(Detailed Analysis) My experience with building backlinks with OnlyWire.com

Hi guys,

I thought I'd share with you my experience with OnlyWire.com. For those of you that don't know it is a social bookmarking tool of sorts. In theory you do one submission and it will make posts to all your social bookmarking (and similar sites) such as digg.com, delicious.com.

I know there are a few of these sites out there, but I've seen OnlyWire.com recommend in a number of places and I came across it over 6 months ago.

Well, initially I did what probably most folks do with these services. I took the frontpage sell text literally 'OnlyWire automates the submission of your status and website links to 43 top social media sites.'

I just hit the button, and kaboom, there I was linked on all these fantastic social sites. Great!

Well of course, that didn't exactly turn out to be the case. I noticed initially off the bat that there were quite a few submissions to sites that consistently failed. The software engineering developer skeptic in me also wondered if
a) Just because it says certain links have been successful, it doesn't necessarily mean they have been successful.
b) What if the social bookmarking site just does not show up in their submission list? There are so many afterall (43), it would be easy to miss them when looking at what has been submitted.
c) What if the profiles I had created on these social media sites were set to private mode, so linking to them was next to useless?

I found that all 3 of the above were true. I also found that there are a number of social sites that while not broken themselves, the connection between onlywire.com and them seem to be currently broken. I want to start relying on a few tools in my SEO efforts, and I want to make sue what I use works so I followed up their customer service and was pleased to get a reply quickly. However, they just told me that they are working on the problems and initially offered no immediate timeline for a fix.

So, I guess with all these services. The lesson is never take the 'turn key/just add water/easy as 1,2,3' approach for granted. I still think OnlyWire.com is a great service, it just doesn't live up to the lofty expectations set out on the front page. Make no mistake, it is a lot faster to do it this way than submitting manually.

I didn't submit to absolutely every service, but I ended up attempting to submit to about 29 services, give or take. Here is generally what happened when I tried to post:

ask.com (FAIL: No possibility right now to create an account with ask.com, so couldn't even try)
blinklist.com (FAIL: Won't submit from onlywire.com)
bookmarks.yahoo.com (OK)
bookmarksync.com (FAIL: Was offered as a bookmarking service early in August, then just vanished off onlywire.com's list)
brightkite.com (FAIL: Won't submit from onlywire.com)
buzz.yahoo.com (FAIL: Won't submit from onlywire.com)
delicious.com (FAIL: Won't submit from onlywire.com)
digg.com (OK)
diigo.com (OK)
faves.com (FAIL: Won't submit from onlywire.com)
friendfeed.com (FAIL: friendfeed.com seems to not be accepting new registrations, have to look into deeper)
google bookmarks (OK: Had to setup a public list though, default bookmarks appear to become private with no choice, so have to manually login to change this)
identi.ca (OK)
jumptags.com (OK: Had to set profile to public)
lifestream.aol.com (OK)
linkagogo.com (OK: Had to set profile to public)
mister-wong.com (OK)
mixx.com (FAIL: Won't submit from onlywire.com)
multiply.com (OK)
plurk.com (OK)
posterous.com (FAIL: Won't submit from onlywire.com)
propeller.com (OK)
reddit.com (OK)
scribd.com (FAIL: Won't submit from onlywire.com)
simpy.com (FAIL: Last time I checked their site was down)
spurl.com (OK)
stumbleupon.com (FAIL: Won't submit from onlywire.com)
tumblr.com (OK)
twitter.com (OK)

So, all in all from the above I see only 16 sites out of 29 (65%) that work, and this was after I had to resubmit a few and double check everything that took hours.

I also tried to ping each of my profiles on the above successful social bookmarking sites. I thought I'd try pingler.com. But I found I could only submit 5 URL's a day. Anybody got any better ideas for pinging? Or anything else I should do to get the max link juice for the above bookmarks?

Any other comments on onlywire.com? Is there another service that you feel is better? Would love to hear it!

Also, if you have any other questions, feel free to let me know.