the next few weeks. Then of course you want to get links from as many other sources as possible for a well rounded link profile. This usually works for me on my new sites. for competitive markets you will need to leave the site on linx boss for months.
After a while add other pages mixing up your keywords, and always get links from other sources other than just from linxboss. If you expect to get good rankings from just one source your fooling yourself. If you look at the URLs that actually get indexed from linxboss it will look something like p=16. Or something like that as they dont add any seo to their urls. that is what ive found anyway.
So if you dont want all your links to look like that you obviously need to get more varied links. Of course most of us know that already. After reading your review on BMR i was about to sign up until i read thru all the comments and found out that many of their blogs have huge downtime…
Anyway, just thought I would throw my two cents in about linx boss. Actually im hoping they just close down their membership all together. That would be fine with me..
Hi Brad,
Thanks for adding this, its a very useful comment. I am pretty sure linxBoss would work over time but I still think there are better ways to spend your money, I may give them a whirl on another site I am working on at the moment for which I have exhausted all other methods… but Im not sure. I just struggled to get past the poor quality of the network / sites TBH… but, you are not the first person to report getting decent results with it.
Yea I can def understand your side for sure. Ive had sites ive added to their system that totally flopped. from my testing and using it now for almost a year I think certain categories do a lot better than others. Ive followed and seen a lot of seo companies using it to do links for their clients. So I think the business category my yield better quality sites. I ve seen pr 3 and 4 using that category. For straight out affiliate sites such as a few of my relatioship type sites that sell CB ebooks, they totally sucked. My rankings actually went back wards so i think it depends on your site and the category you pick. Hope that helps.
I’ve tried LinxBoss for the last 5 months. I’m not new to this industry, having built my first website back in 1994 and doing SEO/SEM since 2000. I decided to outsource some work because I was so busy.
After the first couple of months I was suspicious that they weren’t actually building many, if any links. In the end I tested them on a new site where I had them building deep links and I purposely only built index page links. Two months later – guess what. No backlink checker can find any deep links, but there are plenty of index page backlinks showing.
Of course, for some reason they’re “prohibited from providing information” on the links they’ve supposedly created. How convenient. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY.
When I tested it I used at least one new domain with no links and built index page links with it. I was able to find a small number of links but they were really poor, not worth the money.
IMHO Google will burn that network to the ground at some point, it is deeply flawed.
LinxBoss is a scam guys. I ran an experiment with a new domain, test domain with test anchor text and not one, NOT ONE, link showed up in either opensiteexplorer, Majestic SEO, or Yahoo. This guy collects your subscription money for a fancy SERP checker.
Hi Pazintys,
Those are pretty strong allegations, when I tested LinxBoss I was able to find links, and did not think it was a “scam”, I just thought it was a pile of shit for the money.
How long did you use the service for before checking the links?
It would not surprise me one bit if Google de-indexes their sites, in fact, I think Google de-indexing of this network is innevitable, but that would not stop Yahoo and Majestic indexing and reporting them.
Oh, I wish I’d found this review before I signed up for Linxboss! I’ve almost completed my first month and I’ve already cancelled my subscription.
After reading their promises of links from high PR sites, I was horrified to see where my links were being posted – as you say, just stuck to the end of short, badly-spun posts on sh!tty low-rent splogs. I see no point in paying for links which I doubt will last long.
L4L never, ever worked although I emailed them several times – they were very nice about it, and promised to fix it, but it never happened.
The strange thing is that I did get some extra traffic but a lot of it is spam – my eBay EPC has dropped and I have more spam comments. Could these splogs be attracting spambots or something?
Linxboss has a clever approach – their blurb says “we don’t offer refunds because we don’t want members who aren’t committed, if you’re not willing to invest for the long term don’t bother, yadda yadda…” Nonsense!
Marisa Wright recently posted..Fitting Pointe Shoes – some real life examples
Yeah LinxBoss links are grim, total crap, one of the worst service’s ive seen for the money.
I never saw any results at all from L4L either. I doubt they are responsible for a rise in spambots.
EPN is terrible for counting “bot clicks” and dropping EPC. They have had that issue for years and never seem to be interested in resolving it. The whole EPC thing was bad from my point of view, it was a much more transparrent system before.
Ok, I used Linxboss for a year on 150 of urls. It seemed to work very well until this last spring when things seem to hit the wall. Additionally, when I took a site off LB its rankings plummeted within a week to no mans land. BE Warned and be careful, once you are in, you will pay a big price for leaving
I know someone who seems to have some success using Linxboss – i have always watched his progress with interest.
It’s main feature for me is the fact that you get links without having to do any work, after using the other link building tools it is obvious that there is a significant time cost to every one of them, and at the end of the day a hell of a lot of links are nofollowed nowadays anyway, are Linxboss links really that crap comsidering this fact??
I am wondering if the steady daily dripping of links each day offsets the poor quality of these links – you are getting say 5 links each and every day of the week rather then a blast every now and again when using another tool.
I was speaking to someone else yesterday whose site has done ok with LB too.
They seem to get really mixed results. I guess its ok for some stuff, but not others.
The issue I had with it was that their domaining / network building / content mangling abilities were piss poor and for the money you could do a lot better elsewhere.
I mean, you can pick up shitty blog posts from a number of sources, then automate backlinking to those posts with links from services like BackBlasts.Com, or just buy stuff off fiverr, or getmyrank.com.
I guess LinxBoss is ok if your seriously lazy, but if your prepared to invest a couple of hours you can put much more effective stuff together for less money without having to crank too many levers yourself.
If all the linking sites don’t get links themselves from trusted sources and the linking in/out balance is not natural and the sites have duplicate content then this sites will be banned from Google and with your link on that site your site will be in Googles spotlight as well. Better focus on quality links.
BTW I loved your review and sense of humor. Its the first time I read your blog, keep up the good work
Wouter
link building expert amsterdam recently posted..Duitstalige sites en pagina’s hoog laten ranken in Google met Duitse linkbuilding