I have been running an experiment using two different services and techniques on two different sites, obviously using different keywords. So in reality, I'm comparing apples and oranges. One set of keywords that I'm trying to rank for is considerably more difficult to rank on than the other - at least from my perspective.
With all of this in mind, it looks like there is a clear winner between my two options. I won't name them at this point because the results are not complete and it will be at least a month before I can say for certain if one was more helpful than the other. For now we'll just call them option A and B.
I saw option A not long ago and thought it was a quick and relatively cheap way to get links for my site. They would write an article and submit it to article directories. For every hundred directories submitted to, they would create a different copy of the article. One of the keyword terms I decided to use was free seo tips which is a fairly low competition term and should be relatively easy to rank on. In addition to ranking on the actual term, it included free seo and seo tips, both of which are bigger terms that I'd love to rank on.
The problem with option A is a matter of quality. If you submit the same thing to 100 different sites, they are lower quality sites. This is especially true since Google recently changed their algorithm to penalize sites that don't have much original content. In otherwords, the sites that they submit to aren't high quality.
The second problem with option A that I didn't know going in was their actual articles. Google isn't able to determine what is good writing and what isn't, so this isn't a big deal. I don't get penalized because the article looks like a student wrote it without spellcheck. However, the article that I was given looked like it had been through an article spinner. This isn't an issue in itself as spun articles aren't necessarily penalized in search engines and I already knew that I wasn't going to have my article on high quality sites that didn't accept spun content. My problem is that I was supposed to have an original article written for me. This seemed like it was a spun version of an article that has probably been sold to other people 100 times.
So those are my problems with option A. Because of the writing process, my articles were just submitted yesterday so I haven't received any rankings boost yet. Oh, and that is a third problem that I partially misunderstood and still don't understand. The site says that the duration for my 200 articles is 12 days. All 200 articles were posted on one day. I expected them to be distributed over a period of 12 days. After rereading the site, only orders of 500 and 1000 are submitted slowly, 100 per week. So I have no clue what the 12 day duration actually means. Either way, search engines may assume that you are spamming if 200 links to your site show up in one day.
Option B is a monthly service. It requires an original article for every submission and has a network of high quality sites. You can write your own articles or pay someone to write them for you. Basically, your routes are time consuming or money consuming but the end result is high quality links. During the first week I worked under a 15 day free trial period. This trial only allowed me to submit 10 links. I figured I would wait to see if I got decent results before plunging in with a monthly subscription.
What I can tell you is that at ten days in I went ahead and activated my monthly suscription because I had used my links and I was happy with my results. My only disappointment with option B so far has been the fact that it is too high quality. I had hoped to use an article spinner and pump out dozens of articles at a time and watch the links roll in. Because the service only wants original content, it does not accept my spun content. And it caught me on my test of this. I plan to try again but my hopes are not high. I will probably end up having to write all of my own articles or pay someone to do it for me. So much for generating 100 links a month. I'm now hoping for about ten a week because this is what is more realistic for my schedule.
For the moment at least, I will not be making any more purchases from option A. And even though option B has standards that are actually higher than I'd prefer, I've already seen good results. And in the end, that's all that matters.
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