There us a really tough battle going out to be the king of the linkbuilding world with the main fight now between Article Samurai vs Build My Rank (BMR). Both are really great. This tells you which is best.
The Pros and Cons of Build My Rank
Build My Rank is a relatively new kid on the block that launched about a year or so ago. The basic idea is that it has a huge network of blogs that can accept submissions through an automated front end. As a subscriber you plug articles into the interface and they then get dripped out onto the blog network. As you can see from this image, BMR has a fairly diverse range of blogs and sites with Page Rank characteristics that probably mimic the internet as a whole pretty well. While everyone dreams of getting loads of very high page rank links, the truth is that you probably need a bunch of low Page Rank links too so that you have a more natural-looking link profile. After all, the web isn’t based on sites that are all high PR.
The other great thing I like about Build My Rank is that it is really transparent in terms of allowing you to see where your posts have gone. I can’t think of any other blog network or article syndication system that actually tells you the PR of the sites your posts have gone to. Also keep in mind that this are home page (or domain) page ranks, so although your post will be on the home page for a few days, it will eventually drop off onto an inner page that will probably be PR0, so don’t get too hung up on chasing the PR5 posts.
Build My Rank has Good Indexing
You can see from the picture above the BMR gives really great data on how your posts are getting indexed. They show the site-wide rate as well as the rate at which your new posts are indexing. The big drops in the picture above are not because I was having bad luck, it was because I didn’t post for a week or two so the rate on new posts fell to 0 percent because there were no new posts.
The reason they have a good indexing rate is because they build links back to their own sites using RSS feeds and social bookmarking. They also monitor the performance of their sites against the average and pull ones out for a rest if they aren’t getting indexed well. They also keep adding sites to the network (they say about 150 a month are being added).
Build My Rank Maintains Quality
The guys at BMR work hard to avoid any sort of Google penalty. One of the ways they try to ensure this is by strictly monitoring the quality of the sites that they allowing outgoing links to. This ensures that the network isn’t brought down by linking to bad neighbourhoods (gambling, adult content etc) and also by making sure they only link to sites with original content.
The second level of quality check is on the posts going into the network. They won’t allow spun content and they also check for grammar mistakes, correct spelling and articles that make sense. The quality bar is pretty low but it does keep out the real junk. They also insist on a minimum article length of 150 words, and require a further 150 words for each additional link that goes into the system.
BMR Makes Outsourcing Easy
With Build My Rank you can easily add up to five writes and give them permission to work on certain projects. They can write and you can hit the submit button if you want to check their work, or you can just allow them to submit directly and rely on the quality checks in the system. You get a record of their approval rate and can also see exactly what links they have submitted and what anchor text they have used.
But Build My Rank is Expensive to Scale
One of the great strengths of Build My Rank vs Article Samurai is that it insists only on unique, human written content. Now there is a huge debate in the online world about whether you should use spun content at all. Court Tuttle, one of the founders of The Keyword Academy and one of the most respected people in internet marketing, has said that he thinks you should never use spun content. His logic is that:
People who believe that spun content is great will probably argue that it’s a huge time-save. This is only true if you’re looking at an extremely short time period. I don’t think you’re going to see residual value in those types of links. Google definitely has the technology to detect spun content and if they don’t, I know some programmers who could write something for them in about 10 minutes.
Now I admire Court a lot and am a follower of the Keyword Academy’s methods, but with a bit of a twist. The point is that it can take a lot of time and a lot of links to build authority for a site. Take a look again at my Build My Rank stats on the top of the page and you can see I have almost 800 posts in their system. A lot of those are longer than 150 words, so there is a huge amount of effort involved in getting that number of posts up.
The cost of only using original unspun content can be huge . If one assumes that I had used Build My Rank’s content creation service I would have paid $2.50 for each of those links. So in addition to many months of membership (at a starting price of $59 a month), the content up there alone would be worth 797 X $2.5 = $1992.
I don’t know about you but almost $2000 is a lot of dough to blow on content for links.
Now you could say this is an unfair comparison because who pays $2.5 per link for backlinks from BMR? I don’t know and I know I didn’t (I paid closer to $1.2 per link to an outsourcer and also wrote a lot myself).
But unless you have a solid income stream or a lot of time to write, you will find that building backlinks using pure original content can take a lot of time.
Does Build My Rank Get Results
Sure it does. Over on the TKA (The Keyword Academy) forum there are plenty of members who have joined the $1000 a month income club. A lot of them are using a mixture of Build My Rank and Postrunner, a similar network that is open only to members of TKA. (If you want an affiliate link to find out more about TKA click this link)
There are plenty of big earners there who have managed to consistently get good results using the two systems. If you have the time or the money to outsource then BMR can be a powerful tool.
But Is is Sustainable?
This is one of the issues that I worry about. The sites that BMR posts to all stick out like sore thumbs. They have ugly themes, do not look at all cared for and it is probably a matter of time before Google decides to drop them from the index. Similar has happened to networks like Linkvana and others. That said the BMR team has invested a lot and seems committed to trying to make it work.
So Where do you Talk About Article Samurai vs Build My Rank
I guess this is a good point to give a quick comparison, having just spent all this time talking about what I like and don’t like about BMR.
Here’s why for the moment I’m doing almost all my linkbuilding using Article Samurai:
- Article Samurai is scaleable – For not much more time than you spend writing our outsourcing an article that would give you two links on Build My Rank or PostRunner, I can get up to 150 links from Article Samurai
- Article Samurai is quick - this relates to the point above, but this saturday I sat down and prepared and spun 15 articles. That should lead to more than 2000 inbound links to my sites. In short, I have managed to compress several weeks worth of linkbuilding (months actually if measured purely by number of links) into a morning.
- But it is lower quality – Spun content probably isn’t as good so many of those links will probably drop away. as much as I worry that Google may magically make a lot of the BMR sites vanish from the index one fine sunny day, that could just as easily happen to sites in the Article Samurai blog networks.
Conclusion: Which is better – Article Samurai v Build My Rank?
