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Linkvana 2.0 Review

Money Schemes — Wed, 02 May 2012 15:36:57 +0000

You’ll have to excuse me if this review tends to wander a bit, but to be honest I’ve had to write and re-write most of it so many times that it’s a wonder it’s getting done at all. The problem has been a simple one, how are you supposed to measure results when the scale on your ruler is being dicked around with every other day? Just keep that in mind when you read my results further down. Anyway, after being contacted to test Linkvana (this was a gifted subscription for review purposes) I’ve been using it for a fair few months now and this is how I’ve found the experience, I’ll leave you to make your own minds up as to whether or not you think it’s worth $147 a month.

Linvana Modules

Lets get the basics out of the way first, you manage things in Linkvana by creating projects. Each project tends to represent one site and within this project you can add any number of pages/keyword(s) combinations to promote. There are no limits to the number of websites you can promote with Linkvana which is a welcome change compared to some of their competitors. On the down side there is no built in link variation, if you want to mix up anchor text then you’re going to need to take care of that yourself either via a lot more writing or a lot more outsourcing. The visual part of Linkvana though really is well thought out and the interface is easy to follow and fast to respond. Believe me this is no Unique Article Wizard!

Once you have your project with a page/keyword to promote there are 6 seperate promotion modules you can use. They are

1. Posts
2. Articles
3. Social Bookmarks
4. Comments
5. Profiles
6. Social Media

Linkvana Posts

You can create as many posts a month as you like so if you have a huge number of websites and pages to promote Linkvana can accomodate you. Each post (or snippet in reality) has to be at least 100 words long and can contain at most 1 link. Once you’ve created your post it then goes through approval before finding its way onto your post posting schedule. Each project can distribute posts at a rate of either Every 3rd Day, Every Other Day, 1 Per Day, 1-3 Per Day, 2-5 PerDay, 1 Per Week or the humanise option. As I said above you can create as many of these posts as you like, but who is going to spend all their time writing 100 word posts? This is where the outsourcing option in Linkvana comes in and it will cost you 1 Linkvana credit per post. Linkvana credits cost $2 per credit. Yes you heard me correctly. $2 per credit. That is $2 per post, on top of the $147 a month subscription, unless you want to write all the posts yourself (which I didn’t). I should add that there is the option to import posts (say if you have an outsourcer available) BUT the import strips any HTML from the post, including links. So you’ll then still have to go through and manually add a link to every post you’ve imported. This makes using their own outsourcing as the only viable option for people looking to do a lot of posts. Most of the promotion I did with Linkvana was in the form of posts, simply because I believe I was approached to review Linkvana based on my recommendation for people to use Build My Rank (remember them?). You’ll need to read my conclusion later on to find out how effective I thought the Linkvana posts were.

Linkvana Articles

Think longer posts. A minimum of 250 words, no spun content and a maximum of 3 links per article. You’ve had enough of writing posts, why not write some much longer articles! Or not. You can always outsource at 5 Linkvana credits per article (or $10 to you and me). $10 for a 250+ word article. Wow. You can probably imagine I didn’t use this much.

Social Bookmarks

I’ll come straight out and say I didn’t test these. It wasn’t the pricing that put me off (25 Bookmarks for 6 credits, 50 for 10 or 100 for 16). It was the fact that once I’d paid they then still wanted me to go through and fill in all the information to create the links. Errr, Magic Submitter anybody? I have done some research to find out where these bookmarks were going and it’s enough to say that there are so many more cost effective and not to mention easier ways of getting these bookmarks that for me this was a total non starter within Linkvana.

Linkvana Commenting

They find the articles and videos for you to leave your commments on. The link you choose to promote is automatically including either in the comment itself or as part of the author name. This looked like it had real potential. Not only that but Linkvana are generous enough to give you 150 blog commenting credits each month. To mix thing up the comments you leave have to be of a certain length ranging from a minimum of 20-80 words. Like everything within Linkvana the interface was again slick and the posting delay was minimal. It didn’t take a huge amount of time to plough through some comments and I did use this feature.

Profiles

50 profile links for 14 credits ($28) or 100 for 28 credits ($56), no that doesn’t make sense to me either. I wouldn’t care if they gave away a million free each month, I wouldn’t touch profile links with a barge pole. I do like to test things so you know where your money is going but I’ve had that many bad experiences where I’ve tested all different types of forum and Web2.0 profiles that I wouldn’t even risk the crappiest of my crap websites by pointing this type of link at them.

Linkvana Social Media

Why they hide this away at the bottom of the menu is beyond me, if there is one module in Linkvana I’d recommend above any other it is this one. Think Google+, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg etc promotion. You do get 100 links free per month but if you want more then it’s time to put your hand in your wallet again. Prices range from 100 Social Media Links for 8 credits ($16) all the way up to 1600 Social Media Links for 58 credits ($116). If I was in charge of Linkvana I’d be getting rid of the social bookmarks page and pushing this instead. Not only did I find this the mot effective module but it’s pricing seems to be much more in line with the competition.

My Results With Linkvana

This is where things get a little messy. I started out with such good intentions but no sooner had I started than Google started playing around with anything and everything. Still I’ll give you what I found.

First of all Linkvana posts were nowhere near as effective as Build My Rank posts. They just weren’t. Distributing 15-20 posts with BMR resulted in an instant boost to Google, Yahoo and Bing rankings. The same promotion with Linkvana resulted in a slight increase in Yahoo and Bing but nothing in Google. I tested 2 URLs initially with this. One being an exact match domain that had once ridden high in Google but was suffering from being ignored for a couple of years, the other being a deep page that was already indexed but with minimal previous backlinking. Neither has shifted in any positive way in Google. To supplement this test and with the demise of BMR as my primary “post link source” I then stumped up the cash to do a much wider test. The results, or lack off have been the same. I’m sorry but the Linkvana posts module is absolutely no replacement for the power that Build My Rank provided, that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it.

I only paid for 2 articles to be written, but on seeing the quality of them and the webistes they ended up on I wasn’t likely to be spending money on any more @ $10 a go. Commenting was a different story. I did actually measure a small increase in Google rankings with the 2 URLs I initially promoted using this method (again 1 EMD domain and another deeper page). We are talking a place change of 3-4 to the mid teens for what were fairly uncompetitive keywords but at least it’s something. However the real bonus I got from Linkvana was with the Social Media links. As part of the $147 a month you get 100 of these links and I kept mine pointing at the same page. This page is now sat on the front page of Google in 5th spot for its primary keyword where as before it was mid second page.

I don’t want this review to sound all doom and gloom. For all I know Linkvana could have been the best linking service in the world before the recent Google chanes. Besides the Social Media there have been some other positives from using Linkvana. For a start none of the pages and sites I promoted with Linkvana were negatively affected by the recent Google Penguin update. That’s got to be a good thing? Plus I have seen some positive impact in Yahoo and Bing with just about everything I’ve done with Linkvana so if that’s your game you’re on to a winner. I also imagine that if you have very deep pockets or don’t mind spending 20 hours a day writing then you’d probably do better out of it than I did. If I didn’t know that there were much cheaper and more hands off ways of achieving the same results out there then maybe I’d feel different. Hopefully the latest feature they are introducing will address some of this because I know they are currently in the process of adding a much simpler “how many links to you want to where” style feature. No doubt you’ll have to pay for it as you do with just about everything with Linkvana but it should help with the core concepts of backlinking as we move through 2012, namely link quality and anchor text diversity. The other thing they have going for them is that they are still here, that in itself is a bit of a major result after the recent Google changes.

Overall then what do you get for your $147 a month with Linkvana. You get to distribute as many posts and articles as you like, you get the opportunity to produce 150 comments for backlinks and you get 100 free Social Media links. If you say it really quick then it doesn’t sound so bad….maybe.

Google Penguin Update – 301 Redirect?

Money Schemes — Wed, 02 May 2012 08:04:52 +0000

How is your traffic doing after Google’s Penguin update (April 24th 2012)? If you’re anything like me you are suffering quite badly. A lot of the websites I’ve built in the last 2-3 years have been hit hard of by this update regardless of content quality or promotion techniques used. A couple of those sites I was very proud off and even worse it seems that one in particular was negatively impacted by the actions of somebody else linking to it…brilliant. Then there is MoneySchemes.net, which for reasons of not being a moron I tend not to promote using any of the systems and tools I write about on it. Yet if you are reading this via a web search you are probably one of only around 30 people to do so today, where as before the 24th this site receieved hundreds of visitors a day. Why wouldn’t it? It’s all unique content, written by somebody who knows what they are talking about (most of the time!) and a lot of people find it quite useful. It’s not hooked up in any quick fix link systems (not be me anyway) so why would it get hammered? I guess sometimes it’s more about the subject of your writing than the quality of it.

BUT anyway, on to the real subject of this post. What to do with your websites that were badly affected by the Penguin update?

Right now I wish I had a pound for every webmaster who had suggested this to me, each thinking they were being devilishly fiendish! What you need to do is buy another domain, copy your affected website to it and then 301 redirect the old domain. IT’S BRILLIANT! (So if you think you’re being sneaky doing this you’re really not) How can this not work? For a start do people honestly believe that Google are that stupid that they are going to just allow people to move affected websites to new domains and pick up where they left off? Really? I’d be amazed if this works but please be sure to let me know how you get on with it.

My strategy, if that’s what you can call it, is going to be a little different. I’ve just decided to carry on exactly as I was prior to the Penguin update. This involves writing the vast majority of the posts for my websites myself, not being afraid to add the odd piece of 3rd party content, keeping the linking so that most of it is natural and again not being afraid to use the few tools that can still add value.

Now all I need is for Google to take a long hard look at their current rankings and decide if they think that they are really giving people the best search results. I can’t imagine it will be too long before we start to see some major and minor tweaks to what Google have done with Penguin and I’m confident enough that my own content will stand up at the end of the day….and in the meantime I’ll just do a lot more fishing!

Is Negative SEO Now A Reality?

Money Schemes — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:35:05 +0000

Yes my friends, yes negative SEO is now very much a reality! Don’t get me worng, it has been possible to negatively impact on peoples search results for a long time, in fact ever since Google decided that rather than treating “bad SEO” neautrally i.e. ignoring it, there’d prefer to punish it. BUT Google were always sensible enough to look at balance and if you really wanted to take down a competitor you were looking at many months of hard work and not a small amount of money. Now thanks to the latest Google update (nicknamed “What the fuck have you done now”) all this has become much easier. There are so many tools out there that will post links in a way that Google are now penalising that it’s just a case of getting a subscription and submitting your competitors websites. In fact you can do it in a one off if you like, just pay somebody to blast a load of fake forum profiles and you’re done. Even better is if you go by many of the current websites ranking well all we have to do to gain favour with Google again is go back to exact match domains, we don’t even need any content! There are really lots of examples out there of totally blank websites ranking in the top 10 in Google for massively competitive search terms. What progress.

On a slighlty serious note how long are Google going to play this game before they admit they have NO WAY of accurately working out what should go where based on backlinks? As of today (26th April 2012) their search results are worse than what they have ever been. I’m not saying this as an annoyed webmaster (I’m so rock and roll I haven’t even bothered to check if any of my websites are affected), my income doesn’t really rely on Google so I couldn’t care less, I’m saying it as somebody who heavily uses internet search each and every day. The results are getting worse, if it’s not a Wiki page or a Youtube video it’s now a EMD with bugger all real content. In the meantime webmasters who have invested money they made online back into producing good quality content are now nowhere to be seen. This is what Google fails to understand, they want a world of interesting content for them to profit from, whilst assuming that the people producing this content want no other reward than a “wow you’re great”. Get real. The vast majority of the information worth reading online is produced from a source that requires a pay cheque at the end of the month. Just like Google’s employees…because they’re not doing any of this for the greater good either, at the end of the day there is a bottom line.

Using Traffic Launch Pad Pro To Promote Auto Traffic Buddy Blogs

Money Schemes — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:56:39 +0000

I’ve been using Auto Traffic Buddy for almost 6 months now and although like everything else out there in Internet Marketing land you have to take the sales page with a pinch of salt it is actually quite a good system. I’m not going to go into detail here because I’ll be doing a proper review at some point but enough to say that it is effective in increasing organic traffic. However there is 1 thing you can definintely do to improve the effectiveness of the system.

The trouble is that the indexing rate for your network blogs can either be very sluggish or sometimes they aren’t indexed at all (in my experience anyway). Luckily they do provide you with a quick fix promotional tool called Traffic Launch Pad Pro which is very good at quickly getting content indexed, not so great for authority back linking but easily enough to get rid of that page rank unranked, none indexed status. Problem is (aren’t I full of problems today?) that you have to manually configure for submission, so if you have 100 network blogs on ATB that’s a hell of a lot of work (it’s still a lot of work if you’re adding 10 new network blogs each month). To make this easier I’ve built myself a simple spreadsheet that takes all of the hassle out of submitting my ATB network blogs through TLP Pro. The steps are really simple:-

1. Login to your Archon Central control panel and under “Blog Network” choose “List Blogs”
2. Click on the “B” Icon next to the group of blogs you wish to promote with TLP Pro, the list should expand to show your blogs
3. Use your cursor to highlight from the top left (1st blog name) to the bottom right (last blog date added) and then copy
4. Open up my formatting spreadsheet and use paste special, “Unicode Text” into the spreadsheets first 4 columns (A-D)
5. Column J in the spreadsheet will now automatically contain all the information in the correct format so you can copy and paste this into the “Enter URL” area of Traffic Launch Pad Pro.

Then it’s just a case of hitting the Start button to start submitting your ATB blogs to the various services. If you’re worried about such things you could use the schedule to limit the number of submissions each day but I just tend to do 1 blog group per day so that’s roughly 2 days each month when I get new credits on the ATB system. If you are concerned about over submission, or having your IP blocked then you’d be much better off using a proxy like Hide My Ass and schedule IP changes every hour or so than spreading submissions out over a whole month.

You can download the ATB Traffic Launch Pad Pro formatting spreadsheet here.

Google Profits On The Up

Money Schemes — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:26:07 +0000

Google see’s a year on year improvement of 39% in the number of people clicking on their ads. You can see full details on just how much money Google are making here. It’s a lot.

So the next time you hear Matt Cutts or somebody else from Google banging on about relevant search results and delivering what web surfers want you should keep in mind that relevancy in Google’s eyes is about what is relevant to Google’s bottom line at the end of the day. All of these search updates in the last 12 months have had a massive positive effect on how much money Google is making from their paid click model. I’d bet they are driving more traffic to their own websites now than ever. It’s simple really, you push more people towards having to pay for traffic and because of the bidding system the cost of that traffic also rises. Who wins? Google. You just have to rinse and repeat this “tweaking/optimisation” of the search results until the majority of top results are Google owned websites and everybody else can scrap over buying clicks at $1+ whilst Google benefit from the ad buyers and ad clickers.

Do no evil my ass.

The moment Google branched out from being the motorway sign posts (search engine) to actually owning the service stations (destination websites) somebody somewhere in power should have had a massive fucking big red alarm go off in their office. I’ve got no problem with companies making huge amounts of money, that’s what business is about. In my opinion though Google have bypassed so many ethical/competition safety guards because of their “Heh we’re doing nothing, we don’t even mean to make this money” bullshit that they seem to pass off. Just because their revenue model isn’t centred around directly selling a product doesn’t mean they are not in it for the money and so should have to answer to the same tests every other growing business faces.

People need to ask themselves are Google delivering 39% better and more relevant search results since first quarter 2011? I know what my answer would be.

Don’t Remove Your Build My Rank Links

Money Schemes — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 08:01:03 +0000

There have been some strange goings on lately around Money Schemes Towers. Ignoring what Google has been up to there have also been a couple of more significant changes affecting the amount I’m making from Pay-Per-Click sources. I think I’ve finally got my head around what is going on now and this is why I’d suggest that if you haven’t already you may want to NOT remove your Build My Rank posts!

Everybody knows that visitors from Bing and Yahoo are the real clickers? Google traffic is great for bulk and for showing off impressive visitor stats but when it comes to making money, especially from pay-per-click adverts, then Bing and Yahoo are where it’s at. Of course the Build My Rank, LinxBoss etc systems don’t target one specific search engine, backlinks from these sources also had a major (most of the time even more significant) impact on your other search rankings. I had one page in particular that was being propped up quite nicely by Build My Rank and this is why I regret having those posts removed. That one page has gone from earning over £10 (about $15) a day to less than £1. It wasn’t really getting any Google traffic anyway so that wasn’t the problem, it’s the crash in rankings on Bing that has killed its income.

There is an important lesson to be learned here, Google != The Internet.

Rank Jumpers DeIndexed

Money Schemes — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 08:00:38 +0000

It never rains but it pours! No sooner do I recommend switching from Build My Rank to Rank Jumpers than Rank Jumpers itself comes under the spotlight of Google. Rank Jumpers has now been de-indexed, the service is closing and all posts will be removed. Google really do have their knickers in a twist of this link building services don’t they? Are there any “safe” options out there? Well there’s at least one very good one….

The networks that are getting hit hardest in all this all have one thing in common, they rely very heavily on a private blog network on which to create posts with links in them. If I was you I’d be looking at systems that aren’t using their own blogs but instead are posting content to well known public directory and blog sites on your behalf. Right now about the safest option is Unique Article Wizard, sure it lost some of its luster when compared to these new hands off systems in the past few years but the fact is it’s still effective and more importantly it would be much harder for Google to impact simply because of the nature of the article syndication being used.

And frankly, if Google now find a way to shut down UAW then I’m giving up ever writing about these linking systems ever again (Don’t even get me started about how much this site has been impacted by all this even though I never use any of the promotion methods I write about with it, it’s enough to make somebody paranoid )

Help, I’ve Got Links Coming From Deindexed Pages?

Money Schemes — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:22:07 +0000

Quick, panic. Start throwing your hands in the air like you just don’t care. Some websites have been de-indexed and they have links pointing at you! Will the world end? Is this the end of life as we know it? No.

Having a link on a de-indexed website of any type doesn’t negatively affect your website, set you up for a Google ban, mean the Police are going to come knocking on your door, the sky will fall in or anything else for that matter. All it means is that Google no longer values that website (the deindexed one) and won’t count any links from it.

If all your backlinks (and authority) are from sites that suddenly get de-indexed then yes that is bad, bad SEO in the first place. Most people doing this as a career undertsand that link building is about diversity right? Having some backlinks from non indexed pages is as natural as having links with the text “click here”, or links from no-followed blog comments, the odd link from a real high PR page etc etc

Simply syndicating content (snippets, articles, whatever) left, right and center all over the web is not a link building strategy. There is the odd service out there that can add massive authority (usally adding the diversity for you) but I’d never dream of exclusively relying on any 1,2,3,4 or even 10 “systems” for link building. I can’t undertsand why anybody would.

All these services and tools that are available are designed to ASSIST you with link building, no matter what any sales page says not one of them is the be all and end all answer to higher rankings. The web just doesn’t work like that. Even if they were there is nothing to stop Google deciding it doesn’t like what they are doing and changing the rules on a whim.

Now calm down, the world will carry on.

Build My Rank De-Indexed

Money Schemes — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:41:47 +0000

Bummer. According to this post Build My Rank is no more. As of yesterday the vast majority of their network sites were de-indexed by Google. What will this mean to webmasters who had used their service? Well I suppose it depends on how much you relied on their links. I can’t imagine anybody who used BMR as PART of their link building strategy being too badly affected. If on the other hand you hit them hard with the same keyword over and over with little diversification then I imagine your rankings have tanked just about now?

I liked Build My Rank, they offered a good service at an affordable price. What I would probably take from their demise more than anything is the openness of some of these networks. It is the networks that are happy to share the links they produce that seem to be the first to get hammered by Google. What does it mean for the future of these types of link building services? It’s got to mean that from now on users are going to have to operate on a leap of faith basis, I can’t imagine any network that gives details on where links are being placed surviving for long.

It also shows the importance of sourcing links from as many different places as possible, using variations in your keywords and generally linking “smart”. Rest in peace BMR, you were good to me.

Edit: Build My Rank Alternative

Forgot that I should probably add this for people who have found themselves hit hard by the problems over at BMR. This service is the best alternative to Build My Rank that I’d found. Similar pricing, similar strategy, similar results but not affected by Google, well not so far anyway.

Just Got Banned From Adsense?

Money Schemes — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:04:34 +0000

It looks like Google are doing another one of their large audits of Adsense publishers and some big name bloggers have found themselves banned. To be honest I’m not surprised in the slightest, to start off with Google needed Adsense ads to be displayed on our websites in order to have enough relevant content to attract advertisers. Now things have changed significantly because Google owns so much web real estate on which to show their own ads. Small time publishers (and by small time I mean anybody generating less than 7 figures a year for them) are nothing but endless hassle and legal problems to Google. Eventually I’m sure they will shut down Adsense in its current form. They don’t need our visitors, they have enough page views to sell from their own websites (Gmail, Youtube, Maps, etc etc) Appealing to a ban is a total waste of time, if Google want you gone then you’re gone, so what should you do if you just got banned from Adsense?

Adsense Alternatives

I’ve never had an account banned but in the last 12 months I did have a website banned and it meant a big hunt for Adsense alternatives, including lots of split testing. Whilst I’m not going to lie and say I found anything that paid the same as Adsense I did find a couple of nice enough alternatives, one to cover link units and the other for more standard Adsense ad blocks.

Anyway, the full details are over on this post. The link unit alternative is in the post and the standard ad unit alternative is in the comments.

Don’t let the moods and whims of Google get you too down. I can speak from personal experience that it’s never good to see a big chunk of income disappear but it doesn’t have to be the end of the world. At the end of the day if your content is good enough there will always be a way of generating income from it.