Proper Profits

I’m about to do something highly unusual in the ‘Internet Marketing’ arena (and this has already cost me $2,000) …

Have you ever Google-searched for a review on something?

You’ll find that 99.9% of those reviews will give you a quick outline of the thing, give you lots of positives, maybe a minor negative, just to show you they are ‘real’…

Then they say you should get it and click their affiliate link to buy it…

There are 2 principle reasons that this situation happens.

1. The ‘reviewer’ is only going to make money if they tell you to buy the product, and buy it via their affiliate link
2. Internet Marketers dont want to write a negative review in case it crashes their chances of ever doing a monster Joint Venture (JV) with that product’s owner

That’s what normally happens…

Let’s break the mould right now…

I’m going to give you the real stats and screenshots – and you can tell ME if you think this is a recommended tool or not.

You can weigh up the pros and cons, the good bits and the bad, and you tell ME below what you think, whether you think it is worth it.

So this tool in question is the SEO Linkvine Elite VIP

NOTE: This is NOT the standard SEO Linkvine. You can only get access to the VIP version once you are a paying member of SEO Linkvine

So we’re looking at the Elite VIP – I’m just going to call it ‘Elite’ from now on…

It boils down to the same concept as many other blog/article auto-syndication networks. You input your articles, or short-articles, in which you can have 1 or 2 backlinks to your site, which get automatically syndicated out and published on a number of websites within the network.

Elite’s marketing blurb promises to have a more powerful network than most other such auto-syndication networks. That is its principle USP (Unique Selling Point) – that the sites within its network are more powerful than other networks.

For access to the ‘more powerful’ sites, you pay the princely sum of about $500 a month (its $495, but when its near-enough $500, you’re not interested in a $5 difference)

So now, given that cost, any decision has to be relative to the benefits of this network AND relative to the comparative cost of other great blog/article auto-syndication networks like

1. Article Ranks (best)
2. My Article Network
3. SEO Linkvine
4. Traffic Kaboom (best of this type)
5. EZ Article Link
6. Authority Link Network

These ones above we DO USE – and do recommend YOU use. THEIR prices vary between $50 and $80 month. We have done numerous other tests using the Magic Code method which show these are proving effective at getting us good quantities of good backlinks (Traffic Kaboom is proving to be the best – but more on that in a separate post here on the Proper Profits blog later).

(We then use the Backlink Multiplier methods to supercharge these backlinks)

So what about this ‘Elite’ tool?

Well, after 4 months paying $500 a month (hence the $2,000 cost I mentioned earlier), here are the results…

2144 publications ie 2144 backlinks.

Thats near enough $1 per backlink. Now IF these were powerful high Page Rank (PR) backlinks, then that would be good.

Unfortunately, they’re not high PR, as you’re about to see.

I took the report that Elite gives, of these 2144 backlinks…

I then looked closely into the Excel spreadsheet of these backlinks…

There were MANY duplicates. That is, there were many backlinks which were on different pages, on the same domain. Sometimes 5 on the same domain, sometimes 8.

The issue here is that 5 backlinks on the same site is nowhere near as powerful for your SEO as 5 backlinks on 5 different sites (domains).

So I de-duplicated the list – and got down to only 369 different sites!

(From 2144 down to 369 shows there was a LOT of duplicates)

Not so good, to my mind.

Now, again, if these sites were high Page Rank it might be worth it. Or if they had stacks of backlinks to them. Or if they were old AND had lots of backlinks.

So I ran the first 100 of these 369 through Market Samurai because Samurai is the quickest method to get the data that matters.

Below are the screenshots of the Market Samurai results for the first 100 (first 100 in alphabetical order). Have a quick scan of the columns that matter – mostly BLP and BLD backlinks. Here is what each column means (if you dont already have Market Samurai, it is a great tool)

URL: Site where the backlink is (partially blanked out to protect the network)
DA: Domain Age
PR: PageRank
IC: Index Count (number of pages indexed)
RDD: Refering Domains to this Domain
RDP: Refering Domains to this Page
BLP: Backlinks to this Page
BLD: Backlinks to the whole Domain
BLEG: Backlinks from .Edu or .Gov
DMZ: Listed in DMOZ Directory
YAH: Listed in Yahoo Directory

Now, here are the screenshots showing how good or weak each site is to get a backlink from (note, I inputted the main domain home page which usually has the strongest numbers of backlinks etc – deeper pages usually have fewer backlinks etc)

I would clasify a backlink worth having as one on a domain with over 1,000 backlinks to itself and/or a backlink with 5 or more backlinks to that specific page. You could then assume that Google will have that backlink indexed and counting towards your SEO power.

5 backlinks to your backlinks is not a powerful backlink by any stretch – but it should simply be enough to get your backlink noticed. But still not worth paying over the odds for…

So looking at those screenshots above, I count only 7 of those 100 sites as having more than 1,000 backlinks to their homepage. Yes, some of them are older than 3 or 4 years, which starts to get interesting – IF and only if the domain has a healthy amount of backlinks to them – yet most of those ‘older’ sites don’t have that many backlinks.

So now lets look at the specific PAGE that our backlink is on. The only columns to look at here are
RDP: Refering Domains to this Page
BLP: Backlinks to this Page

Run your eyes down the RDP and BLP columns there…

Absolutely 100% all ZERO!

That means there are zero backlinks to these backlinks. Nada – nothing – ziltch!

So they’re highly unlikely to be indexed in Google or paid any attention by Google.

Now, of course, I would and will be running the Backlink Multiplier steps on all these backlinks, putting them through the Proper Profits ENGINE and getting them all indexed and loved by Google – but only by MY own work – not from ‘work’ I have already paid over-the-odds for.

But I can get similar, relatively weak backlinks, with zero backlinks to that page and only a moderate few backlinks to the main site’s homepage, by using the much cheaper blog/article auto-syndication networks listed above.

For instance, in one recent similar analysis run we did, to check out the other article/blog auto-syndication networks we use, in a similar timeframe to the test above, Traffic Kaboom produced 5,900 backlinks – compared to Elite’s 2144.

Yes, Traffic Kaboom generated over TWICE as much!

I also have a minor issue that Elite is getting backlinks from sites named like this
transsexualsexvideos.net
2-get-female-foot-job-fetish-worship-celebrity.com

I saw those URLs in the link list and baulked at the site thinking our link was going on some dodgy adult site. It turns out that the site is just named that way and the content is not adult material – the content is basically a content farm ie a site created purely to publish other articles within the network.

And here’s the rub…

I own 80+ websites, ALL of which are FAR higher quality and much more tightly relevant to my niches than most of the sites within this ‘Elite’ network. I dont say that to brag – not at all.

I say that because I am just a guy who slowly (and maybe too lazily) built these sites of mine up over the last few years, working things out as we went along, honing it down as we went.

And in essence, the whole way we build these sites is laid out in clear step-by-step detail in the Proper Profits.

My point is not to suggest you need the Proper Profits Coaching (a wise move in itself) – but to suggest that you can build your OWN network of sites which will have much higher quality AND relevance than the sites within this ‘Elite’ network – and probably a number of other networks too.

Now, I am not totally discounting all the backlinks gotten via Elite. About 7 of the links shown above are good. And all of them are worth having – they are just not worth $500 a month, in my view.

So we will need to do a fair amount of work on these backlinks, to get backlinks TO these backlinks, to get Google to pay attention to them and to supercharge them, as per the Backlinks Multiplier strategies.

So tell me what you think…

How would you rate backlinks like this?

Would you be happy to pay $500 a month for them?

Let me know in the comments below…