Update: With what I have learned in the past months, using a system like this is likely to get you into trouble with the search engines. They may not punish you right away, but eventually they’ll catch on and these links will hurt you rather than help.
So my current recommendation is to skip this. I am leaving the links up in case you really want to check it out, but they are not affiliate links since I’m no longer an affiliate.
Back in December, I stumbled across textlinks.com, a backlink generation program that I thought I’d give a try. Here’s what I’ve discovered.
The Premise
“Quality, relevant backlinks” is what textlinks.com is offering. We all know how important backlinks are for our sites ranking in the search engines. A link from a respected and popular site back to our site boosts the value of our site. This is especially true if the link is one way.
What is offered here is the opportunity to add links back to your site(s) from over 10,000 different blogs. Each of the blogs is independent and is run under its own domain. There are over 100,000 articles in these different blogs that you can choose to add your links to and the claim that over 800 of the blogs have a Google page rank of 1.
There are 4 different kind of links that you can make: contextual, blog page, sidebar and footer. Each link that you place will cost between 1 and 3 credits (you buy a minimum of 99 credits per month at $1/credit).
Note that the links themselves are permanent. The last until you take them down (or the site disappears) even if you don’t keep up with the monthly membership.
The Deliverables
I signed up for the 21 day free trial offer which provides 25 credits and 21 days to use them. I did some looking to see if I could find some sites that might be a good link for my Say Hi to Chainsaw (SHTC) site. There are lots of sites that link to video and deal with children so there were several that I thought would be relevant.
Something to keep in mind, several of the sites seem to have adult content based on the descriptions.
Well, I selected 4 different sites and added sidebar links to the title video on SHTC. I didn’t try out any of the other types of links.
The Impression
I began to have some reservations about the system at this point. There were two things that bothered me about this whole thing. They may not bother you so I’ll leave you to make your own conclusions about the site.
- I’m not convinced that paying for backlinks is worth it. There is an ethical consideration as well, although this is really a form of advertising when it boils right down to it. However, I do believe that the search engines may begin to punish those sites that make use of paid links such as these (or at the very least, ignore the links).
- While each site is independent and hosted on different domains among several different networks, the sites do seem to have a cookie cutter feel to them. Many of the sites I looked at had the same theme and had a very impersonal feel to them. The articles I looked at were pretty well written although there are some posts that were just robotic collections of tweets from Twitter and that kind of thing.
Because of these concerns I decided to pull the plug on my links and removed them. They had been up for about a week and I didn’t see any direct traffic from those links (not that I expected much — the intent here is to increase page rank). I don’t know if there was any affect on the page rank. They links weren’t up long enough for much effect.
The Bottom Line
Over all, I liked the way the administration was set up. Finding articles and placing your links was straight forward. I just got a little skittish about the two areas I mentioned above. Sometimes I’m overly cautious, but I had a gut feeling that this wasn’t right for what I’m trying to do with SHTC (or any of my sites for that matter).
I would be more comfortable with the idea of paid backlinks if the sites in question were a network of blogs produced by actual people (like us) rather than the robotic sites.
If the two things I’ve talked about are not a concern for you, then I would strongly recommend that you take the 21 day free trial for yourself.
Use Articles to Dominate Your Niche!
I think I will give it a look, thank you!
francesca recently posted…Top 10 celebrity hair styles, part 2
I own and operate the site http://www.weddingringsforever.com and am currently debating dumping the $99 monthly membership fee into textlinks.com
My hesitation is that they also run backlinks.com and gotlinks.com and a slew of other sites. Which ones are the real thing, if any?
Some of my competitors are ranking above me because they have 50K plus links. It would be IMPOSSIBLE for them to do so without paying for a large portion of them, which leaves me wondering what to do with just 1K to 2K links.
Any other bright ideas out there?
Wade
I’ve used textlinks.com and found them very effective. I used a firefox plugin so I could quickly check the links for page rank. My site was dominating for multiple niches but as this blogger said, it can be unethical AND risky. So I’m sticking to page rank 0 sites, which technically are within googles guide lines. Other ways of link building are via comments just like this. You can find related blogs using programs like scrapebox, you can even auto post but I wouldnt recommend it as your ip might get blocked. Better to scrape the related blogs then check page ranks and actually read the posts and leave a genuine comment like this.