Getting traffic to your blog can be quite the challenge. No matter how skilled you think you are in search engine optimization, a big part of the equation is getting quality backlinks. You can try getting backlinks by commenting on other blogs, participating in relevant forums, and asking other webmasters for reciprocal links, but these strategies can take up a lot of time and may not necessarily provide the results that you want.
The subject of this review should be right up the alley of many John Chow dot Com readers, because Viper Linking is all about generating thousands of one-way links. Google likes that, right?
Viper Linking for Thousands of Backlinks
As soon as you arrive on the homepage for Viper Linking, you are immediately hit with the bold statement that it can offer over 3000 quality one-way links. That’s a pretty big claim, how exactly does Viper Linking work in the first place?
My initial guess was that Viper Linking would submit your link to a series of web directories. That’s not exactly true. My other guess was that Viper Linking worked in much the same way as something like IZEA (formerly PayPerPost), where they would get bloggers to link to you for a price. That’s not really true either.
Instead, you submit a custom written article to Viper Linking and it will publish it on over 500 blogs instantly. The article can include whatever backlinks that you’d like. Viper Linking say that these blogs are indexed in Google and they have PageRank. In fact, some of these blogs are said to be a PR6.
In effect, you are spamming the Internet with your article. Wouldn’t this run into duplicate content issues with Google and other search engines? This is the fundamental challenge that I foresee with this model.
Registration and Submission
The good news is that it is free to register with Viper Linking. Simply hit the Register link along the sidebar and you are taken to a short registration form.
After verifying your email address, you are granted access to the administration area. From there, you can submit your article to Viper Linking through the simple one-page dashboard. If you need help, this page also has a video tutorial, but it’s pretty straightforward.
In the first area, you can select the relevant category for your article or target website. For example, if I wanted to buy links for my fighting games blog, I wold select Entertainment. By selecting the right category, you can presumably get more targeted backlinks from blogs in that niche. Other categories include Education, Finance, and Travel. After that, you have a Content Meta area where you can input the title, keywords, and a brief description.
Further down the page is where you can compose your custom backlinked article. It is a WYSIWYG editor with a word processor-like interface. This means that there are buttons in place for bold, italic, bullet points, and even emoticons. This will work for most users, but I would have preferred an option for raw HTML input as well. It’s unclear whether you can use raw HTML in this text input field.
After that, you submit the content and proceed to the payment page. From what I can gather, Viper Linking operates exclusively with PayPal.
Additional Webmaster Tools
Beyond the main backlink-generating service, Viper Linking also offers three free web tools. The one pictured below is for Google PageRank. There is also one to check for link popularity and one for search engine position.
Strangely, these tools automatically prefix any provided domain with a www. This may be fine for many sites, but what if you wanted to check the PageRank of a subdomain? What results is the PageRank of a subdomain that doesn’t exist. For example, when I check btr.michaelkwan.com (the URL to my blog), it checked www.btr.michaelkwan.com.
The Price of Generating Backlinks
While the system and user interface for Viper Linking are reasonably easy to understand and navigate, I’m not exactly sure if the backlink service is really worth it. After all, you have to provide your own custom article and then it gets published verbatim on a series of (what appear to be) splogs. The duplicate content thing with Google has to kick in, doesn’t it?
In any case, the standard price for Viper Linking for each article submitted is $39. This includes distribution of your article to over 500 blogs instantly and then another 500 blogs over the course of the next 90 days. Note that this price only includes 3000 characters, including line breaks, spaces, keywords, meta info, and the title. Every character over this limit is an additional 5 cents. You are also limited to three links within your article. Additional links are charged at $5 each.
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