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 
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
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!