HI Ashimashi,

Have you used SocialMonkee before?  If so I'm interested to know your thoughts.

In one discussion, a SocialMonkee employee, possibly the owner is quite candid in explaining how the system works, which is primarily by way of a lot of external websites that they also own, and using the service creates one way inbound links (IBL) from these sites.

I have seen this site before but never tried it, mainly because Google is increasingly requiring that links are from related subject matter.  So the types of links you gain from this type of system can often be of low value.

That said, I'm interested to hear other people's views and I may even have a test myself on a site other than this one to see if:

(a) those links are recognised and indexed by any of the big engines
(b) if the links have any chance of coming from related subject matter, and
(c) if the links appear to have any level of importance

Once i have done this, I will report back.

Anyone else used SocialMonkee and seen any measurable benefit?

Jon

 

Very good, well at least that allows you to check if the backlinks get indexed, most likely not visible on Google, but Yahoo should show them if they have been spidered - the only question then is whether or not the links gain any importance, but if the websites do offer a level of relevance, then it can't be a bad thing.

Or can it?

Agreed, Matt Coutes himself once said that there is little you can do offsite that can damage your rankings, apart from of course using blatent scams, such as known link farms (bad neighbourhoods), but at the moment, at worst those "not so great quality" links will just be given low importance.

Things have turned ugly for plenty of websites, but the level of their 'dubiousness' varies.

Having thought more about SocialMonkee, I think spending a little longer to get those links in manually will pay an infinite amount of dividends compared.  After all, 5 good quality links is much better than 100 low quality irrelevant links.

In reality, the only way you can keep yourself safe, is to legitimise the way in which you develop your links and the only way to do that is to (a) do the links yourself and/or (b) let your audience do it.

Option B, especially from the early days, would simply take too long though, so we have to work on A, pretty much every spare minute we get.

Here's a post I made on researching links and I'm producing an article on ropey link activities to avoid, may not help you much knowing what you know, but it's vitally important for others who have less experience: http://www.webmarketingforum.co.uk/search_engine_optimisation_and_link_development/not_all_links_strike_gold_researching_best_linking_partners_20.0.html

I think every web site owner falls for the shoddy schemes at some time early, hopefully we can stop a few people doing just that.

 

I have heard that some of these automatic back link generators can actually get you banned from Google. Does anyone know if that is true or not?

Be sure to let us know if you do see any.

ok peeps you might not know this. well jon will! but the links wont form propaly if you have not created and uploaded your sitemap into your root folder!
since ive uploaded my site map. my traffic has increased from a average of 20 hits per day to over 150 :-) as all the links work. and google displays more of my pages ect....

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ <----- create site map for free here!!!!