Just over two months ago, I started to get the sense that what we were doing to build links wasn’t as effective.

I started to think that the articles my staff were writing and sending out via various services weren’t gaining as much traction as they once did.

(This doesn’t mean “article marketing is dead,” as was discussed in the comments of my “1000 Free Backlinks and How to Get Them” post. It’s not. It just means it’s time to really start looking at the indexing rate of your sources for links to ensure they’re still paying off for you).

The Test

So I set up a test, where I built links to 3 similar pages all on the same domain, via 3 different link building services, to see which service produced the most backlinks in the end.

Each article had been published for about a year, but none of them had any external backlinks. Each article focused on a  different keyword – I was testing pure number of backlinks here, not ranking.

I used OpenSiteExplorer and Majestic SEO to track the backlinks that were being found.

I chose Unique Article Wizard and Build My Rank because I’d been using them forever and my staff is very familiar with them. I threw Article Samurai (currently closed) into the mix because it’s new so I wanted to see what it could do. Article Samurai mentions a 60 day time period for it to drip out your articles, which is why this was a 2 month test – I wanted to give the Dojo time to do it’s thing.

Submission Settings

This is an established site, and although these individual pages didn’t have any backlinks to them pre-test, I wasn’t worried about throwing links at them quickly and seeing what stuck.

• Unique Article Wizard – the submission was set to a maximum of 50 per day and was submitted to a total of 114 sites
• Build My Rank – the submission was set to “Random” and I asked my staff to submit 20 BMR articles, so it went out to 20 sites
• Article Samurai – the software determines the rate of submission

Article Marketing DEATHMATCH - Results!

Which article marketing service produces the most backlinks over a 2 month period?

	URL 1: Unique Article Wizard	URL 2: Build My Rank	URL 3: Article Samurai
Backlinks on 8/26	0	0	0
Backlinks on 9/22	11	30	1
Backlinks on 10/2	11	28	3
Backlinks on 10/10	11	32	4
Backlinks on 11/1	14	38	10

And the Link Building Deathmatch winner is… BUILD MY RANK!

What’s most interesting is that BMR won with only 20 submissions, whereas UAW submitted to 114 sites and ended up with just 14 backlinks to show for it.

Moving forward? My staff is focusing on BMR with UAW as a back-up to add variety. I’m afraid Article Samurai didn’t make the cut.

I think BuildMyRank came out so far ahead because they make a point to ensure that the links you submit are indexed. Here’s a quote from their site on the process:

Once your article is published we first create an RSS feed of the article and submit to various feed aggregators such as FeedAgg, Feedage, and countless others. Not only does this help articles get indexed rapidly, but it’ll also drive some backlinks to your article from other sites.

Next we submit your article to a random selection of 25-75 social bookmark sites and web 2.0 sites. Such sites may include Twitter, Delicious, Mister Wong, Faves, etc. These backlinks help add extra link juice and added indexing speed.

After your article is published, we’ll start checking to see if it has been indexed after 3 days. In many cases, articles are indexed in just a few hours or a day or so. Nonetheless, if an article isn’t indexed after 3 days, we’ll build additional backlinks to it and take extra steps to get it indexed so that you can benefit from every article you submit.

Tests like these are simple and you can run them yourself to check periodically which services are performing well for you.

There are many, many other article marketing and submission tools available, so please let me know in the comments if you’d like me to run a test on another, different service!

In the meantime, if you’re looking for a service, my recommendation goes to Build My Rank based on what’s working NOW. They have a free trial that gives you 10 free links, so you might as well grab those!