When building out web sites for ecommerce and affiliate marketing, we run the gamut of promotion strategies from PPC (pay per click) on the search engines to link building using article marketing, web 2.0 sites, etc.
We’re always looking for more networks to test out and services to try so that we can offload and automate as much as possible.
This past week we took a look at Paidbacklinks.com. The service promises to get links built using contextual links within their existing blog network. The sales page talks about building those links, not as blogroll links, but as links within both new and existing blog posts.
The idea of getting a contextual links added to an existing (and indexed) blog post looked really good. This is one of the link prospecting methods that we already use, so if that could be automated on this new network, then that’s great. They’ll also create new content around a keyword if it isn’t in their inventory. Again, this is good since new blog posts tend to get indexed quickly. Even if the post page is new, as long as the domain name has some age to it and the root domain has some page rank, then cool.
We signed up for the monthly minimum of $47 for 179 link credits. Those links are dripped out at 1 to 20 per day per keyword/URL combination you choose. You can also set the maximum number of links each keyword/URL combination receives.
All in all, that’s looking good. I wish I had a management tool like this to build into a self-hosted blog network.
We let this run a couple of days and then went to inspect the links. Most of the pages were new, but that was to be expected. What wasn’t expected was these “new” pages were postdated to late 2010 (Sept, Oct, and Nov dates were popular) and the domains were all showing 0 or 1 DA in the SEOMoz toolbar. None of the posts were indexed in the big G. More disturbing was the fact that many of the root domains were not cached in Google and only had a handful (around 30 pages) indexed when the blog itself has hundreds of pages.
This link network is bad. The domains are all new with no page or trust rank, the content is all scraped and Markoved autogenerated content (but with a contextual link!), and the pages are not indexed and look like once they get indexed will not stick.
Grab some blogger blogs and some cheap domains for better bang for your buck.
Hm – so you let it run for two days and reviewed it? I see why you and I had two different impressions. I paid for the silver package (470+ links) for two months and had no impression the blog network was high quality or whatnot – but my rankings improved and that was all that mattered.
Yeah. I took a quick look at all of the links being generated and ran a report on if the domains were cached and indexed plus spot checked a few of them in Open Site Explorer.
I would expect these type of links to not be stellar, but the overall lack of quality in that network told me to stay away.
Sorry to see that you had some negative impacts on your site. Hope your rankings bounce back soon.