Test Results are IN – No More Xrumer!
Posted in Opinions, SEO on March 19th, 2011 by Michael – 8 Comments
Over the last year or so I’ve been experimenting with xrumer, scrapebox and various other greyish (I don’t know if anything can be called black any more these days..) seo methods.
While there was quite a bit of positive effect at first, I’m now fairly convinced that these massive amounts of low quality links can do more harm than good in the long term. Sure you might say “ha, big surprise”, but you know nothing in SEO until you test it on your own. Can’t trust any “experts”: those who talk – don’t know, and those who know – don’t talk.
For those unfamiliar with what I’m talking about here: xrumer is a popular piece of software that creates forum profiles and posts and can also post to pretty much any comment form and pass by most conventional verification and spam prevention systems. It’s so powerful that it can create millions of profiles with your links in them.
Since it’s expensive and running it on your own is quite resource intensive and requires quite a bit of calibration and lots of time collecting and cleaning the databases, there are many services that do that for you. Like dripfeedblasts.com – which creates 1k profiles per day (or 30k profiles per month) for $99 per month – this is also the service I used for my testing. It’s biggest benefit is that it’s very easy to use – you just add your signature and homepage links and schedule them to run on a day to day basis.
Scrapebox is a much cheaper and easier to use software that mostly sends comments to blogs and can also handle huge volumes of millions of comments. It also has some great tools to check serps quickly, find out various information about your competition and to find some high PR on topic blog posts – which might in fact be the most useful feature. If you do it right – mostly manually and on topic – blog comments can still be useful, but in massive amount and low quality these links do little good.
Out of about 35 of my new sites I tried these methods on many have received various penalties and dropped out serps, others retained good positions, but mainly due to having other different links of better quality. Some still dance around jumping up and down in the rankings twice a week..
Overall if done in moderation these links too can have a positive effect on the serps, but the efforts outway the benefits and same or better results can be achieved with other low cost and more mainstream methods.
Many people still report different results and argue that these links can form a great seo weight basis for your link feeder sites or for all your hosted content and web 2.0 pages, however I have my doubts about how much “link juice” is actually acquired and pass on there. What are your results?
