Why SEOLinkVine Sucks
Last Edited: November 4th, 2011 – and SEOLinkVine STILL SUCKS…
I want to rank for that term, let me say it again: SEOLinkVine sucks.
Let me start off by saying I do not have a bone to pick with Brad Callen or Matt – I think both of these guys are pretty awesome in their mental acuity and marketing savvy. I also happen to think that SEOLinkVine has the most user-friendly system of all the submitters I’ve tried.
And let me say it again for SEO purposes and for the fact that I want you to understand me clearly: SEOLinkVine Sucks.
I just wish I could say “I’ve tried them all,” but I haven’t. I’ve tried SEOLinkVine after falling head over heels for Unique Article Wizard (thanks to Mike Iser and Ruth).
Then I added ArticleRanks and iSnare, only iSnare can’t offer any measurable way to evaluate their service so I have no idea if they “work” but they’re cheaper than dirt. Of course I swear by Magic Article Submitter, Magic Submitter, ArticleBot and R2D2…
Note: I no longer recommend either ArticleBot or Magic Article Submitter. I did discover that UAW, ArticleRanks, Article Marketing Robot and BuildMyRank worked best. BuildMyRank and Article Marketing Robot were not around when this was written, and are my two top choices.
So to be clear, Brad Callen, if you’re reading this: your programming skills are fine. I love the way SEOLinkVine accepts ALL spin syntax (are you listening, ArticleRanks?). I love the way SEOLinkVine has…you know what, that’s really all I love about it except the green color scheme…
Here’s why SEOLinkVine SUCKS (sorry, but right now it just does, straight up).
First off, I began my whole A-Bomb deal, with massive submissions through various channels, aimed at web 2 properties. Come to find out that my properties skyrocketed, and tapered off, and are hovering sorta, so it worked-ish.
What I think I should have done instead is drip-fed the articles rather than nuked them. (Hey you! Yeah, I heard that, you just said, “No *bleep* Sherlock!” Watch that language.) The experiment did rank my lenses rather rapidly, my Hubs I can’t really tell. Let me check…
…OK. That was fun. I do not currently have a tool to check for rankings of my Hubs, other than an eyeballing of the SERPs manually. What I discovered on the way to check my rankings was interesting: the shrapnel of my A-Bomb!
I had several articles on the first five pages, which are linked to my lenses and hubs, which are linked to my site, which is linked to my bank account.
A-Bomb’s doing its thang (what did y’all expect?)…Did I mention those articles are from UAW and Magic Submitter?
I don’t necessarily care if the articles can be found on a self-contained blog network, like SEOLV reports to be. For security purposes I don’t mind if it’s only the Google bots finding those links and passing my properties some juice…but it is interesting to note that the articles on the directories are what I find.
So other than the shrapnel from my A-Bomb, none of it owing to SEOLinkVine that I can see, what’s made me take the time to write “SEOLinkVine Sucks Because In Article Marketing Size Matters”?
Primarily two things:
SEOLinkVine has terrible targeting when it comes to “free content.” If you’re auto-blogging with it, I’d say you’re nuts or I just don’t have a clue.
When I used them on a few sites a few months ago, they blasted my sites with tons of back end users (I don’t like opening my admin panel to find other author profiles, sorry, that’s tacky and creepy), and with content that was as far off-base as Betty Crocker selling Plutonium to Libya.
I have micro-niche sites (except this here), very targeted in their scope. What I don’t want is an article on my basket weaving website (as an example not in fact) lauding the use of Marijuana.
That last part was a fact: I had an article lauding the use of Mary Jane, and my site had nothing to do with burning trees or getting the munchies…
Lame targeting, I’ll just put it that way. I also don’t enjoy this screen shot:
SEOLinkVine Article Marketing Statistics Haven't Changed Since 6-28-10
It might be hard to see, but as of 6-28-10, I had 3 articles in SEOLinkvine, with 51 submission attempts, 36 approvals, 12 pending, 34 published. Not too bad, right?
Did you check your calendar? It’s July 15, 2010 as I write this scathing review of why SEOLinkVine Sucks…(Did I rank for that term yet? I’ll keep saying it.) NO Movement in their system = No progress = Why did I pay for that lousy service again?
Something tells me that the ad copy on SEOLinkVine claiming that its “Size and Strength” really make it a powerful solution to your backlinking, Google-dominating, SERPs-crushing, niche-blasting (insert hype and hogwash) is…
…remember that scene in Back to the Future (it’s in all 3) where Biff hits the manure truck? That’s a LOT like what the copywriting is like on the SEOLV site, promising the size and results and delivering Biff’s manure truck.
Only, I’m playing the part of Biff, and Brad Callen’s Marty. See, as the customer, I just got crapped on. I don’t play nice when I lose money to crappy service…SEOLinkVine sucks.
I agree with the copywriting in that size matters. But SEOLinkVine just doesn’t have that yet, which is the best explanation I have for the dismal numbers. I got those same submission numbers easily with
(( MANUAL SUBMISSIONS ))
so why in Google’s index would I actually
(( Pay Money ))
for something I could do
(( And Have Done ))
for free?
To quote Flava Flav from Public Enemy, “Don’t believe the hype!” Keep your money and pay someone to do your writing
(( Like hire someone on Elance?! ))
who can submit your articles onto directories that get ranked, on sites that get found by human beings (they have wallets and bank accounts, Google spiders don’t).
I’m in the middle of re-testing ArticleRanks but I’ll tell you what, with numbers like these, using the same 3 articles in the same amount of time as SEOLV…Just take a look:
ArticleRanks Review Article Submission 7-15-10
Because I am doing a test (as a freelancer for another gig) for ArticleRanks, you’ll need to subtract 20 articles from those figures, which means in reality: Published 130 articles, with 147 Distributed, 1 rejected and 16 Pending.
Hmm…lemme think…
Eureka! I think I’ll keep Unique Article Wizard and ArticleRanks (in fact, I just signed up for their monthly service at $39 a month). SEOLinkVine needs to step their game up with some serious virtual real estate, or at least be honest with their definition of “huge.”
UNLESS by “huge” they mean “waste of time,” then I’ll agree with their copywriter, no offense to Mr. Callen. I detest over-selling and under-delivering, call it a pet peeve or false advertising. In either event, SEOLinkVine sucks for the time being.
It bugs me when I pay for stagnant article submissions. Manual submissions, another Magic Submitter submission, another UAW or ArticleRanks blast would have been time and money better spent.
One last thing about SEOLinkVine, to leave things on a bit of a chipper note: I think it would be a great service if the network was bigger. Size matters in article marketing.
So far, the best results I’ve seen from SEOLV is their copywriting. I actually believed the ballyhoo.
Until they get that network actually working the way it’s reported to work (in what niches? I blasted two very popular niches: health and SEO…), I can only recommend you spend your money elsewhere, like UAW, Magic Submitter, or buy the $2 per submission articles at ArticleRanks (or hold off until you’ve read the results of the current test).
The Winners So Far In My Backlinking Efforts
Magic Submitter
Article Marketing Robot
Unique Article Wizard
ArticleRanks
BuildMyRank
Since this was written, I’d recommend BuildMyRank and Article Marketing Robot as 2 essential tools, the rest still work but these two are more than enough.
For now, SEOLinkVine Sucks. Put your money elsewhere, like a freelance article marketer, or software that actually works.
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+1 !
It does suck.
I think James, you need to get your hands on the product that Michelle over at MyPassiveIncome.com was discussing and cheat for a bit! ;-)
Great write-up, as always and I think you just received your second Twitter Tweep from me – I think I retweeted earlier. You're worth it! :-)
Joseph
Joseph -
Hat's off to you, thanks for that. And yes, the Sick Submitter seems like a
good one – I've just yet to incorporate profile links. I might just cave,
I'm surrounded by competitors who want to do this weird thing called “save
time” and “work less.”
Strange.
:)
I'm hoping Brad makes it better. At the moment I think it needs quite a bit
of tweaking.
Hey James I'll Amplify your post now too – do a bit of clipping. Gotta keep ahead of the game one way or the other, after all… How else to keep up with the “cheaters”? ;-)
Jo
Totally agree with your review. I submitted a blog to their system and got articles totally irrelevant to the blog's content. And when I submitted articles to the system, only about half were accepted – despite the fact I think their quality was pretty good. In retrospect, the low acceptance rate is probably because they were submitting my dog articles to blogs about boats (or something like that). Maybe someday the service will be better, but right now it doesn't even begin to compare to UAW. I haven't checked out ArticleRanks yet, but I keep on hearing good things about it, so I'll have to soon! (Perhaps once I stop playing with my new software toy :).
You have me piqued about Sick Submitter – Magic Submitter just added a
number of features, and I'll be reviewing them shortly. Even some “cheater
stuff” =)
James,
You're actually ranked #4 for — or #3 if you don't count the double listing — for “Seo Linkvine Sucks.” (<— yeah that's not the keyword but I thought I'd help you out with some variations of that keyword.) :)
…and by the way, I stopped using it months ago. I never registered for the membership, but I did setup my blogs to receive free content and nothing was ever targeted to my niche websites and I always wound up rejecting content so to me I didn't feel like mining though junk submissions to only approve 1-2 articles per day.
If you really want to build links across several networks, keep doing what you're doing because UAW and Magic Submitter seem to be working to your advantage.
Yo! Hey, I really appreciate your comment re: the HubPages deal on your
blog. I needed the check – I don't have time to build a social profile
everywhere I go, though I thought it would help to network in my case for
freelancing.
Nonetheless – you were spot on! Thanks for the tip. Downloading RankTracker
as I type this, I was pretty frustrated having to pore over the SERPs
manually. Gimme a break!
Great review. I've never even heard of it, but in the Laws of Branding, the number 1 is the Law of Firsts. My FIRST impression now of SEOLinkVine is that it sucks. lol Good for you, bad for them. Sigh.
We have been using UAW for awhile and really like it. What I don't like is that it relies on sheer numbers; I've seen similar results when submitting five to ten articles to EzineArticles myself. If five to ten articles submitted to EZA works just as well as submitting the three spins to UAW, why do it? I think I will do a test just for myself, trying to rank something like a hub, using both of those methods and see which one comes out on top.
How come you can't test your rankings for your hubs? Have you been using Market Samurai? I'm not sure if their free version works well but the paid version is all I use for ranking and back link spying and the like.
Cheers,
Tia
p.s. I've now edited this reply three times. Argh! Why can't I learn the art of proofreading???
I've been using the SEO for Firefox for most of my competitive analysis,
manual reviews at other times. Their “Rank Checker” doesn't list subdomains
or folders, so HubPages and other web 2.0 properties can't be tracked that
way.
Thanks to Yolanda
and <a
href=”http://theaveragegenius.net/strongly_recommends/Leo_Dimilo_s_Internet_Marketing_For_The_Rest_of_Us/192/”
target=”_new”>Leo Demilo I've been hanging onto “Rank Tracker” and
definitely loving that tool all of a sudden.
I've been avoiding doing this sort of analysis for a while since I took a
lot of cues from other IMers (whom I still respect), but seeing the value
in planning future strategy here on out.
SEOLinkVine is a competitor w/UAW, built largely on the persona of Brad
Callen, and his other products (except his article submitter that doesn't
spin) seem to do just fine. I'd be interested in your take on UAW, I used
to do all manual article submissions and found a mix to be what pushed my
sites up pretty firmly.
Spaghetti on the wall, I don't think SEO is an either/or, but an
all-you-can-afford approach (for me: not much just yet, hence the flaming
review). Thanks for stopping by again, Tia!
Yes James, thanks to SEOLinkVine one of my sites turned into feeder article directory for SEOLinkVine articles on any topics (( But with a plethora of other great services like Magic Submitter, SENuke, UAW and others we can rest assured that backlinks will come )))
I'm now workig on shifting my strategy towards lower competitive terms wit a good buying potential, and I think these backlinks will be enough for dominating top positions .
Thanks for the mention Joseph. It's confusing, I know, but my blog is actually http://passiveincomeonlineblog.com/.
I'm just saying, because the one you mentioned is a bit spammy. :)
Ooops Michelle, sorry about that! No idea how I had that wrong. I best correct it on my own blog too, so thanks for pointing that out!
Jo
PostScript: In fact I should put up sidebar links like what you and James and mia Tia have done – to the “favorite” blogs. One of these days… At least Keyword Luv and CommentLuv are enabled, which I feel does the job supremely well.
I don't actually know who Brad is but he has to be a hell of a marketer. The hype about SEOlinkvine before it came out was staggering….then everyone who bought it decided they didn't like it.
He is a doozy of a marketer, for sure, but reputation aside (and his brother
owns My Article Network – who have a pretty good set of free videos in their
pre-sell, but I digress) his network wasn't big enough to deliver as
promised. If you follow the thread on the Warrior Forum (I stopped) then
you'll see he did a good job making his case, more or less.
He just couldn't make the necessary changes in time to keep my business or
my mouth shut on it…
I use everything you mention in this post and more.
Of the 6 subscriptions I have for services like this I put SEO LV botton, but it is still worth it for me as it allows me to get more out of my spinners.
Regards the poor targeting of free content, It is not the system that is at fault… it is morons thinking that they can get more links by selecting extra non related categories.
Jez -
That might be the more plausible explanation. It might be that the “moderators” at SEOLV were trying to syndicate more of the articles for complaints like mine, but your view would probably be closer to the heart of it.
And I agree – having more than one service gets you the most out of your spinners – I’ve just written a post doing just that with 5 different channels of distribution (or was it 6?). In any event, I’m not happy with the extremely low distribution, which I could and have done better with manually.
Thanks for stopping by!
You can't really blame them. I have to admit that the main reason I get a lot of links out of magic article submitter is because of how many categories I put it in.
Hm…I never thought of doing that with MAS. Thanks, Josh… >> DOH! <<
I guess the difference would be how SEOLV is set up on others' blogs, and on
that front is different. Also the fact that SEOLV reportedly has a quality
network, etc…it's a little different on those ends. Good point, though.
A lot of the directories in MAS seem to be on auto-approve so it helps out quite a bit. I have had some of my articles go out to 500+ directories. I'm still trying to figure out a way to get them out to ever directory I have an account on(about 800).
What I do is first put in all the categories that fit really well then type in something like health, business, or shopping(usually everything I can think of).
To be totally honest though, I'm not terribly impressed with MAS. When I was promoting infobarrels with it I had to send 8 articles to an article for it to get over 100 backlinks-and even then it didn't seem to transfer much link juice.
Some of my articles aimed at sniper sites have produced 20-30 backlinks in Yahoo and the sites won't move up more than 1 position.
So one of the main points I'm getting here (and with my own experience) is that when you use article submission software, you have to choose a broad range of categories to get enough submissions.
But at the same time, with a few of those set ups – such as with SEO Linkvine, if you do that, you will find that very many people get peed off because the submissions are not targeted enough. And thus dump the software altogether.
Tough call here!
Agreed w/your take, JA, I just realized that I could still legitimately use
multiple categories. For example, sometimes with promoting SEO software,
some directories will have a category for site promotion, others SEO,
others article marketing, etc. Technically you could submit to all three
depending on the topic.
I'm personally involved in a test of another distribution service, and have
used Josh's advice here to give my client more traction, legitimately
speaking. Good point, though, Joseph.
SEOLinkVine sucks big time. As far as backlinking, I've lost ground using it, I don't think I've ever seen a more horrible piece of crap come out. Brad Callen always overpromises and underdelivers, and I had my misgivings when I signed up and I hoped I was wrong, but I wasn't. I started with 250 backlinks to my site 5 months ago, and I've put up 20 articles on the site for backlinking, and I have…. drum roll… 250 backlinks. Thanks Brad, your crap sucks. I should have realized (like I suspected) those 7500 backlinks he mentioned his “interval training” blog got (I looked for a interval training blog that actually ranked with him associated with it, it doesn't exist) was fake. I'm sick of Brad and Matt Callen.
I have been using seolinkvine for a few months too and I agree that it sucks compared to article ranks. The network is not big enough and the articles go out to slow in my opinion.
Thanks for your review. I was currently looking into seolinkvine and I always like to see quantifiable data for or against a service. Your submission example of 50 articles to over 150 was very impressive! I did click to ArticleBase and UAW through your page links, so I do hope that you get credited for the sales.
I do have one small question for you. You mention Magic Article Submitter – I have had that package for some time, but I find that getting a lot of sites with categories to post in tricky. Do you have any hints or tips in this area?
Thanks again,
Frank
Frank The Good Christmas Gifts Guy recently posted..By- fthomas
Thank you, Frank – and yes, I see that you did sign up. For that: my wife sends a virtual hug and a fruitcake (sorry, that was inspired by your site, which is REALLY intelligent, thanks for beating me to the punch!).
I have no “beef” with Brad Callen of SEO LinkVine…other than he’s a “personality” of sorts and everyone wants to join his blog network as an affiliate (I was part of the bunch)…only…it’s one of the least effective to use! He has plenty of other products that (I’m sure) work really well, but this SEOLV is a stink-bomb in terms of quality.
And YES! ArticleRanks is amazingly effective, as well as “big brother” UAW.
Re: MAS – I actually don’t have a trick per se to give you unless you can find someone to import categories from, I know the Magic Submitter community at the forum made some of those categories available for the community to download for this reason.
It really depends on the niche you’re in – whatever you’re “in” find the most general top-level category you can get into without being a category spammer. The reason being you will get shut out of some directories, lessening the effectiveness of the tool.
Other than that, I don’t know of any other way to make it better – but! – have you tried Article Marketing Robot? That’s one of the things about AMR that I picked up right away – the category selection uses a wildcard built in, so if you put in “mark” it will look for “marketing” and other categories that include “mark.”
Whenever I use MAS I tend to do things in bulk, so I’ll be in the same niche for a while and just bomb the entire network (I’m impatient – I don’t recommend that for a new site). When I open a new category, it takes about 15 minutes or so to select the categories.
I do skip a lot of directories, though – if they’re too niche. I don’t want to rub someone the wrong way, and figure if I was the owner of the directory, I’d hate to deal with the boatload of totally off-topic articles, so I don’t submit to those niche-specific directories if there is no category.
Ah, much like I thought. One other question that may be something you know. Do you know of a way to transform (easily) the articles from MAR to the ArticleRanks spin format? I’m to the point of considering cracking open vb and coding it, but I’d jump at a quicker answer.
Thanks!
Frank
Frank The Good Christmas Gifts Guy recently posted..By- fthomas
Yes – just use the MAN or AMA format.
It works fine – sometimes there will be a bracket or what have you here or there, but it works 98% of the time for me.
According to the AR tutorial, the MAN/AMA format is backwards, in that the first level brackets and pipes are switched for the second level braces and tilde – vice versa – anyhow, I tried it thanks to a reader, Carrie – and it works great.
What I do is spin and then wherever I have a SPUN URL (in case you do that) I will use a token instead, like %%LINK%% or whatever.
Then I upload to the HTML editor vs. the WYSIWYG editor in AR.
Then I control + F to find the token and replace, using whatever spun URLs I have. I find that the best way to do it is to take the full backlink – anchor text and closing anchor code – and spin them entirely.
It looks like:
{(Pretend This Is an A HREF) [Anchor|Anchor2|etc] (Close Anchor) ~ (Anchor HREF Here) [Anchor3|Anchor4|Anchor5] (/Close Anchor)}
I couldn’t get that to format correctly – but the idea is the same – point being I use the HTML editor to upload to and when I do – I use a couple of line breaks between paragraphs after every paragraph. Otherwise you will upload everything and see that it’s one massive paragraph.
This assumes you are going to spin URLs and anchor text – you can use the WYSIWYG editor at AR to do it, it’s easier, but I like to manually edit the HTML when I submit. I don’t WYSIWYG.
The cool thing is that the My Article Network and Article Marketing Automation – both of which owned by Matt Callen, and no offense, Callens – I don’t recommend this at all! – the export feature in MAR is good to go.
What I will say, though, is that you do NOT want to go deeper than 2 levels of spinning with AR.
Right now it’s set up for 2 levels – I have issues when I go to a 3rd level nested spin.
I can’t believe I just realized that SEO Link Vine sucks!
I just checked their stats and it seems that the average article you syndicate with their network gets distributed to 5 websites. Is that worth $67 / month? Not to me…
I switched out to Article Ranks and now I’m saving about $30 per month.
I should read your blog more often :)
PS: Looks like you’re currently ranking #1 for SEO Link Vine Suckes :)
Clayton recently posted..2011 Is Going Fast – 3 Month Left!
Clayton,
Sorry I missed this comment – but did you say $67/mo? Wow…can’t believe people actually buy Brad’s sorry system. I’m not sure what it is with Brad and Matt Callen, but both of them have blog networks that aren’t worth a dime.
In MAN/AMA, Matt Callen has hardly any C-Class IP diversity, so the “20,000 blogs” he boasts of are more like “100 blogs” or what have you.
If it’s a blog network and it’s run by a Callen brother, sorry to say, save your money.
Hopefully lots of people read that. Hopefully 2 from the Callen family read it and step their quality up some. I’d be happy to say differently if they weren’t simply scamming people for shoddy service.
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