Matthew Woodward - Tried & Tested SEO

UPDATE: As predicted, the network was fully deindexed on March 24th less than 2 months after it launched.

If you have anything to do with SEO it is likely you have had an email pop in to your inbox about SEO Link Monster in the past few days. It seems like every man and his dog is blindly promoting it even John Chow can’t help himself.

I had considered doing a full case study for SEO Link Monster but I quickly decided against it.

I wanted to take some time to write about what SEO Link Monster actually is, precisely why you should avoid buying it, explore why people are promoting it so hard and suggest better proven alternatives. Heck, I’m not even going to link to it.

What Is SEO Link Monster?

Well to be honest its not actually clear what SEO Link Monster actually is from their sales material. As far as they are concerned it is a Monster Of A System That Can Literally Guarantee Higher Google Rankings.

Having a browse around a few forums it turns out the SEO Link Monster is essentially a network of 5,000 websites with a page rank of 1-4. It costs $47 for the first month and then $147 a month after that.

So what do you actually get for your money? $147 per month will allow you to submit 14 blog posts to the network per day with up to 3 links. On the surface that doesn’t seem to poorly priced if I’m honest. However there is a lot more to consider than that.

Why Is Everyone Promoting It?

The reason everyone is promoting it so hard is simple, money. Take a look at the joint venture page, here are the most interesting bits though-

They are giving away $36,000 in their prelaunch contest which is split between the top 10 affiliates. The number 1 affiliate will get $20,000 of that pot!

As well as that each customer can generate up to $255 per sale plus a minimum of $59.97 in monthly recurring commissions. So that means in the first month you can earn $313 plus $59.97 per month for the lifetime of the customer.

So if you’re wondering why everyone is so desperate to shove it down your throat at the moment, that’s why. It’s all about the money.

So What’s Wrong With It?

First of all SEO Link Monster was created by Brad Callen who is responsible for some decent software based products. However he is also the guy behind SEOLinkVine which was popular a while back. That network just flat out didn’t perform and took a lot of heat from a lot of people in various forums.

Brad Callen is also the brother of Matt Callen who runs the MyArticleNetwork which has about 10,000 blogs in it. I used to have some great results with that network a couple years back but it has lost its traction in recent times unfortunately.

You have to ask the question, how many domains have been reused from previous networks to fuel SEO Link Monster?

It Is Setup To Fail

The problem with launching a link network on this scale is it is going to attract a lot of attention from Google. It’s no secret that Google has a dislike for link networks and does their best to find and eliminate them.

On the TrafficPlanet forum it was mentioned that Brad already had 17,000 opt ins for the product. Let’s assume that 10,000 people (and that’s a low ball given the likes of John Chow are promoting this) sign up to the network of 5,000 domains. Each of those people can submit 14 posts a day.

So that means the network of domains suddenly start receiving up to 140,000 posts every single day with up to 420,000 links. That’s a huge strain for any network of sites to take.

If I’m honest I think that 10,000 users is a very low estimate and the actual number of users is much greater although I can’t confirm that.

On top of that this kind of launch that has been promoted so hard will have every newbie around the world drooling on their keyboards dreaming of making millions overnight. They will be huge volumes of users submitting poorly spun content. From what I can understand there is no moderation of the posts going out to the network. This leaves it hugely vulnerable in my opinion.

It was also mentioned on TrafficPlanet that the spinning functionality isn’t random at all. If you have {word 1|word 2|word 3} {phrase 1|phrase 2|phrase 3} it will only spin out to Word 1 Phrase 1, Word 2 Phrase 2 and Word 3 Phrase 3.

Why You Should Avoid It Like The Plague

This network will get caught and deindexed by Google in the coming months. Although the pretty graphics and fancy video are appealing it just isn’t worth been part of. What if you have 500 hundred of those sites linking to your money site and Google comes along and slaps the lot?

Not only will that erase your rankings over night but it could result in the deindexation of your site as well.

Actually, It Does Have One Use…

The only thing you should do with SEO Link Monster is send an E-mail to your competitors telling them how good SEO Link Monster is and how your getting great results with it. Make sure you include your affiliate link with your E-mail. Other than that it is worthless.

What Do You Think Of SEO Link Monster?

It would be interesting to see what other people think of SEO Link Monster especially if you run your own high PR network of sites. If you have bought it please let us know how well it performs, personally I don’t think it is even worth a case study.