Affiliate Marketing – The SMART Way

76 responses so far ↓

• 1 The Mad Scientist // Apr 26, 2011 at 2:24 pm

  Great post Chris,

  After looking through so many links and working on ActuallyRank.com couple with experience with my own sites – I have realized that PR is such an old and dying concept.

  Too many great sites are overlooked by those that focus so hard on PR instead of the real power in a page – backlinks & Content!

  Social marketing power is so much more important such as facebook likes etc.

  Like google video I can see PR going by the way of the DODO in the near future.

  Can’t wait to roll out the new UI for ActuallyRank.com

• 2 GoogleSlam // Apr 26, 2011 at 2:40 pm

  I realize that site relevance is a bit overrated, and complicated to judge, but if your programmers could somehow determine if a blog falls into a particular niche, that would be helpful. Such as “Tech, Shopping/Health/Legal/Misc (most blogs)/etc.”
  I also really like the foreign language blogs as it is easier to slip by with anchors that don’t look like anchors. I have a few clients in geo-specific drunk driving lawyer markets, and “Francois Dui” is easy to anchor
  It takes about 60 seconds using BabelFish.com to decipher the post and format a reply.
  Maybe a foreign language section for guys like me who see it?

• 3 Steve // Apr 26, 2011 at 2:44 pm

  Hi Chris

  Cant we keep PR alongside the new score? I would still want to see the PR of the page, do others agree?

  That being one of my 3, the other 2 would be amount of links to that page and domain age.

  Domain age was off the top of my head but think it would give a good all round idea of the quality of that drop.

  Would be great if we had all the above!

  Steve

• 4 Peter // Apr 26, 2011 at 2:47 pm

  I can’t think of anything you’ve missed right now.. it’s a pretty exhaustive list of factors and should give us a very useful indication of the quality of the backlink we’re going to get..

  Info I’d like to see next to each URL;

  1. Number of (external) backlinks to the page
  2. SEOmoz page authority
  3. When the page was cached by Google

  Thanks buddy..

• 5 Richard // Apr 26, 2011 at 2:54 pm

  Hey Chris,

  It’s refreshing to see someone actually investing so much time, energy and money into improving a product after the launch.

  I purchased based on the potential for this service long term, and am impressed by what I’m seeing so far.

  I definitely like the idea of the scoring system.

  It’s much better than just going by PR (especially when a lot of the high PR sites are older sites, that aren’t approving comments as quickly, if at all)

  My main issue is trying to maximize the time my outsourcers spend commenting on blogs that have the best chance of resulting in a live comment.

  One thing I would find useful (though don’t know how feasible it would be) is to have an indication of how recently there was a new post on a site in question, or how recent a comment was approved on the site etc.

  It doesn’t have to be the specific page listed, but if there was some way of determining this ‘activity’ for the overall domain, by looking at date tags or something (rather than just Google cache date which shows when Google crawled it)

  Then we could see which sites are more likely to get a comment approved, and focus on those first, rather than commenting on dead/abandoned blogs that will never get approved.

  Like I said, not sure how feasible that is, but I think just the new scoring system will be a big help.

  Thanks!

  Richard

• 6 Bruce // Apr 26, 2011 at 3:01 pm

  Chris,

  The numeric ranking system you are developing sounds great, please keep it simple. My 3 wishes….

  1. # of backlinks
  2 # date of last comment
  3 # what type – (commentluv, register to comment etc)

  On the interface, the stand alone database of urls will be HUGE for me, plus I’d really like a checkbox on the main url list where you could check off urls that you’ve accessed/commented. If it could be color coded or something to identify “good” or “not so good” that would be even better.

  I find I don’t use the “Project” feature much, so rapid identification of where I’ve been in the main list is more important.

  I’ve found that in the time it takes to examine all the attributes of a given url, (to decide to comment or not), I can just type up a comment regardless of the “quality” & chances are some will stick & still be better than bypassing the url completely.

  Am I on the right track here?

  ~Bruce

• 7 Abhik // Apr 26, 2011 at 3:09 pm

  Can’t say there’s anything I’d change or add to the list of awesome improvements you’ve described above. I particularly like your new scoring system as it’s far more valuable than PR.

  I would love to see the option added where we automatically know when a comment of ours in live and approved.

• 8 Pat // Apr 26, 2011 at 3:10 pm

  Hey Chris,

  It looks like you guys are actually covering a lot more ranking factors than I would have expected. I had suggestions in mind in terms of what factors to use, but you guys have them covered already. Ha!

  As for the 3 things I’d like to see next to each URL, they are as follows:

  1. Total links to page
  2. SEOMoz page authority
  3. PR can stay I guess. haha!

  The UI changes sound good. I’ll come back and post again if I think of other features.

  Thanks for updating the service so regularly!

  - Pat

• 9 James // Apr 26, 2011 at 3:19 pm

  Hi Chris,

  Are the data points above listed in weight order?

  In terms of what data points I’d like to see next to the URL. I suppose you should still include PR, especially if you are still advertising high PR links on your salespage. Trying to educate new customers on your new ranking algo may be difficult. So I’m sure they’d still like to see PR.

  I personally would rather not see the Google PR anymore, otherwise it could still be influencing people’s link choices.

  I would like to see:

  1. How many juicy backlinks to this page.
  2. How many outlinks from this page.
  3. How long ago was this page cached.

  I think those metrics would help me the most.
  But perhaps you could just list the 3 most heavily weighted data points in the algo?

  Maybe something for the future – perhaps you could list the data points in a drop down and we could choose the 3 we want to see within the UI?

  Also, when we export via CSV, perhaps all the data points could be shown, rather than just the 3 that are in the UI?

  Looking forward to May’s list

  Best
  James

• 10 Tom // Apr 26, 2011 at 3:22 pm

  Hey Chris,

  Thanks for the update. I think this will work out better than seeing PR rankings. Besides the score I would like to see #of outbound links and cache date. I think these two alone besides the overall score give someone a better idea of how good the link could be.

  - Tom

• 11 Ed // Apr 26, 2011 at 3:25 pm

  Are you planning on providing us with all the data are just showing us your score?

  PR certainly is not up to date but it is a pretty good indication that the page has some good inbound links, that the page is cached. If I look at the page rank distribution on my website I can certainly see a correlation between inbound links and page rank.

  It would be nice to be able to sort the URLs based on factors that we choose such as page rank or inbound links, number of comments and date of the last comment.

  For us end-users it’s really about getting the best value links without spamming as quick as possible.

• 12 Ken Edwards // Apr 26, 2011 at 3:25 pm

  @James
  “Maybe something for the future – perhaps you could list the data points in a drop down and we could choose the 3 we want to see within the UI?”
  Man, great idea.

  @Chris
  I like that idea from James as it allows us to do our own testing. Since we could sort on values, we could do 100 comments on the top SEZmoz Page Authority sites, 100 on the top delicous sites, extra, and see our approval rates.

• 13 Brian // Apr 26, 2011 at 3:31 pm

  Why does a custom score have to replace PageRank?

  Why can’t we have both numbers to evaluate a website?

• 14 David // Apr 26, 2011 at 3:32 pm

  Great work Chris and Dave,

  I have a question. Since the original guarantee for our monthly inventory was based on PR (400+ PR2, 3, and 4), how is that going to work now with the new scoring system?

• 15 Gary // Apr 26, 2011 at 3:35 pm

  I agree with Bruce regarding these statements:

  “On the interface, the stand alone database of urls will be HUGE for me, plus I’d really like a checkbox on the main url list where you could check off urls that you’ve accessed/commented. If it could be color coded or something to identify “good” or “not so good” that would be even better.”

  If you are outsourcing, this would make it significantly easier to check work done, etc.

  Thank you Chris for such a great system.

  I almost afraid to keep recommending it!

  Regards,

  Gary

• 16 Text Marketing // Apr 26, 2011 at 3:43 pm

  Hi Chris & co.

  I haven’t decided on what I really would like to see in regards to the link scoring system but when it comes to UI anything that will make it easier to outsource (like i.e a separate log in with less functionality – sub account for the outsourcer) would be a great plus. In addition to:

  * POSSIBLE: Scan Your URLs and See How Many Backlinks are Live. (This is in development).

  * Create Your Own Standalone Database of “Favorite Links”.

  Sincerely,
  Martin Mölsted

• 17 Bill // Apr 26, 2011 at 3:44 pm

  As a relative novice to all this, I’ll apologize if this appears simplistic.

  I feel my problems are basic and while all the technical description sounds nice, I don’t know if it will address the problems.

  1) The new UI will certainly help as the current one is a nightmare. I can’t track where I leave comments or which ones I’ve seen before, and trying to deal with groups of links (as opposed to the whole list of 1000′s is impossible, particulatly when the sort is different from day to day (they now appear in PR order again whic means I have to again figure out what I was working on). Having to create a CSv and try to manually match them up is too much extraneous work toward the objective of commenting.

  2) the quality of the links post phase 2 is terrible. As I try to attack a set I find a large percentage (> 33%) are not even in English. Of the remaining ones almost all are blogs that are 2-5 years old. I keep hearing that it is because they are high PR (e.g. 4 and above) but I was focusing on a set of only PR 0 and found no blog within 12 months of today’s date and most were 2007-2009 blogs. Certainly, since the comments have to be approved, the likelyhood of that occurring is very small.

  The end result is that I have to wade thru over 100 links, posting the bad links back to the site, going back to the list refreshing the list and finding my place just to get 1 blog to comment upon (assuming I’m intelligent enough to post on that blog).

  To my mind this is simply not worth the high monthly cost.

• 18 Mikael // Apr 26, 2011 at 3:50 pm

  I’m with James on the page cached date. I find that to be highly relevant.

  One question though…

  Why go all the way to 100? I can’t imagine any of them will score above 40 (based on the example you gave), so why not cap it at 40?

  /Mikael

  P.S. Looking forward to seeing what links are live.

• 19 Stephen Bolin // Apr 26, 2011 at 4:04 pm

  Thanks for your concern and caring to make Actual Rank better and better. This is a reflection of why I still love following you.

  Just 2 things.
  1) like mentioned above – it would be great to know if our comment was accepted

  2) Any way to only bring up sites that are current, and not 4 to 5 years old, with no real current posts? That has been my biggest time waster.

  Stephen

• 20 Sam Moore // Apr 26, 2011 at 4:33 pm

  Adding your own scoring system is OK, but PLEASE do NOT remove PageRank. I’ve heard all your talk about it’s downside, but serious marketers know it and understand it. Repeat, add your own scoring system, but do NOT remove PR.

• 21 Bruce Smeaton // Apr 26, 2011 at 4:48 pm

  @Mikael… “Why go all the way to 100?” It makes perfect sense to go to 100, regardless of the fact that there’s close to zero chance of ever linking back from a 60 ranked site, let alone a 100 ranked site.

  The reason being, Mikael, is that in order to put true value on the sites we CAN hope to link back from, it’s imperative to have a meaningful benchmark from which to work from.

  We ‘live, eat and breathe’ in a decimal-based number system, so having 100 as the supreme benchmark is logical, even though unattainable.

  It also helps us to realize that there are ‘authority sites’ and Authority Sites’… and AUTHORITY SITES…and then there’s the El Supremo A-U-T-H-O-R-I-T-Y S-I-T-E!!!!!!

  Each to their own, but for me at least Chris and the team are doing the right thing by using 100/100 as the standard scoring metric.

  Oh, and Chris, if you’re reading this, why not perfect this new-found scoring algo, build a WordPress Plugin around it, and I’ll help you market it…lol

• 22 Dennykkkkkkk // Apr 26, 2011 at 4:49 pm

  I would love to see the option added where we automatically know when a comment of ours in live and approved.

• 23 Michael // Apr 26, 2011 at 5:27 pm

  Hi Chris,

  Don’t have time for a survey at the moment, but I do have an opinion to register…

  If you are going to create a scoring system, you should show your score next to the reported PageRank from google… replacing one with the other is not a metric people will have complete trust in, but a metric in addition to Google’s would be value-added, in my opinion.

  Regardless of how PR is fluctuating and what value it may be thought to possess, or not, it is not a metric that I wish to completely dismiss when I take something into consideration, and I don’t think I’m alone in that matter.

  Sincerely,

  Michael

• 24 Craig // Apr 26, 2011 at 5:29 pm

  In addition to the excellent suggestions above, I’d like to see a date of the link as well. This would give us a quick picture of whether we’re looking at a 2008 link or a 2011 link. As an example, just for fun, I imported my entire inventory into Fast Blog Finder and ran a PR check, date of last activity check and a dofollow/nofollow check. The latter was actually very accurate for the 50 or so links I checked, as was the date of last activity.

• 25 Mark // Apr 26, 2011 at 6:32 pm

  Like the ideas for your scoring system. Makes sense to include the factors you have mentioned. Ultimately time will tell if this is accurate at all, but like you mention everything in the score is relative to everything else. I will very much prefer to have an easy to follow grading system for the worthiness of a url as I am currently using a scattergun approach for my linking. This would turn my scattergun into more of a precision assault weapon.

  Have you thought about how you might differentiate these lists for people on different pay plans?

  You have answered one of the suggestions important to me, which is the ability to export projects into a csv, but I would like to place another vote for some sort of indicator that details whether or not a link in your own account has been used before.

  Great stuff Chris.

• 26 JR // Apr 26, 2011 at 6:34 pm

  3 data points I would like to see:

  1. OpenSiteExplorer Page Authority
  2. OpenSiteExplorer Domain Authority
  3. # of comments

  As for the UI, I have several sites I want to promote. But I have different quality controls for each site I promote. So I go thru the listing and I take a look at the site and the type of comments others have left. If it’s quality I drop a link for one of my quality sites, if it’s kinda cheesy I drop a link to one of my buffer sites. But the way the projects are set up it doesn’t make it easy to assign a link to any of my domains at random. I would like to see maybe a drop down box with a list of my domains next to each comment site and assign it that way.

  I would also like a way to check back later and see which comments got approved without having to revisit every site I commented on. Maybe each day the system could go out and check to see if the links I assigned to one of my domains (but not yet verified) has the link on the page yet, and if so have an area that would say “26 Apr 2011 – xyz.com/page.html is now linking to mysite.com”.

• 27 admin // Apr 26, 2011 at 6:59 pm

  Thanks for all the feedback guys!

  Let’s keep it coming… I’ll have a followup post to follow shortly as well to register how we are going to progress based on your input here.

  SO PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT AND LEAVE YOUR INPUT.

  Thank you

  Chris Rempel

• 28 admin // Apr 26, 2011 at 7:03 pm

  Also – I’ll be back with some specific replies to comments shortly.

  Stay tuned

  -Chris

• 29 Henk // Apr 26, 2011 at 7:09 pm

  So far I have had lots of problems with this. I might be the way I use it.

  I agree with James and Bruce above with the additional data relating to the link.

  The current project feature is no good for my work. It needs some enhancement so I can work with the links better to know what’s happened with them.

  1) I outsource, but I don’t entirely trust the people who are doing the work so I can’t give them access to the whole system for fear that they will just steal all the links and use them for other clients. Is there a way to create projects and give subusers access to them?

  2) There needs to be better facilities to mark the links in the projects as not suitable, too old, comment in moderation, date link posted and comment accepted.

  I like to come back to them and see if they have stuck. There are two reasons for this; First I’m paying my outsourcers by the hour and by the link and the have a tendency to go for quantity over quality. The quality comment stick for the most part. Second – I also make some comments so I can see what is happening and it is good to get the experience as to what works so you can pass it on.

  3) If link relevance is of any value to the link, is there a way to sort them into the basic market niche. Eg, I’m trying to link to my GPS site and how does a link from a kids education site (even if PR 3) look natural / normal. I just draws flies in the long run.

  So far I’m exporting all the links to Excel, putting them into chunks, and then tracking action via Google Docs. This is OK.

  I’m also finding a lot of posts that are 2-3 years old (hard work to get a comment in there) and sites that are hard to post to because the are so off market for my niches.

  I’m still testing to see if it works at all. We need more evidence here.

  Hope that helps

• 30 Patrick // Apr 26, 2011 at 7:37 pm

  Chris,

  I like the direction of everything but I would particularly like to see this feature:
  Scan Your URLs and See How Many Backlinks are Live

  This would be a big timesaver and a big help.

  Thanks!!

• 31 Dwain // Apr 26, 2011 at 8:45 pm

  Looking forward to the upgrades.

  Observation:
  It seems to me that last week when I was going through some of the comments I made, I found pages I did not recognize. Is it possible that some pages were swapped out or added to projects when the last update took place?

• 32 admin // Apr 26, 2011 at 9:50 pm

  Hey guys,

  Some quick notes here…

  We will be displaying PR alongside the other data, beside each URL, so no worries.

  So we won’t be replacing the PR value, but our own scoring system WILL be replacing the arrangement of how URLs are displayed, since PR just isn’t a measurement of value.

  However…

  Starting June 1st, we will likely be changing our terms of service (and yes, we will be giving all current members PLENTY of warning and time to make a decision going forward) to reflect different ratios.

  Offering a percentage of URLs at a certain PageRank threshold might no longer be our marketing angle. Or if it is, it won’t be the central focus, like it is currently.

  Why?

  Because it’s contradictory if the real value isn’t directly connected to PR.

  Most likely, this will take the form of promising a percentage of PR alongside other factors, like number of inbound links to the URL, etc.

  Regardless, you will know well in advance as a current member before any changes like this take effect.

  Thanks guys

  -Chris

• 33 monamilar // Apr 26, 2011 at 10:15 pm

  Hi Chris,

  I agree with JR and most of the above comments. I would like to be able to mark where I am in in the batch of 2000 links so I know where I left off. It would be great to be able to list the links I’ve commented on and check the status of my comments. I would also like to see links grouped by industry or subject so I could focus on those links with authority for my area of interest.

  Thanks for all the work.

• 34 Ken Edwards // Apr 26, 2011 at 10:19 pm

  Looks good to me over all.

  For the top three, I would like to see a Social Score, Cache date, and SEMoz Page Authority.

  If we abandon PR as the primary indicator of “top pages”, then how will that effect the “top pages” that appear in our monthly mix.

  Right now, we have on the lowest level, 400 PR2 to PR7 pages. Does this remain going forward, or do we change to 400 pages with score of 20 – 60?

  Webmaster
  Shameless Plug
  THE Web’s Sleep Apnea Information Site!

• 35 Ken Edwards // Apr 26, 2011 at 10:21 pm

  Looks good to me.

  For the top three, I would like to see a Social Score, Cache date, and SEMoz Page Authority.

  If we abandon PR as the primary indicator of “top pages”, then how will that effect the “top pages” that appear in our monthly mix.

  Right now, we have on the lowest level, 400 PR2 to PR7 pages. Does this remain going forward, or do we change to 400 pages with score of 20 – 60?

  Webmaster
  Shameless Plug
  THE Web’s Sleep Apnea Information Site!
  I tried to put in an anchor, but this blog rejects any post with in it. Since Chris encourages us to do that elsewhere, seems he would allow it here. hehe

• 36 The home business ideas guy // Apr 26, 2011 at 11:42 pm

  Hi Chris, I have been having fun commenting and expressing my opinions on all sorts of sites. Not only have I seen my unique visitors go up but one comment even brought me 20+ visitors from one site…

  I’d like to see color coding on the urls so that I know what I’ve clicked. I don’t use the ‘new project’ – I just open links in new tabs and go from there.

  Also be good to know if a comment is live & approved too. Not essential but good to know. Particularly for all those wordpress sites that dump you on a blank page after you comment leaving you hoping your comment got through.

  Maybe too you could add a comment box under the choices on the ‘report bad link’ page (or more options) because there’s not quite enough options on there yet for some of the stuff we come across.

  The thing with me is that I just do my commenting as quick as I can. I don’t do Pages or Quantcast, I just spend time on writing a good comment.

  If you are *not* already an Actually Rank member here’s a blog post I wrote about seeing a nice ‘gentle’ (and natural) increase in my unique visitors…

  http://www.homebusinesscreative.com/backlinking/can-actuallyrank-help-you-actually-rank-or-are-high-pr-do-follow-back-links-just-a-surfers-pipe-dream/

  Also maybe we should just have one complete, simplified page specifically for out-sourcers. They could read that page and know exactly what they need to do next, and how to do it.

  I’ve been pretty impressed so far Chris (and team) – what I’ve been able to do comment wise would have literally taken me hours and hours to do otherwise.

  It’ll also be good to know ‘your scoring’ (the ActuallyRank Page Rank – ARPR) because then I will know how worthwhile it is to go through all those PR0 and PR1s I’ve barely touched so far!

  Thanks for the great opportunity….
  Martin

• 37 Bachblüten // Apr 27, 2011 at 1:16 am

  For the top 3 :
  # backlinks
  # outlinks
  SEOMoz page authority

  In addition :
  * a tool to see how many backlinks are live.
  * a tool to create your own database of favorite links.
  * a possibility to choose for non-English blogs

  Thanks!!

• 38 Steven // Apr 27, 2011 at 3:26 am

  The factors I’d like to see in addition to your scoring are:

  1. Back links to the page.
  2. Back links to the domain.
  3. Title tag.

  I think it’s important not to over-analyse all this data, but to get on with things. Scraping the title tag is going to give some sense of relevance and there may be some sites where I can actually use the blog post to drive traffic and engage in the conversation. There is a real world of actually engaging in blog commenting – like this one!

  Relevance will become more important in the long term too and I view this as a long term tool.

  Can you let us know if your own score is on an exponential scale like PR or is it linear?

  Ultimately it would be nice to have some sort of reporting of live links to measure performance, but not at the risk of creating any sort of footprint. If I need to do this sort of naval gazing, I can always organise it myself, but I prefer to do something more productive.

• 39 kenneth // Apr 27, 2011 at 4:28 am

  I think most of the ideas above are good, my main wants are:-
  some way to sort/mark which comments I have used;
  a way to check which comments have gone live;
  the age of the blog page;
  when was the last comment/post on the page/domain;
  which are non-english blogs/pages;
  some way to sort relevance/niche/category of the pages/blogs;

  Overall I have seen an upwards trend on the traffic on my main site that I have been backlinking since I started using this service. But somedays it can get frustrating going through 10 blogs to find 1 to post a link that might stick or I feel able to comment on. A lot seem to be too old or abandoned blogs or really technical or political blogs and have come across some religious ones.
  More recent pages on non religious/technical/political blogs would be better.
  Ken

• 40 Steve Hards // Apr 27, 2011 at 6:20 am

  I’m with Martin and Gary above in that I’d like “a checkbox on the main url list where you could check off urls that you’ve accessed/commented. If it could be color coded or something to identify “good” or “not so good” that would be even better.”

  I’m not really too bothered about how ‘good’ the urls are – if I can find a way to comment on one that has made it through your selection process, it’s good for me!

  Agree about need to have a comment box or more options when reporting ‘bad’ links.

• 41 Ken Edwards // Apr 27, 2011 at 6:22 am

  Sorry for the duplicate posts?? It seemed to not go, so I did it again. -shrugh- @Chris, delete the duplicate if you want.

  @Henk
  “I’m also finding a lot of posts that are 2-3 years old (hard work to get a comment in there) and sites that are hard to post to because the are so off market for my niches. ”

  I am finding that my girls are getting between 25 and 30 percent approval of the actual posts made on the PR2 to PR5 sites after a one week wait to check. And of course most of those are the 2-3 year old pages. Newer posts may have a higher success rate. So I am actually looking forward to the new ranking system.

• 42 Shawn // Apr 27, 2011 at 9:12 am

  Looks like quite a few people are still stuck on PR

  Anyway, here’s what I’d like to see if I had to choose:

  1) SEOmoz page authority
  2) SEOmoz domain authority
  3) cache date

  I also like these:

  4) The seoMoz Page Authority of the top 3 internal *juicy* links in? (more useful than # of internal backlinks data point)
  5) How many backlinks to the domain base (more useful than external backlinks to a page, since in most cases there will be very few)
  6) Does this page rank in the top 10 for the 1st 3 words in their title? (not including site.com) – a great measure of page strength!

  Not sure these will be very useful:

  1) How many outlinks from this page? (there are some very powerful blogs that link out to other sites via their Blogroll, etc). Now if you could show “number of existing comments”, that would be incredible!

  2) Dmoz listing (becoming somewhat archaic)
  3) Yahoo Directory listing (becoming somewhat archaic)

  Thanks for all of your efforts here! This is quickly becoming one of the most valuable link-building resources out there… let’s keep it quiet

• 43 Jerry // Apr 27, 2011 at 10:55 am

  Chris, whenever I come to this blog I feel totally clueless so I won’t be commenting on this post specifically. However, I did want to take this opportunity to let you know that I have slowly been building links for 2 of my (AffGenie!) sites for the last few weeks. Traffic at one sit is up 30+%, the other 106%! Clueless or not, I want to say “Thanks” for your efforts on my behalf.

• 44 Brian // Apr 27, 2011 at 11:04 am

  Hi Chris,

  Thanks to you and your team for continually trying to improve…it keeps getting better.

  I like your approach to the Link Scoring but I would still like to see the PR displayed.

  The top 3:
  1. Total links to page
  2. Page Authority
  3. Date of Last Comment

  Regarding the interface:
  1. I find that I lose my place easily and would like to see some sort of marker identifying the site that I am currently working with
  2. I often want to make notes or comments to myself concerning the site/comment, for future reference
  3. We should be able to offer an explanation for the Bad Link, if we have one

  Thanks again,

  Brian

• 45 Cricket Tips // Apr 27, 2011 at 3:07 pm

  Chris,

  Thanks for taking time to consider all this feedback. The things I would like to see include the following:

  1 – Export all variables to Excel for offline analysis – Excel is much better for managing link building projects than the current tool. For the current project tool to be a viable alternative, we need at minimum to be able to flag and comment on the urls visited (e.g. check off those which have been commented on / not appropriate etc – as per comment #29).

  2 – Automatically check if link has gone live.

  3 – A ranking tracker would be a very useful feature to monitor positions against target keywords in the search engines.

  Cheers,

  Ian

• 46 Stephen // Apr 27, 2011 at 4:48 pm

  I love all the new features you’ve mentioned Chris, I think those will help a lot.

  The one thing I’d really like to see is a column in AR for “posting success rate”. For example when we as members make a post then we can (should) click a radio button or something next to the link within AR that say’s “did your comment get posted?” and then we can select YES, NO or WAITING FOR MODERATION. This way we as members can skip pages we can see other members have said are not posting correctly and save ourselves a lot of wasted time on blog posts that are not going to work for us.

  I know we kind of have that now in that your guys get notified to take a look at problem links, but I’d like to see those results up front and in semi real time if possible.

  Thanks,

  Stephen

• 47 Brett // Apr 27, 2011 at 5:06 pm

  Hi Chris – Have to say I’m still getting amazing results from using AR – I’m very pleased. On my wish list? Well – each day I just go into AR and do 5-10 comments and then logout. But the hardest thing I find is finding where I last left off. I know I can go find it by looking in a project – but it would be great and save time hunting around if each link was numbered ie 1-2000 etc. At least you could record for later which one to come back to. Ultimately, some form of notation or tagging would be useful beside each link. Other than that – I’m REAL happy. Brett

• 48 admin // Apr 27, 2011 at 11:16 pm

  Thanks so much guys, this is awesome feedback.

  I’ll have an update for you ASAP on all of this.

  Right now we are gearing up for the May 1st refresh.

  -Chris

• 49 Cindy // Apr 28, 2011 at 2:06 am

  Everything looks great for the new score system, Chris. Keep the PR and add whatever you guys want!

  For the interface:

  Please keep the “new project” feature…however I need some kind of coded color from the main list that shows in which project I added that url.

  The possibility of know the “status’” of the url after posting. Something like “approved” “awaiting moderation”, “deleted”

  The possibility of exporting only the approved url’s to build our own inventory

  Regards,

  Cindy

• 50 Mike // Apr 28, 2011 at 10:28 am

  I’m having a real hard time getting my posts to stick. When I submit a comment, it doesn’t show up or I get sent off to a blank white page.

• 51 admin // Apr 28, 2011 at 7:40 pm

  Hi Mike

  This sounds like an Askimet issue…

  Try two things:

  1) Go to Proxify.com and visit the blog URLs from there, and post a comment. If it works, then it means Askimet may have temporarily locked out your IP address.

  Solution? Short term, you can probably just reset your modem and router, to generate a new IP address (depending on how your ISP issues your IP address)

  Long term – you can use different proxies in your browser, either by pulling from free proxy lists or by using a service like ProxyBonanza.com

  2) Try submitting a comment with NO url whatsoever.

  If it works – then the domain you are backlinking for has been temporarily blocked in Askimet.

  You will want to go to http://akismet.com/contact/

  And request for your URL to be “unlocked”.

  I’m doing a detailed mailing on this shortly, since a handful of others are experiencing the same thing.

  -Chris

• 52 Shaun // Apr 29, 2011 at 12:00 pm

  From one Shaun to another [albeit it spelled incorrectly ] Shawn

  “1) How many outlinks from this page? (there are some very powerful blogs that link out to other sites via their Blogroll, etc). Now if you could show “number of existing comments”, that would be incredible!”

  This is very important actually .. the reason being is that there is so much outgoing juice a page has.

  So if for example you have 100 juice points per page, if you have 5 links each link will scoop up 25 juice points. But if there are say 50 links on the page, your juice per link is reduced to 5 juice points.

  So obviously the less links out the better the value of the link. Plus it allows to assume a couple things.

  0 links outside the domain = chances are leaving a comment won’t approve/work if the post isn’t brand new

  30 or more links would most likely mean this is a spam target.

  Isolating comments rather than just pure links is important, I agree, however it’s much easier said that done in an automated, simply because of the number of platforms out there to account for.

  “2) Dmoz listing (becoming somewhat archaic)”

  The fact that it’s archaic is what gives it value. It’s hard – if not impossible – for a newer site to get into DMOZ, so having a site in DMOZ shows that it’s been ‘around the block, and Google rewards sites that have been there and done that…

• 53 Kendrick // Apr 30, 2011 at 12:47 pm

  Wow. Great ideas to move this forward from Chris and from all the postings above. I don’t have anything productive to suggest, but I did want to take the time to thank EVERYONE here for helping to make this system even better going forward.

  I have to say, I have experienced some frustrations in trying to find ‘good’ links that stick, and haven’t been very diligent in using AR on a regular basis. But between the successes I’m reading about here and knowing that Chris and Crew will only make it better… I’m not going anywhere anytime soon (except UP in the SERPs!)

  Thanks all!

  Kendrick

• 54 Rebecca Wolf // Apr 30, 2011 at 1:19 pm

  Hey Chris, I know this is a long shot but it’d be SO helpful if there were some way to search for sites based on keywords or even have sites in broad categories like: pets, real estate, etc. My biggest challenge is finding sites that are somewhat related to the pages I am trying to optimize. Thanks for listening!

• 55 Leah // Apr 30, 2011 at 10:07 pm

  What are Extreme Curator Sites?

  *MAKO Dominator Authority Niche Sites full of curated content strategically linked to well-endowed Affiliate Genie Money Sites that Actually-Rank, contextually speaking of course.

  Join MAKO Tribes & Get Inspired All Over Again. Just Click My Name. It’s FREE!

  *I used osmosis to replicate The Lazy Marketer mindset. Oh dear, Chris! What have I done? Now I see “ECS” written all over your future!!

• 56 Mike // Apr 30, 2011 at 10:21 pm

  I use static ips. I’ll contact them.

• 57 Robert // May 1, 2011 at 6:30 am

  A 100 point scoring system should have a -100 point score if the page says “Comments Closed”. Why do comments closed pages even appear on our lists?

• 58 Rich // May 1, 2011 at 8:44 am

  Hi Chris

  Can’t wait for this to be rolled out.

  It would be good to see No of existing comments + date of last.
  Also it would be good id we could flag links in the main list to show which ones we have already visited.

  Rich

• 59 Ed // May 1, 2011 at 11:37 am

  Hello Chris

  On a side note I see the several of these sites allowed dofollow on TrackBacks,I would think that we could also use this to our advantage to get some nice deep links in our blogs.

  Maybe a quick little tutorial on how to do this effectively would be a good idea.

• 60 Richard Hargreaves // May 1, 2011 at 12:18 pm

  Hi Chris

  In an email I just got from you it says…

  “Going forward, our archiving system is going to be based on user-compiled “URL Favorites”, which will come online with the new interface in roughly 10 – 15 days. We are discontinuing the current Archive structure in the new system to prevent abuse, protect existing backlinks built by members, and to prevent server slowdown.”

  Does this mean we will no longer be able to export the complete URL lists as excel spreadsheets?

  Or will access to complete lists for download still be available in the archives in the current month?
  ie. Will your new archiving system only prevent access to the complete lists when the next months list becomes available?

  Being able to export the complete lists is important to me, because I don’t allow my outsourcers to access my control panel…I send them their lists as excel spreadsheets to work from.

  Can you please clarify whether I’ll still be able to send my outsource workers excel spreadsheets of the complete URL lists.

  Thanks.

  -Richard

• 61 Greg // May 1, 2011 at 5:01 pm

  Hi Chris,

  I would like to see less false positives in the list as it seems to waste a lot of time just trying find the blogs where there are easy comments.

  Some pages have no comments, some no recent comments and others no comments on the page with the PR.

  The other changes sound good though.

• 62 Angela // May 2, 2011 at 7:29 pm

  Actually I missed out on the launch and now I’m eagerly waiting for it to reopen… I hope it’ll be soon! Been waiting for the notification email. Chris, hope you can let in a few more spots soon!

• 63 Alex // May 2, 2011 at 10:53 pm

  Yeah me too, hopeful that AR will be reopened but not very optimistic though.

• 64 admin // May 3, 2011 at 4:57 pm

  Hi Richard

  Yes – you’ll always be able to export your inventory.

  More on this very shortly.

  Thx

  Chris

• 65 Bence // May 9, 2011 at 4:04 am

  I would suggest to use the Majestic SEO API instead, not the SEOmoz API. Because Majestic SEO has a much larger index, therefore their data is more accurate and fresher.

• 66 Ed // May 9, 2011 at 1:30 pm

  “You will want to go to http://akismet.com/contact/

  And request for your URL to be “unlocked”.

  I’m doing a detailed mailing on this shortly, since a handful of others are experiencing the same thing.”

  any update on this?

• 67 Gunnar // May 13, 2011 at 4:45 am

  Waiting for Actually Rank to open up for new members again. Hopefully in time for me to get in with all the kinks worked out of the system.

• 68 Emmitt // May 18, 2011 at 7:23 pm

  Per your advice, I am rotating my name, email address, and url when I am leaving comments. I notice immediately that I have a higher rate of posted comments. Is it likely that akismet will catch on to this approach?

• 69 Stephen // May 21, 2011 at 5:18 pm

  I’m trying out the new ranking system in AR and am loving the changes! Now I can tell the true difference between a high quality link compared to a so-so link.

• 70 Lorne // Jun 1, 2011 at 11:53 am

  Clearly identify (or remove) links that require payment before posting a comment.

  One high PR in last month’s batch wanted $69 for their newsletter subscription before anybody could post. After digging around, the posts that were already there had no backlinks.

  So either all posters didn’t bother to make backlinks or backlinks were not allowed AFTER they paid $69 for their subscription.

• 71 Adrian McCluskey // Jun 2, 2011 at 5:10 am

  Hi Chris,
  Just wanted to echo an earlier comment that if it’s possible, being able to determine which of our comments are accepted and live would be of great benefit.

  Love the program and results have been great.
  cheers

• 72 PAT // Jun 14, 2011 at 6:36 am

  Hey everybody,

  Can Anyone tell me why the AR-Ratings are shown in different colors (black, green and blue)

  Maybe it was alrweady explained somewhere but I seemed to have misswed it

  Thanks

• 73 Boatrod // Jun 14, 2011 at 9:38 am

  I tell you what…setting aside the whole scoring set up if I could….I’d like really like to see offer some kind of ‘we do it for you’ type service for an additional fee. With your ranking now set up you would be able to offer a price for each quality of link that gets approved.

  I’ve outsourced posting comments and I’m finding getting approved comments is getting expensive because they’re still hard to get. I’m sure it would be cheaper to just pay you guys to do it.

  Doing so would force your team to make sure they find and add new URLs that THEY will be able to get approved comments on and .

• 74 Shaun // Jun 16, 2011 at 10:31 am

  The colors are different so that you visually you can see the best targets faster.

  Green = great
  Black = good
  Blue = ok

  And for those interested in the “full” version of the page juice calculator that AR is using, it’s now available here:
  http://www.pagejuicecalculator.com

  (note: I’m the developer)

  It’s just been updated to include even more variance between urls, this will be reflected in the next update for the AR urls. It will now be even easier to rank these urls!

  The full version will give you access to the full data set, so you can sort/filter on your own if you wish.

• 75 Franklin // Jun 20, 2011 at 6:51 pm

  Hey Chris, new to this. I am just glad that there is a system like this one and people to sort these out. With the page rank deal, I been checking the url’s with SEOQuake and noticed that it helps to check the PR. With my one and only PR6, I checked it and it was a PR-0 and I think that might be incorrect. Other than that, great stuff and good job.

• 76 DR Guitar Strings // Oct 13, 2011 at 9:12 am

  I don’t think that PR is going to “die” anytime soon. However, I do think that Google will very soon be changing the way in which a page is ranked, thus making it much more relevant for the future.

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