Backlinks.com Review
After doing a recent Textbroker.com review, I decided that this week it should be the turn of a backlink provider. As normal, the business in question are not told in advance that it is a review, in order to show how they perform under “normal” conditions.
Backlinks.com Pricing
Text Link rates are as follows (per month) per text link. If you spend $500 or more per month, additional discounts are available.
PageRank (PR) 0 homepage/subpage $.50
PageRank (PR) 1 homepage $1 , subpage $1
PageRank (PR) 2 homepage $2 , subpage $2
PageRank (PR) 3 homepage $4 , subpage $3
PageRank (PR) 4 homepage $6 , subpage $4
PageRank (PR) 5 homepage $9 , subpage $7
PageRank (PR) 6 homepage $25 , subpage $20
PageRank (PR) 7 homepage $60 , subpage $50
PageRank (PR) 8 homepage $150 , subpage $100
The prices certainly look tempting, and they say have more than 18,000 pages that you can buy links on.
Getting started
It was extremely easy to get going – fill in a few basic details and I was in right away. You can then add “target” pages that you want to build links to, then search for suitable pages to link from. Once I done this, I realised you can’t actually view the url’s of sites you want to buy on until you buy credits.
I understand why they are doing this, but this is like being told at the door of Hugo Boss you need to pay for the suit before you come in. What if you try it on and don’t like it? I guess its tough luck.
One thing I really hate is when people offer seo services without fully explaining the risks involved. If you want to do something risky that is fine – but you need to know the dangers to make an informed decision.
here has been a lot of discussion over this on numerous web forums and SEO websites. Google’s official policy is that they don’t approve of “paid” text links. However they themselves sell sponsored text links on their own search results pages. Text link selling/buying remains a vital part of increasing search engine rankings and you can almost guarantee that any website listed highly in Google’s organic search results has done so. Thus is is really a necessity for businesses to successfully match their competition in many cases.
I don’t like the text above (from their FAQ page) at all. It plays down the risks and likens buying and selling links to what Google is doing, but that is a stretch of the truth to say the least. Sure, Google technically sell links in the form of Adwords, but those links do not pass any seo benefit. Comparing that to selling text links for seo benefits is bizarre.
They then go on to say:
Our service has been around for at least 3 years and we have had no reports of Google banning our customers for buying or selling text links. This is because our installation code/software used to publish the sold links is not detectable by the search engine bots. The paid links are simple, html based links that appear as natural as other links on the web pages where they appear. If Google started really penalizing websites for buying text links this also implies that your competitors could intentionally buy links to point to your website in an effort to harm your rankings. Such a scenario seems highly unlikely and there would be an industry wide outrage over such practices.
Again playing down the risks involved. Another black mark against Backlinks.com. As we all know, Google can, and do, regularly penalise sites for link buying and selling.
The actual links
Okay with that stuff out the way, lets take a look at what our money gets us. I’m not going to out sites, so I will just give descriptions of the sites themselves.
I decided for the review we would look at finance links with pagerank 5, so I put that information into the search box and it only returned 2 sites. One of them had a network holding page on it, and the other was a “finance blog” that was built on a site that used to be a Finland student guide! It was immediately obvious from looking at the domain alone that this site didn’t begin its life as a finance site, so there is no way whatsoever you would want a link on it under its current form. Not a good start whatsoever, but not enough information to base a full review on. Modifying the search to instead look at “health” sites with pagerank 5 returned 33 sites, so we will base the review on that.
Looking at the first site from the health list, again it is blatant that the site never began its life in the niche it is currently in. This one used to belong to a mobile network, until it dropped on the 8th May (2 weeks ago) and the current owner built a health insurance blog on it. At this point I was starting to get disheartened, was I going to find a single site I’d actually want a link on?
The next one on the list looked a lot more promising – a “healthy foods” blog which at least had the word “food” in the domain so probably hadn’t been changed to a more easily monetizable niche. When I examined the backlinks in Yahoo site explorer, the top 10 sites listed all no longer link to the domain in question. The links must have been removed recently. So you’re paying for a pagerank 5 site here, but it doesn’t actually have any real pagerank to pass. To make matters worse, of those 10 backlinks I checked, 8 of them had the exact same template on – immediately obvious it had been part of a network.
The next domain, I couldn’t check the actual page the link was on. They use a weird wavy text to show you the url, embedded in an image. As you need to be signed in to see these url’s, this is completely pointless. This url had about 100 characters in it, after seeing the above there was no way I was going to spend quarter of an hour trying to work out what each letter was, and typing them one at a time. So I just looked at the root domain, which was a chinese domain(.cn). When I went to the url all I can see is text saying “bad request – invalid host name”. Whether the page that you can buy links on actually loads, I’m unsure.
Looking at the site in archive.org, it used to be a Chinese language site, topic unknown. It definitely wasn’t an English language “health and fitness” blog like they are advertising it as though.
The next one up was advertised as a “Lose weight blog”. Checking the site on Archive.org shows that it used to be a technology association site from the Philippines. So basically yet another site you definitely wouldn’t want a link on.
And now we move onto the next one, a “health and fitness blog”. The site doesn’t actually load, so buying a link on here would be a complete waste of time right now. The site isn’t listed in Archive.org so I cannot tell you for sure what it used to be, but looking at its backlinks all of its incoming pagerank is coming from Chinese language sites again. I think its fair to say this is yet another site that didn’t actually start out as an English health site.
The next one was again a massive url that I didn’t feel like trying to type in, so again I’ll just look at the root url. From the domain alone it was obviously not going to be worth wasting 10 minutes trying to decypher the full url. This one is a Chinese science website, although it does have an English version.
Next up is another page from the same Chinese site we started with. Not sure why backlinks.com are choosing to show them as separate sites, it just makes everything take longer and be a pain to use. After this one I tried to view another site, only to be told I can only see 5 url’s per day. I’m not quite sure how you are meant to do any real backlink building if you can only see 5 url’s. Maybe they expect you just to keep buying them blindly without doing any checking.
At this point I thought I’d seen enough to conclude that the links are complete garbage.
Payments for backlinks.com links
As I mentioned above, you need to actually pay before you see the links. I wasn’t impressed with that to begin with, and having seen the links I am even more unhappy about it now. I’ve not seen a single site I would have been willing to take a link on, but I have already got my credit card out and handed over the cash. At this point you can either choose to write the money off, or take links you don’t want. To be honest, the links are that bad I would recommend the first option.
You need to sign up with a monthly paypal subscription for credits. To make matters worse, the credits don’t roll over to the next month – you need to use them or lose them. You can’t buy links one off, so even if you were regularly using their service you would be losing money every single month as its unlikely you would be able to use the exact number of credits that you have.
Conclusion
I simply cannot recommend this service at all. The sites are extremely low quality, and with them being dropped domains and/or changed niches, they are potentially dangerous.
Their payment system is designed around forcing you to lose cash every month and get nothing in return.
They deliberately make it hard for you to see where you will be buying links, by making the url’s so that you cannot copy or paste them, and then only let you see 5 of them per day.
They also force you to pay them before you even get to see any urls. So right now I don’t have a single link from them, but they get to keep my money. Nice work if you can get it!
If you have any experience with them, feel free to leave a comment. Also I’m taking requests for what you want me to review next. Let me waste my money so you don’t have to 
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13 Responses to “Backlinks.com Review”
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I just bought about 50 credits and got some sites. hopefully i see some incoming links to my site and some google organic because of it. I also wanted to ask a question to the owner of this blog if possible. This is a great blog and its alexa is a pretty good rank if we could discuss some methods and key things you did to become this succesfull that would be great!
OMG I am so glad I found this, its a complete scam. I just signed up a week ago $300 a month.. I also got a card and gift of nuts mailed to my door. WTF must be a peace offering. I just canceled the PayPal subscriptions and also opened up a dispute. I provided paypal with this link so they can read your reveiw.
Thank you for taking the time to post this!!
Regards,
Supercan
You mention that google’s text links do no pass PR. What about AdWords links placed on other sites? Do they bring any SEO luck? Here is what I read on SEOMOZ: Google sells links through AdWords and AdSense. Why, yes they do. And your AdWords ad campaign passes no PageRank whatsoever to your site.
Can you comment, please?
Hi Admin, do you have any recommend site is better than this site..?
Subject: Official BackLinks.com Response
Hello,
This is John Sprock. The guy in the cheesy pink tie on the BackLinks.com videos. Since this is supposed to be an unbiased review, we’ll see whether or not “Admin” allows this post to stay.
First of all, it’s always somewhat amusing to see people bash the quality of really inexpensive links (A pr5 for $9, c’mon). But even more amusing is how they lose focus of what they are really buying. When people buy backlinks, they’re not actually buying backlinks, they’re buying results in the Google search engine (If you don’t believe me then answer this question, “Would I rather have 10,000 backlinks and not be in the top 100 in Google or would I rather have 0 backlinks and rank #1 in Google?”). The truth is that people don’t want links, they want rankings. Regardless of how crappy you may think our links are, the fact is they work. We have hundreds of customers including some Fortune 500 companies that buy links from us. If they did not produce results, then people would not continue to buy from us each and every month some of which have been customers in excess of 3 years.
Secondly, of course Google is going to try to use scare tactics to keep you from buying links. They do not make money from you doing free searches on the Internet. They make money from Adsense and Adwords. If people are giving money to link brokers instead of paying for Adwords then I’d try to scare people too if I were Google. (For more info on this, John Chow has a great article on this called “The DarkSide of Google a Spooky Story”.) In fact, Google is even allowing people to do Adwords for buying links. Just Google “buy backlinks” and you’ll see for yourself. They used to never allow Adwords for link brokers.
Also, if everyone got banned for buying links then why couldn’t I just point links to my top 100 competitors and get them all banned and move to #1. Matt Cutts himself, the Sheriff of Google, admitted at PubCon Vegas in November that they have not focused on link buyers because they’re working on other projects.
As far as having to pay for links before you buy them, we don’t want people coming in and spidering our inventory. If you don’t like a link after you place it then you can just cancel the link and choose another site instantly. You can also do this “test” for as little as $5 which was not mentioned. If you don’t like the inventory, then we’d be happy to refund your money if it’s within a reasonable time frame of initial purchase (I don’t recall the author ever asking for a refund).
In conclusion, we’re well aware of the limitations of our product which is why you are not paying $50 for a pr5 and which is why we created a product call AuthorityBackLinks.com in which we manually approve all sites and take into account the following:
* Age of domain name/web page
* Number of backlinks from other web sites
* Number of links on web page
* Google Pagerank
But, I’m sure the “Admin” could also find something wrong with that product since it’s much easier to be Simon Cowell and bash a product than to have any talent and creativity and actually create a superior product themselves.
Thanks,
John Sprock
P.S. @supercan – That’s the tackiest response I’ve ever heard to someone sending a thank you card and a gift for your business. When is the last time someone like your utility company or phone company or any other vendor for that matter sent a gift for your purchases. OMG.
“Since this is supposed to be an unbiased review, we’ll see whether or not “Admin” allows this post to stay.”
I just approved your comment, any first comments will need approving. I don’t moderate comments outside of dealing with spam, anyone is free to say what they like.
The review *is* an unbiased review. We had no financial incentive to say one way or the other. I didn’t think the service was value for money, so I said so. I’ve outlined my exact reasons to back my view point up, if you don’t agree with them or don’t like them, that’s fine.
You’re saying we’re bashing inexpensive links. But there is a massive difference between an inexpensive link, and a shady one. At no point did I say they those type of links won’t work, as we all know that sometimes they do.
If you want to sell dropped links I have absolutely nothing against that, but you are being extremely unfair and deceptive in the way you’re going about it. You’re taking the profit but leaving someone else loading up on all the risk, and a lot of them won’t even be aware of it.
“If you want to sell dropped links I have absolutely nothing against that, but you are being extremely unfair and deceptive in the way you’re going about it. ”
If a site is indexed and has page rank then we accept it into our inventory and classify it by its page rank. If a site ever loses its page rank or the page rank decreases in value then our system automatically credits those back to your account so you can use the remaining credits on another link. I don’t see how that is deceptive. We sell sites based on page rank which can be verified any number of ways. It’s not like we are faking the page rank and charging more for it. That would be deceptive.
“Looking at the first site from the health list, again it is blatant that the site never began its life in the niche it is currently in. This one used to belong to a mobile network, until it dropped on the 8th May (2 weeks ago) and the current owner built a health insurance blog on it.”
Are you saying its not deceptive to pass that off as a health site? Do you think Google spam cops would be happy with it passing link juice as a health site?
Publishers get to choose which categories they would like to advertise in. With as much inventory as we have, some links may get miscategorized which is why people can view the links before they purchase. We also include other factors like domain age, AlexaRank and MozRank. We can also increase the amount of links a client can view before placing their links if we have a trust factor with them. And as I mentioned before, they can always cancel the link immediately if they do not like it.
We are not trying “deceive” anyone. I’m very public with my persona and anyone who questions our ethics is welcome to contact me directly and we can have a telephone conversation about it. The number is on the website.
@Admin and @John Sprock – thanks for your open discussion regarding Backlinks.com and link buying. You both bring up salient points. I appreciate John’s candor and openness and Admin’s doggedness. I know of companies that rank using only bought links; and others that manage a healthy balance of paid and organic links. Again, this open discussion is helpful because bought links are the elephant in the room – folks don’t like to talk about them, but they are a reality of SEO.
I’ve used backlinks.com for the last 18 months. I think the review here is a huge gloss over by someone with pre-meditated opinions on this market space. Clearly you can’t judge this product without testing it is fit for purpose. We spend about $10,000 a month and climbing and buying links for my clients is the thing that really gives us an advantage. In their particular market space there is little opportunity for getting useful… ( high PR that pass PR ) links with appropriate keywords in site, page and link text. Backlinks offers all of this. For other clients we do lots of other white hat techniques but none of them are as easy or cost affective as backlinks.com. We’ve used their system to bring in over $500,000 of revenue from SEO which had previously been bringing in about $10,000 per annum. You can’t test a system like this in a few days. You need to test it over 3 – 6 months minimum so to the reviewer … sorry you simply don’t understand how this system works iIMHO. I’m a seasoned SEO with a global company and blue chip clients and it simply works better than any other SEO method for SOME of them… FACT!
@ Admin – google spam cops… you’re so funny man. There are no cops… there are no penalties… I’m black hat in technique but not in principles. I only black hat what should be ranked anyway. 1000′s of sites use these systems and you are either a part of it or losing the race. I thought we were winning generating 10,000 for a client… only to find out we were really losing 490,000. The problem with all the people criticising this system is that they don’t have any TRUE success in SEO, They just ‘think’ they have. A big statement I know but I’ve been on both sides in the last 10 years and I certainly know which works best as far as revenue for clients. At the end of the day that is what clients want – revenue with no down side. That is what they get with this system. Yes I said it NO DOWN SIDE.
You obviously have no clue what you are talking about to say there is no down side to risky link buys….
How did it work out for Overstock? JC Penney? etc etc etc
Ah backlinks dot com, not used them in years – well – at those prices it soon becomes clear… you get what you pay for hay – personally i dont like the idea of paying before you see the links either.
As you mention dropped domains, i would also say that my experience tells me to avoid backlinks dot com… but like i say not used it in years.
you are better off in tnx – and if i am correct – i think JCPenny had a few TNX links so i would think to avoid them too now.
Nice post and a good read – thanks for that one Searchengineoptimsation.org!
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