Sept 6 Update: Case study of AMR VS UAW VS linkamotion VS Article Samurai

[Natlex]

Hey guys, for a while now I've been debating if UAW is worth keeping for those who have AMR (one time fee). Uaw is really expensive at $67/month or so and obviously I, and many of you that use both, can save a lot of money if AMR is enough. I decided I might as well compare it to other services that are newer and that I haven't had the time to try on my current $ domains too.

So, with that in mind I decided to register 5 domains that all contain my keyword+5 random words such as info/blog/guide/review/hq.

All 5 domains will rank for 2 keywords in their domain name which are KW1 + KW2 (which is only an "s" added at the end of KW1, the plural).

I also gave them all an inner page that will contain a KW3 in the title, in the "alt" of an image and 3 times (not more or less) in the text. While I do not mention KW4, I will be promoting it with backlinks to this page. The article is 500 words on all of these 5 domains.

Domain 1 + page 1 UAW
Domain 2 + page 2 AMR testing
Domain 3 + page 3 UAW + AMR testing
Domain 4 + page 4 linkamotion (only 1 link per article, so half will be to the domain and the other half to the inner page)
Domain 5 + page 5 Article Samurai! Currently in beta, this is basically like AMR and was made by the developers of market samurai. Since I am in the beta (which is sadly ending in a week), I decided to quickly send an article to be syndicated across their article/blog network to compare with AMR and also it will be a good indicator for me if it's worth buying when it comes out...

So, KW1/Kw2 to the domain and KW3/4 to an inner page on each domain with a similar image/keyword density (of only KW3).

The domains are 2 months old by now so they should not be too young to start linking to (I usually wait 3 months before I use automation/article distribution services).

Today I started the article samurai and linkamotion syndication ( I wanted to get article samurai done since the beta is ending soon). Tomorrow I will do UAW/AMR and UAW + AMR.

Right now, none of the websites are ranking in the top 200 for any keyword, despite them all having 5 or 6 articles for at least a month. So, these are not keywords that will rank by themselves without any backlink!

Let me know if you guys have any questions or clarifications or tips on other things I should consider to make things as equal as possible!

I might reveal the domains in a month or so, not too sure. Btw, 4 of them are .info. The linkamotion one is a .net. I doubt theirs much a difference between .info or .net but JUST IN CASE I wanted to have a non .info in this test. Also, Linkamotion is not the same as the other services + I was really interested on seeing if the service works or not in this case, not really to compare it with others since it's an entirely private blog network.

Sept 6 UPDATE:
Ok here's week 6 update. I think I will start compiling the pingbacks this week and sending links to the backlinks now and try to get them all indexed.

AMR and UAW results:



AMR only results, lost a bit of rankings this week, google dance maybe?


Article Samura results, starting to rank well but only the inner page, a bit odd.



UAW only



Linkamotion:





So all sites are ranking right now at least, some might be in the middle of small Google Dances.

[RevSEO]

Sweet! I actually haven't heard of a few of your link solutions that you are using and I look forward to seeing the results.

I've used AMR & UAW and am pretty familiar with them, but I'll let you post your own experiences with those to. I appreciate all of these sort of case study posts, especially when I haven't used them!

[Natlex]

Originally Posted by RevSEO

I've used AMR & UAW and am pretty familiar with them, but I'll let you post your own experiences with those to. I appreciate all of these sort of case study posts, especially when I haven't used them!

I used both AMR and UAW to good results, but since they have a lot of overlap in terms of article directories they probably both submit to I'm hoping to see if keeping my UAW subscription is worth it over only using AMR. Basically, the UAW+ AMR domain should be pulling ahead of the one using only AMR and the one only using UAW for me to keep it .

[Althaf Ahmed]

Keep us updated, as I am curious too. UAW is expensive I agree.

[jpizzle]

I am currently running a test with AMR as well. I've been reading all these threads on how article marketing is dead. I want to find out for myself how effective AMR and article marketing is. Keep us posted on the case study. I think I may start one as well.

[freddylan]

good case study, i am using UAW at the moment and i was thinking to buy AMR.
keep it update
all the best

[JamesE3]

Looks like a good case study. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about Article Samurai.

[idreesfarooq]

Ambitious project and keep updated. I have just bought AMR and really want to see results.

[Natlex]

Ok all the articles are submitted for all domains. For UAW/AMR/article samurai each domain got one article with 2 levels of spun syntax (title,body and ressource box). The linkamotion domain has about 100 articles Q'd for it and should be drip fed at a rate of 5 per day (each article is only 1 link unlike the first 3 article distribution services which each contain 2)..

Looking foward to the results ! So far all domains are not in the top 100 for any of the 4 keywords.

[higherstate]

Hey Natlex, really interested to see the results, thanks for documenting for us all.

I just tested AMR but was waiting for the article samurai launch. As you have been in beta for it for a while, what are your initial impressions comparing it to AMR?

Not sure which to go for at the moment.

[MastrGrdnr]

For those of you who are currently using the above tools and have been for a while, is all of this (the thousands of back links this is supposed to generate) holding up with the new Big G algo change?

[eco]

Thanks for doing this case study. I'm looking for a good article submission service so I'm keen to see the results.

What are your initial thoughts about Article Samurai? Does the content spinner produce good (intelligible) results?

[Natlex]

Well I just bought article samurai. Damn it's expensive.. $100/month for beta users and it will apparently be higher for others. Anyway, I was seeing a bit of movement after only 1-2 weeks and I decided to try it for more of my main websites and because I wanted to be sure the article is going to be properly syndicated for the test domain.

I'll probably submit a second article to all services in 2-3 weeks or so (by then it should be done being drip fed with all services for the first article).

I'm really happy I had these domains waiting for a test.. I really hope article samurai beats everything at the expensive monthly price it's at...

For those of you who are currently using the above tools and have been for a while, is all of this (the thousands of back links this is supposed to generate) holding up with the new Big G algo change?

I do see more flutuations in rankings now then before the panda update in February but since 80%+ of my links are from blog networks and article directories and my income is relatively stable and has slowly increased since March, ya I think it's fine. I think some of the fluctuations are when some networks lose power (I think BMR is getting weaker... my keywords that were only promoted with it seem to always lose their ranking over time)

What are your initial thoughts about Article Samurai? Does the content spinner produce good (intelligible) results?

I did not use the content spinner, I still just use the best spinner and my articles were already ready with spin syntax so all I did was create some ressource boxes. Article samurai does come with 50 "tokens" for content boss automatic spinning, I'll see how effective it is, but I doubt it can be much better then just doing a auto spin "best" on TBS.

[John34]

This is interested case study, i signed up to your thread. Are you using any other form of link building other than article submission to these networks?

I wanted to sign up for Article Samurai today, but looks like they have been sold out. I hope they will open again soon.

[resshin]

already bookmarked!! I really loved to read a case study like this..

[olamilekan2]

Looking forward to the results of your testing.

[bluenetworx]

Sounds cool, I'm looking at Article Samurai now myself, as the number of links does look enticing, but whether they work or not is another question

Look forward to seeing the results you get

[110ben]

Hey Natlex
Excellent work
I agree with your comments about the spinner in article samurai, it is not good.Personally i much prefer tbs and i was wondering if you know whether i could drop a syntax ready article into article samurai instead of using their awful spinner.
Rgds
Ben

[seobirk]

this actually looks really great.. as a Market Samurai user I was keen on purchasing Article Samurai and UAW to combine them into my SEO services, however the background of both is relatively foggy lately

thanks you very much for doing this mate, will keep a close eye on this thread

[glennforum]

This is a great initiative to test different content development techniques and how they fare post-panda, please do keep us posted for any changes especially now that Google Panda is still updating its versions.

[dmswans]

You can use pre spun articles by the best spinner or any other spinner using the import feature of Article Samurai

[EmilyRoseSanders]

Article Samurai sounds too expensive - it would take you forever to make back your money, unless you have thousands of sites to rank and/or lots of clients to pass the cost onto.

Regarding how has this type of backlinking fared since teh panda updates - I've used both AMR and Article Ranks. Article Ranks produces better results, but in my opinion you can get good results whichever network you use - as long as you really go to town with the spinning. The more unique the articles you produce, the better chance of them staying indexed

[OpticalOut]

Originally Posted by EmilyRoseSanders

Article Samurai sounds too expensive - it would take you forever to make back your money, unless you have thousands of sites to rank and/or lots of clients to pass the cost onto.

Lol, what are you charging clients? $10 per month?

If you were using that service for clients, it would only take one or maybe two to justify it's cost.

[Natlex]

Originally Posted by EmilyRoseSanders

Article Samurai sounds too expensive - it would take you forever to make back your money, unless you have thousands of sites to rank and/or lots of clients to pass the cost onto.

Regarding how has this type of backlinking fared since teh panda updates - I've used both AMR and Article Ranks. Article Ranks produces better results, but in my opinion you can get good results whichever network you use - as long as you really go to town with the spinning. The more unique the articles you produce, the better chance of them staying indexed

Yup I agree, Article ranks works really well for me and that is why I did not even include it in this study. The initial goal of this was to see if UAW was worth keeping when you have AMR (one time cost).

Since I had bought 5 domains and after the 2 month period passed I ended up discovering Linkamotion and article samurai, I decided to use those on the extra 2 domains I had.

[jacked]

Great thread, really looking forward to the results. Any updates?

[Nero Arcnumé]

Very interesting thread. As someone new to this, it's easy to get lost in all of the tools that are out there. So when the time comes for me to decide which tools to buy, it's comparison threads like this that really help in making a decision!

[Natlex]

Originally Posted by jacked

Great thread, really looking forward to the results. Any updates?

It's Sunday so it might be a good time to do updates.

I checked all the rankings and so far only the one that I only used AMR on has breached the top 100

I uploaded an image for this one, for those wondering:
KW #4 is 49
Kw #3 is 50
KW #1 is 69
KW #2 is 70


Since AMR has no "pending review" submission time besides on each individuals article directory discretion I guess that might explain why it is the first to show results and break the top #100. The article samurai keyword for this category was done syndicating after 2 days... I'll probably try to submit a category around the same topic but that might fit in another category that hopefully will take longer to syndicate. One category on AS has been syndicating for 6 days now! Not sure if the longer time = more submissions or AS simply allots a random syndication time but it's definitely something to test.

Off topic for this case study but the article that took 6 days to syndicate is showing increase in rankings so far (NOT RELATED TO THIS NICHE NOR THESE DOMAINS, just an article samurai observation since many people are wondering about it !!!)

[vapsjee]

Great thread! Keep us updated. I'd like to see the results with UAW as i haven't used it myself and dont have a clue about it.

[kaedus]

A similar study has been done that can be viewed here:
Final Results: UAW vs AMA vs AR vs FTS vs SEOLV vs SYA | Marketer's Center Blog

It will be interesting to compare your study with this one.

[rachs]

good case study bud.

+1 after you past some weeks and updates

[amleeco]

Great! I was shut out of the article samurai purchase when it came out last week. Looking forward to your results!

+1

[BLSquared]

Hey Natlex,

I was able to get in on Article Samurai as well. One thing I discovered however which should put a small twist in your study is that UAW is one of the networks included in Article Samurai. The reason I found out was because one of the many articles I submitted got rejected and in the notes of the rejection notice was a help file that was on the the UAW website. It appears it was created and returned back by a reviewer from UAW. It appears that they can distinguish between direct UAW subscribers and those submitting through AS as I couldn't access the help file because I don't have a direct UAW account.

Many people seemed to have been confused by Article Samurai because Noble included some of the tools that are in Market Samurai in the interface. Essentially Article Samurai is a software that allows you to submit articles to multiple well known Authority Directory and Blog Networks that people are already paying monthly subscriptions to like UAW. So far UAW can be confirmed to be a part of this. That's $67 month out of the $97/month already. I'm certain as time passes we'll discover some of the other well known Blog Networks that are part of Article Samurai and will likely see that we are getting access to these networks a substantial discount over what direct subscribers are paying. Hence, why these networks would not want this info public and why Noble didn't announce them.

For those using Article Ranks, have you looked at your distribution counts lately. When I started with AR I used to get an average distribution of about 115 blogs per article and at the time I wasn't even aware you could select multiple subcategories within a category at no additional cost. My highest distribution now is just under 30 and everything else is archived. Not to mention they also slapped on the now 10 domain limit (after people were so furious about the initial 5 domain limit). I'll be dropping them and BuildMyRank to use AS for a while and see how that goes.

As everyone else mentioned, the spinning component could use some improvement but its really not that big a deal. The key is how wide of a distribution we get with the article. How well an article is spun is not a concern for us the marketer but instead for the blog owner. We care about the backlink which we get regardless and they care about appearing in search results.

I'm hoping Noble finds a way to report back how wide a distribution count we get from each article submitted. That is the one major missing component. Otherwise, so far so good.

[Natlex]

Originally Posted by BLSquared

Hey Natlex,

I was able to get in on Article Samurai as well. One thing I discovered however which should put a small twist in your study is that UAW is one of the networks included in Article Samurai. The reason I found out was because one of the many articles I submitted got rejected and in the notes of the rejection notice was a help file that was on the the UAW website. It appears it was created and returned back by a reviewer from UAW. It appears that they can distinguish between direct UAW subscribers and those submitting through AS as I couldn't access the help file because I don't have a direct UAW account.

Thanks a lot for sharing, so by conclusion the AS website sohuld have higher rankings then the UAW one (sends to UAW AND elsewhere). It will be interesting to see if this is the case. For now I sent 10 articles (only 1 to the domain in this case study) and had no rejections by the article approval team.

[BLSquared]

I'm glad you're doing this so we can know for sure. I just had two of my articles that were submitted on July 30th and July 31st flagged as "syndicated" which should mean its finished being published to all directories and blog networks.

They state the distribution on average for their case studies was 150. Did my articles get published that many places in less than a week? I doubt it and the problem as previously stated is they don't give you a number to say yes or no.

I think your Case Study may be the only way for now at least to get an idea. I've written them about this again because their initial response of checking backlinks is not adequate unless everyone does what you are doing for this study.

What Percent Uniqueness are the articles you've submitted Spun?

Originally Posted by Natlex

Thanks a lot for sharing, so by conclusion the AS website sohuld have higher rankings then the UAW one (sends to UAW AND elsewhere). It will be interesting to see if this is the case. For now I sent 10 articles (only 1 to the domain in this case study) and had no rejections by the article approval team.

[Tom L]

I've had great results with AMR myself... after I increased the number of sites that I can submit too.

Tested it vs. UAW, article ranks and some others... beats them all hands down.

[Natlex]

Originally Posted by BLSquared

What Percent Uniqueness are the articles you've submitted Spun?

It varies a lot but 30-80%. Networks that accept 2 levels of spin syntax have a sentence + word spun article. Sadly article samurai only accepts 1 level for example but the rest have a more highly spun article.

[BLSquared]

Thanks. I had my writer/spinner change to spinning at the sentence level and just imported that into AS. Its showing spun 99%. I'll be interested to see if it makes any difference based on the networks being used.

Originally Posted by Natlex

It varies a lot but 30-80%. Networks that accept 2 levels of spin syntax have a sentence + word spun article. Sadly article samurai only accepts 1 level for example but the rest have a more highly spun article.

[Natlex]

Week 2 update, wow the only one that still has breached the top 100 is the one that only has AMR... The only reason I can see this happening is it probably randomly chose some high pr/authority websites to submit to at first and things should even out later. Also, somehow... the inner page got a PR1 with just a few AMR links!?

[BlakeM]

Originally Posted by Natlex

Week 2 update, wow the only one that still has breached the top 100 is the one that only has AMR... The only reason I can see this happening is it probably randomly chose some high pr/authority websites to submit to at first and things should even out later. Also, somehow... the inner page got a PR1 with just a few AMR links!?

Google was very generous with their most recent PR update. It may go back down... who knows.

[rajivkumar900]

good to see some live case study keep update my friend..i have eye on it..
Rajiv

[BLSquared]

Do you have Pingbacks enabled on your blogs? Just curious as that is giving me some good visibility into some of what is going out through AS and others. The linking for my AS submissions is different than how I insert links otherwise so they are pretty easy to distinguish.

Originally Posted by Natlex

Week 2 update, wow the only one that still has breached the top 100 is the one that only has AMR... The only reason I can see this happening is it probably randomly chose some high pr/authority websites to submit to at first and things should even out later. Also, somehow... the inner page got a PR1 with just a few AMR links!?

[Natlex]

Originally Posted by BLSquared

Do you have Pingbacks enabled on your blogs? Just curious as that is giving me some good visibility into some of what is going out through AS and others. The linking for my AS submissions is different than how I insert links otherwise so they are pretty easy to distinguish.

It should be enabled but I haven't seen it happen on my blogs for a long time, maybe one of my plugins block it.. I'll try disabling some of my anti spam plugins and see if it re-allow these trackbacks.

[Natlex]

So finally an update filled with a bit more results . All sites have shown some rankings besides the AMR + UAW one. I can only explain this by the fact that since it had both AMR and UAW backlinks I made both services drip feed articles a bit slower than the other ones, however all articles have been properly syndicated by now.


Article samurai results:







Linkamotion is next, some good results and a PR2 for the domain!




UAW only domain results:







AMR only results, also a PR2 for the domain!:








So some interesting results, the linkamotion and AMR only website somehow ended up with a PR2 for the domain. For now the AMR site has the best results but some of the others are catching up. I'm hoping Article Samurai will have stronger results soon...

[BLSquared]

Great info. Very interesting to see how this is playing out. I'll share one observation I discovered yesterday as well. As I mentioned I have pingbacks enabled on one of the blogs I'm using with Article Samurai. The pingback count was just about 1000. I decided to look for a way to extract the URLs out of the pingbacks and found a great free plugin called Pingback Power (not enough posts to include link but easily searchable)

I exported all of the URLs out with the plugin and ran it through scrapebox. Out of nearly 1000 URLs only 177 were indexed. The bulk of these were from Article Samurai. I took the non-indexed link and through them into backlink engergizer. I'll watch to see how that impacts my backlink count.

[Tyke]

I'm interested to see if the Article Samurai results improve. Unfortunately, I missed out on getting into that, but I'm on the waiting list in case they decide to open it up again. Any overall thoughts on Article Samurai from those of you using it?

Cheers

[Natlex]

Originally Posted by BLSquared

Great info. Very interesting to see how this is playing out. I'll share one observation I discovered yesterday as well. As I mentioned I have pingbacks enabled on one of the blogs I'm using with Article Samurai. The pingback count was just about 1000. I decided to look for a way to extract the URLs out of the pingbacks and found a great free plugin called Pingback Power (not enough posts to include link but easily searchable)

I exported all of the URLs out with the plugin and ran it through scrapebox. Out of nearly 1000 URLs only 177 were indexed. The bulk of these were from Article Samurai. I took the non-indexed link and through them into backlink engergizer. I'll watch to see how that impacts my backlink count.

Ya that's a good idea. I use to do that but for a mysterious reason found out that the plugin wp captcha free that I use to prevent spam was stopping "good" pingbacks/trackbacks! So I disabled it from these sites and they should be receiving those. Eventually I'll assemble all the links and try to get them indexed, I'll let you guys know when I do that (definitely not for another month or so).

[spideysteve]

Very cool ... I was looking at AS and had some questions ... then did a search here on WF and found your thread ... interesting stuff and thanks for the info ...

How long are you going to continue your study?

[JumpstartSEO]

Good stuff! I had honestly never heard of Linkamotion, but I'm very interested after checking out their site. Not too fond of being limited to 1000 links/month, but it's worth a try on some of my larger authority and review sites. And you've just added another reason to the list of why I should get AMR and get using it. I don't know why I keep putting that off.

[Hardik Jogi]

Hi,
Which type of article directories do you submit from AMR?

[Natlex]

Originally Posted by spideysteve

Very cool ... I was looking at AS and had some questions ... then did a search here on WF and found your thread ... interesting stuff and thanks for the info ...

How long are you going to continue your study?

Probably at least another month, it's still very early to know the results and some of these sites haven't even shown much change yet.

Originally Posted by hardik jogi

Hi,
Which type of article directories do you submit from AMR?

Not sure what you mean by this... Theirs not much choice. Though I added some article directories that are not in the inital AMR list but I doubt it makes much of a difference.