SAPE network still works?

SAPE is a bit different then the typical network, some characteristics:

- The sites are actually real, no typical crappy blogs

- Majority of the sites are in Russian or on .ru domains or russian hosting

- 95 percent of foreign sites in the netlwork are clearly hacked as no one in their right mind would submit their real site (which they obvious are) to a Russian link network. I've even seen Dutch sites in the network and no way the owner would have submitted his site with links placed at ugly places and what not, most deny it but it's simply the truth.

Personally I woudn't care about having a link on a hacked site, but that's just me, though I would never even think of using it for a client or trying to rank a site for the long term.

So treat it as a churn & burn project I would say.

As for results, I did a test, first I build links from my own network and I ranked well but not high enough (tough keyword) so I bought an additional 100 SAPE links with great anchor diversity and spread among different pages. The site TANKED instantly and never came back, even after removal of links it remained tanked.

However I've also seen cases where the links worked exceptionally well, the person rented 600 SAPE links and ranked for an insane competitive keyword in his country.

The difference between us:

- My site already received about 150 paid kind of irrelevant links

- His site already had many 1000's of non paid links (very diverse spam really) and he redirected another site to his domain that also had 1000's of diverse/spam links.

So what might have triggered the tanking is an excessive amount of link juice / pagerank, I've seen this in the past when we gave a site 8 PR5 and 2 PR6 links all the same day, nothing happened, while other sites could handle it and the rankings went through the roof.

So all I can suggest is:

- Build up a domain with diverse spam (think of GSA)
- Build a website on another domain
- 301 Redirect the spammed domain to the website domain
- Point the SAPE links at the website domain

When you tank cancel the SAPE links (afterall you rent them), buy a new domain, move the 301 redirect from the spammed domain to the new domain and point 100's of SAPE links at the new domain again.

Rinse and repeat till it stops working.

I can't guarantee this works today but it used to work not so long ago.

You might also want to consider using an aged expiring domain for your money site to speed up the rankings as it's very well possible these days that it takes to long to rank and thus it burns before it churns.