I’ve been a pretty big fan of Build My Rank for over a year because I’ve read a number of positive reviews of it and I’ve seen it work myself.  Lately I’ve been hearing rumblings that it wasn’t as effective as it used to be however.  I largely dismissed these rumblings because if you spend any time around SEO people, the sky is always falling.  I’ve largely sworn off message boards because I get tired of hearing about some idiot’s site tanking because Google screwed them over and it is never anything they did, blah blah blah.

However, I did notice a month or two ago that there were a number of BMR posts that were no longer indexed by Google not long after the site listed them as indexed.  And in general the PR of my backlinks had degraded.  Once again, I attributed this as Google’s crackdown on page ranks in general but it kind of sucked that when I started with Build My Rank I was getting a lot of PR4′s or better and lately there have been a lot of 1′s or 1′s that later got downgraded to 0′s.  Thanks, but I can get plenty of PR0′s on my own.

So just a couple of weeks ago I shelved BMR just to see if there was any truth to the rumors.  It turns out that these are not rumors at all.  As of March 19, BMR is dead for all intents and purposes.  Here’s their own posting, not some rumors on a watch site: http://www.buildmyrank.com/news/its-been-a-great-run

Of course this leaves me with the question of where does this lead us.  And the truth is that I don’t know.  SEO is a game of cat and mouse in trying to stay ahead of Google.  And if that is your only goal, you’ll eventually lose.  Basic SEO principles still work and will always work.  If you write good articles, tag them well, and have good keywords it is always to your advantage.  But if you are working a system, eventually Google will catch up with the system so you should always keep that in mind.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t systems that will work for you, just that nothing is every guaranteed to continue working.  I’ve been working on a large, long term project that uses a number of different techniques.  I’m not ready to report on what works and what doesn’t because frankly I haven’t determined that yet.  But once I have new recommendations to pass along, I’ll do so here.

Editor’s note: BMR is now dead - The Death of BMR  This article remains up for mainly archive purposes and as a reminder that things are always changing in the SEO world.

So let me be up front about my test results this week – they don’t make a lick of sense.  I have no possible explanation for them aside from the fact that Google appears to be completely random in their rankings and instead of a highly refined computer algorithm, rankings are determined by a monkey and a dart board.  But that would be an insult to monkeys unless the monkey decided to throw the darts at random people instead of the board.

Last week the highest ranked page didn’t make a whole lot of sense but at least the page that I was promoting made some sense because they were in order of the amount of promotion I had done.  That is no longer the case.  So enough babbling, here’s my results for the week.

Results

Keyword 1 had dropped to 65 for the top ranking page.  That ranking is now up to a new high of 36.  However, the page that I’m promoting has dropped completely out of the top 1000 after rising last week.  This could be due to a lack of promotion but it still doesn’t explain the overall rank increase.

Keyword 2 saw the biggest gain.  Previously it had ranked 119 for the top page and 308 for the promoted page.  Now the promoted page has taken a huge jump and is now sitting at 31 where I’m within striking distance of the first page and actually making money with the keyword.

Keyword 3 was doing well.  The top page was my promoted page at 191.  This made it the highest ranked promoted page.  My top page has gone up to 119 which is the highest that I’ve ranked for this keyword.  However, (there’s that word again) my promoted page dropped from 191 to 367.

Overview

The good news is that all three of my keywords have continued to increase.  The bad news is that two of my promoted pages have dropped this week.  That might be the hazard of tracking results daily or even weekly however.  Things are going to move around and the ranking on a certain day or a certain page isn’t nearly as important as where things end up when it is all said and done.  Next week we’ll see where things stand.

Editor’s note: BMR is now dead - The Death of BMR  This article remains up for mainly archive purposes and as a reminder that things are always changing in the SEO world.

First of all, if you’ve been following closely it has been two weeks since week 1′s results.  Due to a crazy workload and almost daily headaches that crippled me in the evenings I wasn’t able to get all of my posts up as expected.  I ended up having to outsource my posts which was kind of the point of the test – to determine if you could see results with few posts that you wouldn’t need to outsource.

Although I feared that my results were all over the place, after looking more closely at them I’m seeing movement in the right direction.  I’m still blaming Google for its fickleness and lack of understandability however for some of the randomness.  While all measurements improved, the results themselves still don’t make much sense.

Results

Keyword 1 was ranking 53 as the top result for a random tag page and is now ranking 65 as the top result for another tag page.  I couldn’t begin to tell you why the top page changed because the site hasn’t changed.  On a positive note, the page that I’m actually promoting has moved from 522 to 357.

Keyword 2 was ranking 147 for the index page.  It has now climbed to 119 for a tag page as its top ranking.  The promoted page was not showing up within the top 1000 results and it is now coming in at 308.

Keyword 3 also ranked the index page first at 131.  The promoted page showed up at 505.  Now, the top result is the promoted page which is coming in at 191.

Overview

If I look at the top results for my keyword, this still doesn’t make a bit of sense.  I’m blaming this on Google and WordPress and probably a hundred other factors that I didn’t account for.  However, this week is starting to show some sense for the pages that I’m actively trying to promote.  My rankings are 357, 308, and 191 which is at least in the proper order with regard to how I’m promoting the keywords.  We’ll see if this pattern holds but at least things make a bit of sense looking at it from that angle.

Editor’s note: BMR is now dead - The Death of BMR  This article remains up for mainly archive purposes and as a reminder that things are always changing in the SEO world.

Well, I’ve been running the test for BMR for one week and unsurprisingly there are no definitive results.  If anything, my data right now is backwards and completely goofy.

First let’s start off with the statistical stuff that you may or may not care about but it gives the results some context.

Keyword 1 had only two links – a PR 1 & PR 2.  The PR 2 is listed as not indexed so this link isn’t even doing me any good at this point.

Keyword 2 had five links – 3 PR 2′s, a PR 1 & a PR0.  BMR doesn’t use PR0 sites, so this actually dropped to 0 after posting.  Google is messing with things once again.

Keyword 3 had seven links – 2 PR 3′s. 3 PR’s, 2 PR1′s.  A PR 3 and PR 2 have not been indexed yet.

I started the week by posting two links for each article.  On no day did I post more than three links.  All of these links have been up for at least two days at the time of this writing.

Results

To say that the results are inconclusive would be an understatement.  I didn’t expect anything clear after one week but this is the opposite of clear.  First the good news; all three new pages are index and each keyword returns results for the site that are in the top 1000.  The bad news?  The top result for each keyword on my site is not the page that I’m promoting.  I don’t entirely know what this means at this point other than after one week, BMR with its links can’t beat the pages on my site that are relying strictly on SEO.

Keyword 1 ranks fairly high at #53 but the page that ranks is a tag page on my wordpress site, not the page that I want to rank.  The page that I’m actually promoting is #522.

Keyword 2 ranks at #147 but it ranks for the index page.  There is another page that ranks but it is not the one that I’m promoting.  My promoted page does not show up within the top 1000 results.

Keyword 3 comes in at #131 but once again ranks the index page.  Even stranger is that the promoted page lands at #505.  The page that is #504 you ask?  Why it is the page that keyword 2 is promoting.  How it ranks the wrong page higher is beyond me even though the two keywords are related.

Whether you are looking at the overall top ranking for the keyword or the ranking of the promoted page, keyword 2 is the loser at this point.  As a matter of hindsight I’m seeing some variables that may sway my results but I won’t know until I finish the test.  If this proves to be the case I’ll run a second test that eliminates the variables.

The one big variable that is skewing results right now is that this is a wordpress site.  The three pages that I created for this test are new pages and therefore are showing up on the index page as well as their own page.  For the purposes of the test I won’t be adding any new pages during this month so that all three pages remain on the index page.

The one thing that I have decided as a result of this test is that Google obviously weighs index pages more heavily than individual pages.  This is the only explanation I have for the index outranking my pages with keyword anchored backlinks pointing to to them.

I’m hoping that next week I will see more movement and some results that at least make a bit more sense.

I have recently discovered something that I have suspected for a while but never had definitive information to prove it.  It relates to the importance of having quality links point toward your site.  Now, you probably already knew that it’s important to have high PR links pointing back to your site and that a PR 2 is more than twice as valuable as a PR 1.  That isn’t the point I’m trying to make although that is true.

When I talk about quality, at least as far as this article is concerned, I’m talking about how relatable the ad is to your site.  For instance, let’s say that you have a website about cars.  You can get a high PR link from a site about cosmetics and it will certainly help, but if you get a high PR link from another site about cars it will help you even more.

Here’s what I did.  I have two sites that both rank for the same keyword.  This is partially by accident and partly design.  I route my traffic from site A which is a general site to site B which is focused on that keyword and similar words.  The funny thing is that site A ranks higher for the keyword even though it is no longer designed to do so.  It’s a higher PR site and is much older so it’s considered the authority over site B.

What happened though was that I was given a review copy of a backlink service.  Given the specific parameters of the test Site A was better suited to promote the keyword even though I’d probably gain more if I had promoted Site B.  At the start of the test, Site A ranked #12 for the keyword while Site B ranked #53.  I did no other promoting other than the service to promote the keyword on Site A.

Two weeks after the test, the keyword on Site A has risen as it was supposed to but it’s a relatively small rise from #12 to #7.  On the other hand, Site B which had absolutely no links added to it rose from #53 to #19.  So what conclusions have a drawn from this?  If your links come from related sites it is as important as whether they are high PR.  Because Site A was considered to be a higher authority on my keyword at the end of the test the links going from it to Site B were considered stronger.  I have absolutely no other explanation other than this.  Nothing else was done that would effect that kind of change and it couldn’t have been coincidence that Site B rose at the very same time that Site A rose.

So, when you are looking for places to put links, consider the source and I’m not just talking about the page rank.  If you can get links on related sites it will be weighed more than unrelated sites.

Editor’s note: BMR is now dead - The Death of BMR  This article remains up for mainly archive purposes and as a reminder that things are always changing in the SEO world.

I have liked Build My Rank since I started using it.  The interface was simple and most importantly it delivered results.  If you’re not already using Build My Rank to increase your keyword rankings, then you should read my Build My Rank review to see if the program is right for you.

There’s been one thing that has bothered me about BMR however.  I haven’t read anything definitive about how many posts you should do or what is most effective.  One site advocates doing as many posts as possible in a month’s time but I have to take this recommendation with a grain of salt because they just so happen to have a sister site that sells BMR posts.  On the other hand, I’ve seen documented tests that have delivered results with less than 20 posts a month.  In case you want proof, the Electron Plumber did this when he tested Build My Rank against several other SEO tools.  See his Great Link Building Experiment of 2011.  He’s actually a big part of my inspiration to start my own testing.

We’ve always been told that more is better when it comes to linkbuilding but is there a point of diminishing returns?  If you are to bake a care at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, you can’t do it in half the time by doubling the temperature (even if ovens reached 700 degrees.)  So that’s the point of this experiment.  Can you get the same results with 10 posts as you do with 30?

To start, I know that even 30 posts are going to make much of a dent in a competitive keyword.  It will take 100′s of posts and many months to get where you want with a tough keyword.  This is a proof of concept.  If traditional strategy holds, three times as many links will yield three times the results.  I intend to discover the truth with regard to how this works in BMR.

So here’s the test specifics:

I have created 3 new pages on a two year old domain that has a PR of 2.  Each page is designed for a specific keyword.

My three keywords have exact searches of 1000, 1000, and 880.  I would have liked to have had all three with the exact same number of searches but I believe that this is close enough so as to not affect my results.  I chose the threshold of 1000 searches as this is enough to be worth the bother to promote but low enough that I should be able to see results fairly quickly.

Although it’s difficult to judge the quality of the competition for the keywords, all three yield results between 250-350,000 pages in Google.

My methodology is pretty simple.  I will use Build My Rank to promote each keyword.  I will create ten articles/links for one keyword, twenty for the next, and thirty for the final keyword.  Every week I will track the results by using seoserp.com.  I like to use this for my research because it reports the results of the top 1000 in Google.  While it’s unlikely that I’ll get any traffic when I rank at 700, it is very useful to see how things are moving.

Reaching a conclusion

At the end of one month I hope that things will be conclusive.  I am looking for one of three possible results.

1. 30 posts will outpace 20 posts which will outpace 10 posts.  I’ll be looking for significant differences like 100, 200, 300 or 33, 58, 76 – not 33, 36, 38.
2. There is a significant drop off or point of diminishing returns between 20 and 30.  In this instance results would look like 33, 36, 58.
3. There is no significant difference between 10 posts and 30 posts.  If this is the case, the results will be bunched together like 22, 24, 27.

I’m going to start right off by saying that I’m a Google guy and if Google hadn’t become so fascist in the sites that they will approve for adwords, I never would have even bothered using Facebook ads.  So consider this to be more of me ranting than giving an objective review.

The concept of Facebook ads is great.  If you tell Facebook that you like food then a person selling food items can target you for food ads.  It’s even better than the model that we have for television.  For television there are a lot of assumptions and worthless displays.  For instance, football games have a lot of beer commercials because the presumption – of course most likely true – is that if you watch football, then you probably drink beer.  But of course there are still plenty of people like myself who love football but don’t drink beer.  For all of those viewers it is wasted air time and more relevant ads could be delivered to them.

Facebook removes this factor if done correctly.  People who like games should get ads for games.  People who like knitting should get ads for knitting.  No overlap hitting the wrong target unless of course you are advertising for crocheting and target knitters because you assume that they will click your ads.  But this isn’t Facebook’s problem if you improperly target your audience.  The concept is solid in theory.

The problem with targeting is twofold.  The first is that it is poor targeting.  Even though people share way too much on Facebook, they don’t share everything.  I like to cook but I don’t share this on Facebook so I’ll never see such ads.  On the other hand, if I search for a recipe in a search engine, there is absolutely no doubt that I want something cooking related and I’ll see relevant ads.  Ads are targeted only so much as we tell Facebook.  In time as we allow Facebook to invade our privacy more and more these ads will probably get more relevant but personally I don’t like the idea of Facebook serving me ads based on the fact that I listened to Lady Gaga once on some online music service.

The other problem with targeting is that as far as I can tell, Facebook lies to you.  When you select your targeted audience, Facebook tells you that your ad will be seen by x number of people.  Now obviously if you bid too low, your ad won’t be seen because they are going to display higher bidding ads.  But here’s my issue – using the recommended bid amount I was supposed to reach 200k.  The first few days of running my ad, I saw a reach of only 2000.  Then I noticed that the recommended bid had gone up a few cents so I raised my price to make sure that I would be getting exposure.  A few days after this I had a reach of 11k, not terrible but still not the 200k I was promised.  At this point I noticed that the recommended bid price had almost doubled as well.

Despite these frustrations, I’d still probably be using Facebook ads (if I could afford it) if not for the lousy click measuring system.  After a few days of virtually no exposure two days in a row I was billed for 8 clicks.  My biggest problem with this is that my site didn’t record that I had 8 visits.  Facebook says I had 16 clicks total while Google analytics says 9 Facebook people reached my site.  Who am I going to believe, a third party with no vested interest in how my traffic arrives or a company that makes money from my clicks?  I’m not implying that Facebook fraudulently charged me with clicks or anything like that, only that there were likely accidental clicks where someone immediately hit the back button or otherwise didn’t reach my site.  In other words, the kind of stuff that Google goes out of their way to make sure they don’t charge advertisers for.

It wasn’t on my front page stats but after clicking some, I discovered that Facebook has “all clicks” and “unique clicks”.  I had 16 clicks but only 15 unique clicks.  Or in other words, Facebook new that someone had clicked on my ad twice and had no problems charging me for it twice.

On top of all of these questionable clicks, I have found no way to actually question the clicks that were supposedly delivered to me.  Going through the help menu was an absolute maze of incomprehensible menus.  Even when I found the place to actually contact someone if my question wasn’t answered, they made me answer a bunch of other questions – several of them irrelevant to my problem.  I never actually got to post my question.

So, my ad campaign was stopped.  A complete waste of money that may have delivered 9 hits according to Google analytics.  Of those hits even, they didn’t appear to do anything of value.  Of course not ever ad clicked on is going to convert but there didn’t seem to be anything of value that I received from Facebook at all.

I was given a free review copy of the SESlingshot service.  This included 100 posts on high PR sites with the keyword link of my choosing.  Based upon the parameters of the test I chose a keyword that gets 9900 exact searches a month.  For my chosen domain, I ranked #12 according to seoserp.com which I used to track my rankings often.  There were two added wrinkles to this test.  The first is that this domain is an old one – I have had it for 11 years.  This could very well affect how much Google moves such a keyword.

The other interesting wrinkle is that for my chosen keyword on this site, I actually redirect most of the traffic to another site where I ranked #53 at the start of the test.  I had hopes that by raising the ranking on one site, I would also raise the ranking on the associated site.

I submitted my information on a Friday a received a report back on Tuesday.  I don’t know whether to count this as a two day or four day turn around on time because of the weekend, but either way I consider this to be pretty fast.

So, what about the actual results?  According to my own tracking on seoserp.com I climbed from 12 to 10.

According to the report I received back, I climbed from 11 to 5.  Click the chart to see the results.  Obviously, there is some discrepancy between different rankings trackers so I’m not too concerned about the difference. What is personally surprising about the rise that came about so quickly.  Frankly I question whether it is sustainable.  EDIT: see chart below for sustainability

EDIT: I’ll still check at a month out but the ranking has actually grown so I can’t have any complaints about that.  According to my own tracker that I’m using, this has moved from 12 to 7 but it’s worth noting that this lists individual pages that don’t actually show up on Google.  It is the third site listed in my results.

The one area of growth that I tracked however was on my secondary site that I also rank on for this keyword.  I went from #53 to as high as #44.  I’m currently sitting at #46 today.  I might consider this ordinary fluctuations except it has been up every day since I submitted my order and I have done nothing else to increase my ranking on the keyword.  EDIT:  There’s no doubt in my mind that the rise is from my links now.  The secondary site has gone all the way up to #19 now.

The Good

I feel sure that the service delivers just what it promises.  I have a report with every post that I purchased.  I can verify that the domains are high PR and actually see that they are there and have not just been “submitted” the way some services operate.

The Bad

For me personally, I don’t want 100 links to show up overnight.  If you’re adding a 100 links everyday that’s one thing but I have a feeling that this will only lead to a temporary bump as Google doesn’t see any more links coming.  Only time will tell if this strategy works or not.  I would prefer a slow drip over 3-4 weeks in order to appear more natural to Google.  EDIT: I can’t argue with the results even if the method wouldn’t be my first choice.  In the end I want results and it looks like SE Slingshot has delivered despite my skepticism.

The Ugly

If I had paid for my review copy, the price would have been $277 for 100 links.  That’s a big pill to swallow in my opinion.  I’d sooner have a service with a monthly fee and not only lower my monthly hit but also stretch out my submissions.  On the other hand, this works out to be $2.77 per link.  If you are paying someone to write articles for you on Build My Rank or some other service, you may pay $250 for the articles alone, plus the cost of the actual service.  So, in the end it comes down to how you want to look at the costs.  I’m a bit more for doing it myself than to take a $277 hit for a one time service but that may just be me.

Conclusions

EDIT: I had to completely change my conclusions because I’m ready to give SE Slingshot my recommendation now.  I will still check to see if the ranking holds at a month out but at this point it has not only shown sustainability but my ranking has actually grown since my report came back.  Jacob, who I have had multiple contacts with, has been very quick about contacting me and even alerted me to a separate issue regarding my website that he had found.  This service gets my endorsement at this time.

Editor’s note: BMR is now dead - The Death of BMR  This article remains up for mainly archive purposes and as a reminder that things are always changing in the SEO world.

If you’re using Build My Rank, you obviously want to get the most out of it.  If you’re not, see my Build My Rank review and you’ll see that it is one of the best link building tools available today.  Despite its effectiveness there are obviously some tips to keep in mind when using it so that you can best get your money’s worth.

Competition is everything

It doesn’t matter how great of a program or software you have, if you’re trying to rank for a difficult keyword it is going to take more work.  Build My Rank is absolutely effective at improving your keyword ranking but if you have a tough keyword it will take many links and perhaps months to get the ranking that you want.  There is no shortcut in doing this.  On the other hand, if you have a keyword in a niche without much competition you may be able to conquer it relatively quickly.

Basically, competition isn’t so much an issue with BMR as it is with all link building.  Some people are likely to think that it doesn’t work because they haven’t put enough effort into it.  No program is going to work without effort.

Variance is key, sort of

While there is still debate over the existence of the dreaded Google sandbox most web gurus believe in it and I count myself among them.  One of the ways to end up in the sandbox is to have all links pointing to your site or page say the same thing.  It looks unnatural to Google and rightfully so.  If other people are naturally linking to your page, at least one of them will say “for more information click here.” The link being the click here part.  So, to avoid the sandbox you want some variations of your keyword even if they are similar such as links, backlinks, and link building.  That should be enough to keep you out of trouble.

On the other hand, if you submit 20 links and they focus on 10 different keywords you’re probably not going to get very far.  Yes, you created 20 links to your site but for any given keyword you’ve only moved up whatever amount two links will do for you.  My guess is that you hope to move up a lot and two links isn’t going to help you much.  I suggest about three keywords for optimal ranking.

Don’t overpost

You can schedule up to 10 posts a day but BMR recommends against this.  If Google detects 10 new posts every day they’ll suspect something is up so BMR can be scheduled for a random number of posts each day.  Still, you could put up 200 posts easily and keep a random number without a problem.  The real question is will this help you?

Some advocate putting up as many articles as possible for maximum effectiveness.  While I don’t doubt that more articles/links means more effectiveness the main advocates of this that I’ve seen also sell BMR articles so it feels like a conflict of interest at best.

I personally haven’t run any experiments but from those I’ve spoken to about it, there are diminishing returns after a certain point.  For instance if 20 posts will move your rank from #50 to #20, 100 posts might get it to #15 and 200 posts might get you to #13.

So, perhaps you’d like some numbers to back this up?  I’ll turn to an internet guru who got me turned on to some of this stuff, the Electron Plumber.  In a six month experiment he worked with a 3 word keyword that got 1000 exact searches a month and a 2 word keyword that got 10,000 searches a month.  Using only 98 posts (just over 16 a month) he got the 1000 search word to #1 and the 10,000 search word to #34.  Yes, it took time but it didn’t take tons of posts.  Now presumably he could have got the tougher keyword up higher with more posts but that wasn’t the point of the experiment.  This was all done with no other programs and no other links at all from other sites.  So, what was my point now?  That’s right, you can get good results with a fairly low number of posts.  The real issue is how hard is your competition.

Don’t spin your content

BMR says up front that they don’t accept spun content.  But odds are that you’re like me and you figure that you’ll just spin something really well and no one will notice – after all they’re just saying that so they don’t get garbage that is incomprehensible.  Wrong!  I tried several different spun articles and only succeeded in getting one through the filter in ten tries.  Basically just save your time, don’t bother trying to beat the system.  I don’t know if there’s any truth to it or not but you don’t want to send up a red flag and have your account come under extra scrutiny because you’re always throwing junk at it.

Deactivate your domains

If you promote multiple sites this tip will be of use to you.  The base package allows for five domains.  But if you have other sites to promote then all you need to do is deactivate a domain that you’re not promoting at the time.  All of your links remain active and everything is still available in your reports, you just can’t post new links while the domain is inactive.  Of course if you want or need to promote more than 5 sites at a time you’ll need to upgrade to the next stage which will cost you a bit more money.

Don’t get discouraged

Rome wasn’t built in a day.  Obviously you want to hit page 1 in Google within your first week and you want to have the top spot by the end of the month.  That’s just not going to happen unless you have a keyword that has no competition and nobody searches for.  These things take time but they will pay off in the end.  You might not see the dividends that you want at the end of the first month but if you keep at it you’ll definitely see results at the end of six months.  Just keep plugging away and you’ll reach your goal.

Conclusion

I think that Build My Rank is a pretty simple product to use and that it will yield good results if you keep these tips in mind.  Just remember that you’ll need some hard work to achieve the results that you want.  Build My Rank is an excellent tool and it will work for you if you work for it.

Editor’s note: BMR is now dead – The Death of BMR  This article remains up for mainly archive purposes and as a reminder that things are always changing in the SEO world.

Build My Rank is widely regarded as the best link building service available on the market today.  It delivers results that are superior to other services and these results have been benchmarked my numerous other websites.  See http://electronplumber.com/the-great-link-building-experiment-of-2011-final-results/ for a great test that backs up the claim with data comparing BMR with other link building services.  If you are already using BMR you’ll probably be interested in Build My Rank tips.

As for my review of what Build My Rank does, I have found it to be a fairly easy system to operate and one that gives solid results.  Let’s look at three areas: what sets Build My Rank apart, the good, and the less than good.

If you just want to go ahead and test it out for free without reading further just click here to sign up.  No credit card is required to sign up in case that kind of stuff is important to you.  If you want to continue with the service the price starts at $59 a month.

What sets BMR apart

Build My Rank is really neither an automated, nor completely manual link building service.  With an automatic link building service you would set your parameters for the month, pay your fee, and hopefully watch your keyword ranking increase.  A manual service requires painstaking submission of your articles to each individual website.  With BMR you submit your articles manually to them and then they handle submitting your article on their network of sites.  You don’t need dozens of website logins, just one with a simple interface.

Another thing that sets BMR apart from other ranking services is that it requires only 150 word articles.  A 150 word article will allow one link in your article while 300 words will allow two links.  Either way, it requires a lot less words than most article submission sites that require anywhere from 3-500 words.

The Good about Build My Rank

The best thing about Build My Rank aside from the actual results is that your articles land on quality PR sites, anywhere from PR1-7.  You get a report that specifies the pagerank of the site that your article landed on.  Related to this is that they have a network of over 1000 sites with high PR.  This means that when Google changes the PR system like they did a few months ago, they just take the sites that dropped to 0 out of their rotation.  You are guaranteed to have your link on a site with a decent PR.  From personal experience at least a third of my articles were on sites that were PR3 or higher.  One link there is worth dozens or maybe even hundreds of crummy PR0 links that you’ll get from some other services.

Another positive of BMR is that you can easily verify where your article is posted.  By simply clicking a link on the report page you’ll immediately be able to see your article.  If you’re like me, you’ve probably paid for article submissions before and received a report that you had a hundred links and no way to verify that you got what you paid for.  Or even more frustrating, occasionally those reports will have links to your articles and you’ll discover that the links are already dead.  I have never encountered a dead link on Build My Rank.

Perhaps the nicest feature – and another that sets it apart from at least most other services – is the fact that BMR backlinks your backlinks.  For every article that you submit, as many as 50 social backlinks will be pointed to it.

Closely related to the fact that your articles have as many as 50 backlinks to them is the fact that they are guaranteed to be indexed.  On your report page it tells you exactly when your article has been indexed.  I’ve personally seen the article indexed in less than a day and never more than two from the time I submit it.  This means that Google not only finds your backlink but finds it fast.

The Bad about Build My Rank

There is only one bad point about BMR.  You have to use original articles.  They do not accept spun content.  Now I know that you may be thinking that you can spin content really well and you’ll fool the system.  No, you really won’t.  I experimented with this because of course I didn’t believe it either.  Out of ten tries I got one article that actually passed the filter.  Quite frankly that success rate really isn’t worth the time, just write an original article or pay someone to do it.

The verdict on Build My Rank

Believe it or not, but the one downside to BMR is actually one of its best points.  Yes, you’ll have to do more work or pay someone to submit a quality article but that is actually why Build My Rank is so good.  The truth of the matter is that any review that you read before the Google Panda update is basically invalid anymore.  Google Panda hit a lot of sites with duplicate content hard and changed the landscape.  Because BMR doesn’t accept spun content it didn’t get hit by the big Panda bear.  And you can also expect that it won’t be hurt in the future by whatever updates Google does next.

I personally saw some good gains on keywords that I promoted with BMR.  Obviously it isn’t magic.  The gains that you’ll see will be largely dependent on your keyword, your competition, the number of articles you post, etc.  What I can guarantee though is that having a number of links to your site from high PR sites is a good thing and it will help your ranking.

But enough talk, I recommend that you try it out for yourself for free.  Build My Rank has a free trial that will give you 10 free links and will allow you to test out the interface yourself.  You have my word on it, now test it yourself for free.

In fairness, if you do like what you get from your free trial and continue to use Build My Rank, I do get a referral fee for your signup.  If you don’t like it and cancel the service, I get nothing.  I believe that you’ll like the service and you’ll want to keep using it.