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LinkVana - the other blog announce network

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Wed, 2008-03-12 09:42 — Marketing Fan

As you might know (or not know) some of the private label content clubs provide "announce blog networks" that allow you to post some content including your links to your sites for a relative low fee (or included)... and there your links are - among the neighbourhood of the other 500 members trying to power their thin adsense site with links from even thinner announce blog network links... well - as you can tell, I haven't been impressed with those offers ...

in fact you'd better NOT put your links up there as the negative effect of bad links became evident in the past 6 months... Yes, I've seen sites tank because of bad links!


And thanks to you own ad network detection tools that I wrote about here as well, it didn't take long for me to spot that several of those blogs are not only available to members of the network (ie ArticleUnderground's network) but are also member sites of Text-Link-Ads, PayPerPost and other big scale, WAY ABOVE THE RADAR ad networks that are all being cracked down ... hand's off!


...and then there's LinkVana - the below-the-radar blog link network

One "blog network" I recently tested is called LinkVana which is run by the "famous SEO Dave Kelly"

Well, LOL, did you ever hear of this guy? I'm not even close to recognizing this name, and googling him brought me to a stoneage actor, some singer from the late 70's, and even a gonzo speaker (wtf? :) ... sounds like he picked that fake name to stay below the Google radar :-)

Anyway, regardless of the name issue, what caught my attention are some pretty familiar, for clients not so comfy business rules he set up for this network

  • blog post urls will NOT be revealed - not even after placement

wow - how cool is that? You buy links and NEVER get to see them - not even after placement...

Additionally they

  • control the timing of blog posts (even those YOU wrote) is done by their system
    • so they try to vary link placement speed, avoid people overdoing it etc
    • you still have a way to decide if you want max 1-3 posts per day or less or more ...
  • offer outsourcing of the annoying blog post writing can be outsourced at $2 per 100 words blog post...
    • that's a quite ok rate, given that you hardly find freelance writers doing 100 word posts for you at that rate...
    • the problem with the content outsourcing service is
      • boring talk - it's averlage to low quality content
      • copy cats - which means many phrases are just copied from other places on the web...
      • production time - and they took almost 2 weeks to complete around 20 posts of 100 words each.. better write your own posts - I can write that in two hours!
  • promise to never reveal all the sites to a single user, so merely cycling a percentage of their sites thru for their users... need yet to see that

So while I wouldn't endorse blog link networks in general,
I'm giving LinkVana a try with some test sites ...

The "we don't show off our stuff" (aka not revealing the placement urls) is what I've been practicing for over 2,5 years now, and clients value it as well.

So I'm in there now, been testing for some weeks.

The posts are getting indexed, and of course you can google them with their post text, which is a good thing, as it means the pages are juicy.


I suggest to give LinkVana a try, too - I'll update you on it's progress and mail Dave about the content quality issue now.

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