Link Building DEATHMATCH!
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!
I am very surprised as I am seeing lots and lots of pingbacks coming into my articles while trying out Article Samurai. (Great way of finding where they have been published) I am usually getting upwards of 30-35 for each article submitted.
Wow, that’s awesome! Thank you for sharing this!
Never tried Build My Rank… I’ll have to check it out… Thanks
This is a really nice (clean and simple) test Michelle. Thanks for sharing. I have not used BMR before. I’ll have to check it out.
Hmm I gave up on UAW ages ago, system wont evolve, and the backlinks have just become pretty ugly in my opinion, I moved over to ezarticlelink. com about a year ago….has crushed every service I have tried to date as for as article marketing goes…., would love to see you test it. As usual great post and lack of BS on your blog keeps me subscribed.
How many articles did you send to UAW? It mentions submissions, but not how many articles as it seems that you sent 20 articles to BMR and 1 to UAW?
Yep – UAW is getting pretty average. Now trying Traffic Kaboom which is awesome. WHat about the service you recommended in your last post? Postlinks? Or is that too new to test?
Now that you’ve done the test on backlinks, can you tell us how each of the services worked with respect to rank? It could be that AS provided links from higher ranking sites and therefore provided better end results. I don’t know this of course, but I would be interested in learning what ranking results you saw from your experiment.
Great split test, Michelle… I would like to see BMR against Linkvana. Haven’t used BMR but I’ve been crushing it with Linkvana the past year.
I’ve been using both Build my rank and Article Samurai and I have dropped BMR as Article Samurai increased the backlinks and rankings at a much faster rate. My Vote is with The Samurai.
Michelle – was excited to see this post as we’re using both BMR and Art Sam and have also been reassessing our link diversity and backlink building effectiveness. However, I’m not sure this was a fair test….
if you submitted 20 BMR articles, then you submitted 10 times more content there than you did with Art Sam or UAW, right? BMR requires 150 word posts (20 posts would be 3000 words), and Art Sam is 300 words. If you had submitted 10 Art Sam articles (presumably a similar content cost as you spent on BMR) then you could have got 100 links out of AS. Is this a correct assumption?
We recently tested Art Sam and got 39 links, similar to Graham who posted here.
I LOVE the idea that BMR worries about indexing for you, and I also think that the PR is higher there as it’s a higher PR blog network.
But for that lower level linkbuilding, Art Sam may still a good tool…
Your thoughts?
Thanks,
Becky
I am using SEOLinkvine and MyArticleNetwork – not sure it delivers. Could you test them tooß.
Build my rank is a network correct? That’s a little bit of a concern and not that difficult for Google track down and slap at some point. Please correct me if I’m wrong but that is my understanding.
Hi Michelle. I’d be interested in you testing IM Automator…
I’m glad the one I’m currently using won the test :-p I’ve been using BMR for a few months now and I really like how easy it is to use.
Hi Michelle, I have to thank you I was going to join AMA tomorrow. but I am going to give BMR a try. Boy if I was paying that high price for Article Samurai I wood not be happy with that result.
Valuable info on article marketing. Thanks.
Michelle MacPhearson Thanks for the test! I have used UAW in the past but didn’t like the results I was getting. I have kind of taken a step back from doing articles for a bit but I am glad to see the results you have gotten off build my rank. I have checked out the website for them but as I said I have kind of taken a step back from doing articles. Great information to know for when I start doing them again.
Fantastic article that lays out some real number, and solid tatics. I use my personal rss ag software to blast the bookmarking rss feed also. It seems by doing that too, your articles and your bookmarks are indexed. Covering more ground in the higher pages.
Thank you Michelle
Thanks…. can I nickname you “Mighty Mac!”…. One question…. why does “on page” page rank still have your site as N/A? for PR
I have been using AMA. Do you have any experience with this service?
I am curious about how BMR compares to Article Marketing Robot. I have had good results with AMR.
That is an odd AS conclusion to me. It might be a category type issue? Most of my sites tend to get about 50 links per month per article. I have had articles on a non profit site do poorly like you have seen.
Why didn’t you test PostLinks?
Really useful information – just shows how you can be wasting your time if you are not informed.
Hi Michelle, Great post as always, I use Senuke X and other link building tools, just wondering what your thoughts are “or” even your advice with results regarding Senuke X.
I was going to cancel Senuke X and go with Article Samurai instead but missed out from being sold out in a few hours, but after looking at your results I’m in 2 minds what to do.
Thanks Michelle
Cool info, good stuff Michelle!
Hey Michelle, Thanks for sharing this info. My question is (and maybe I’m missing it)… It seems like with BMR you had to write 20 articles to get 38 links, whereas with UAW you can write one spun, or 3 unique articles to get those 14. Seems like I could write 20, spin them, and get 200+ with the same amount of content vs. the 38 from those same 20 unique articels on BMR. Is this the wrong way to think about it?
Michelle MacPhearson I just signed up for build my rank, but I notice there is no content spinning? samurai uses content boss to create unique versions of each article submitted. Now I know that there is no penalty for dup content for me as the writer of the article I’m linking back to but it does mean that my article is less attractive to the publisher as they could get filtered for dup content on there side therefore they don’t get as much value from the article. I’m just thinking out loud but doesn’t that seem like more of a win win in concept? would love to know your view on it michelle.
Great test Michelle, thanks.
Great test, but I did not see any answer to the question on how many articles you submitted to AS. Was it 20 as you did with BMR? Need to know this to determine the validity of the test. Thanks!
My wordpress blogs show lots of incoming links from Article Samurai, but I am a bit disappointed about some of the glaring bugs when spinning that do not get fixed. For the price, I expect more.
I love this information – really mahalo for the effort you put in and all the great stuff you blog about – I can see why your so popular. But do one really have to spend 60 bucks a month for 5 measly sites? Jeez I am already spending so much on stuff like this – how about sharing some free traffic tips just for fun – are there any free traffic tips left to share?
Thanks for taking the time to share this, Michelle! The discussion that has ensued here in the comments has revealed SO many more of these article marketing services than I knew existed (and for me to tap into at least a time or two using fiverr.com!)
Excellent usable information. Thanks for testing for all of us…
Thanks for sharing this. How about PingKaching?
Thanks so much for a great post Michelle. But you have another post highlighting the value or PostLinks, which appears to do a similar thing, but is a bit cheaper. Which would you recommend?
Great test. Long overdue on my linking process.
Nonetheless, I would never consider backlinking without ‘index boosting’ and the test shows.
that as well since BMR works a bit more on those links.
Once the links a built they should be linked to, ever if it’s only within an RSS feed. Then
that one should be submitted to RSS directories. There are handfull of plugins that do.
that the latest being rsslinkbomber which I have used to replace Web traffic Genius.
Pingback Optimizer and Backlink Energizer (yes this one take a while to setup but it’s.
a one time per blog event) do so as well.
Idea:
Based on your 30min backlinking where you create little pieces of software.
and blast them out to software sharing directories with a backlink.
Why not do the same with RSS feeds. I mean instead of just updating.
an rss fee that has been submitted, create a brand new one with random.
posts from the blog and submit that to the feed aggregators. Since the rss.
xml would be hosted on same host as the blog, it would be have that many.
more links to the site just because the aggregators point to the file, kinda.
like the software download sites point to the pad files…
Unless of course the RSS aggregators work differently…
Anyhow, always a pleasure reading your blog.
Yves Baggi
Hi Michelle,
I just gave you my 2cents on your test over on my blog: http://www.stulong.com/article-marketing/why-article-marketing-may-not-be-working-for-you/.
This is great content Michelle, thank you.
Feel like doing this with backlink services like linkvana, post links, etc?
So glad you touched on the indexing aspect. A lot of these services work but nothing like they would if their links were indexed better.
It’s a true time suck, no doubt. But the ranking difference is big.
Great experiment. Its good to see some cold hard data to help see which service gives you more bang for your buck.
With out Article Samurai testing, our studies have shown that for the markets that we tested, that a single article builds on average 150 back links. We waited 6 months for the back link search engines to report these numbers, however. We’re currently working on our own “shingling” service to help locate syndicated articles to give more accurate numbers.
Using this shingling “finger printing” technique for the 4 articles that Michelle submitted she received:
Article #1: 237 Google indexed syndicated articles.
Article #2: 562 Google indexed syndicated articles.
Article #3: 1090 Google indexed syndicated articles.
Article #4: 104 Google indexed syndicated articles.
Clearly, this is much more than the “10″ reported by a back link index such as SEOMoz or even Majestic SEO (both great services BTW!)
All back link services are relatively inaccurate in the short-term in identifying back link accounts. To get the best indication of the total back links I recommend using “shingles”. Pick out a few phrases that are unique in your article, and then search Google with quotes around them, to find the number of syndicated articles out there. When I did this with Michelle’s article I found over a thousand syndicate instances. Of course, not all of these will have back links, but it’s much more accurate than relying on back link search engines.
Hope that helps to eliminate some confusion.