Today I signed up as a paid member of ActuallyRank.com so I figured I’d start by writing an ActuallyRank review.
I’m not YET an affiliate. I expect to become one if I am happy with the system. I signed up for the basic package charging $69 per month.
Here’s how Actually Rank it is supposed to work. You sign up and you get access (via login) to 2000 places per month where you can leave a blog comment with a link to your money site.
The blog comment is supposed to be dofollow, rather than nofollow, although I’m not going to be upset if 10-20 percent are actually nofollow. Anything more than this and I’ll feel a bit misled.
The rules are simple. You go to the posts that you are given (up to 2000 at my level of subscription) and you leave a comment that is OF VALUE. You do NOT spam these sites. You leave a useful comment and then drop anchor text links after your comment. Being respectful keeps it all good.
Chris Rempel, the guy running this site, says that members will only share their links with at most 14 other users. So say the users in my shared pool only leave 200 links per month, then I’ll be sharing with only 1.4 users per blog post on average. That’s totally reasonable.
The system has just launched, and I haven’t had a chance to even log in yet, so I’ll update my review here when I know more.
My plan for this service is to use it myself, but also to give my login to one of my guys in the Philippines. Then he doesn’t need to write me emails telling me where we need more links. He can just look at our Google results (analytics, etc) and go build links himself where he deems them necessary. That’s the best way to do things for me because it is more or less hands off.
Anyway, I applaud Chris Rempel for putting together what looks to be a pretty awesome backlinking system. I have no idea what algorithm they used to find and then filter all of the high PR links they are giving us each month, but if it delivers on the promise it would be a bargain at 10x the price.
UPDATE 1: I was able to log in and check out how the system works. Overall I like the layout. I don’t really see the need to support projects within his website though. I think people should manage their linking projects within their own spreadsheets rather than on this membership site. So I’m not using that feature.
As many people are noticing from day one, the initial link package that we’ve gotten is not high quality. Most of the links are nofollow. Chris Rempel is MORE THAN AWARE of this problem and has acknowledged an algorithm problem that is to be resolved in a couple of days (we’ll get a new link package at that time). I’ll reserve judgment until after this happens.
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I also paid for the $69 package, enjoyed one of Chris’s previous products, but greatly disapointed with this offering so far.
After the hype, I eagerly logged into my account and after an hours search almost all the page 4 5 and 6 links were no follow.
Talking over a 200 domains i had to sift through to garner one link.
So far this is looking like all hype no trousers but will see if it’s just teething problems and if the situation improves in the coming days.
Not holding my breath though.
Same thing here for now – but I have emailed back and forth with Chris Rempel on a bunch of the teething pains and I know he had an algorithm issue that triggered a lot of false positives. We’re supposed to see higher quality links in a few days. I’ll reserve my opinion until I see those links. I suppose even if I could only get 10 good links per month it would be worth paying for because I’m going to be outsourcing the work on this.
Can you tell me if the issue has been resolved? Are you still a member of Actually rank or did you cancel your membership? Thanks for any answers.
I ended up canceling and I honestly can’t say if that was the correct answer or not. I gave my account to my Filipino employee to get busy on commenting. He put together a good plan to measure our success on several sites / pages / keywords. But he started running into a problem where a LOT (the majority) of his comments would not go through, even though we were only using the author name as the link (and a real name, not a keyword as the author name). He would hit submit and he’d end up on a blank screen almost every time. These were not spam comments (he showed them to me)… they were real comments with no funny looking links anywhere. Just his name linked to one of our pages. So, bottom line … he got frustrated wasting his time on the comments and I did not have the time to bother testing it out myself. So I canceled this one.
You get a blank screen after commenting if your site/IP has been banned by Akismet.
I signed up for the ‘new & improved’ actually rank in August. Under the same package you had as well – bronze for 2,000 dofollow links for $69.
It seems you need to make sure you only comment so much a day or else your website address gets ‘banned’ for a lack of a better word by wordpress. Chris addresses this in the tutorial section. Bit of a pain but does seem to work. I think I will give it another month or two and then cancel my subscription because at that point I think enough back links should be created for my one website and no point spending more money on the program. My website is for a local product and as such I don’t think I will need 6-8,000 potential back links.
Jason – http://www.garagecabinetry.ca
I did join ActuallyRank about 3 weeks ago, but I only managed to test drive it for the last couple of days. (Yeah, I know, scarcity tactic, that’s why I joined right there and then as they said they would close doors).
I was floored by the copy. In theory, the system seems great, but what they don’t tell you are those bugs and glitches with the system.
When I logged in, I had to wade through a lot of non-english sites, sites that are too old (and with no active comment boxes anymore). It was very frustrating. Not all sites are commentable. I spent majority of my time reporting bad links.
I made sure I had Gravatar photo and Twitter account to make it easier to log in in those sites that require logging in to comment.
In summary:
- too many (1) non-active sites (2) non-english sites (3) sites that don’t allow comments/removed comment boxes
For $69, it’s not worth it.
I’d rather pay someone in the WF to do blog commenting for me for that same price, and save myself headache associated with this buggy system.
I have cancelled my subscription, and I’m currently in the market for backlinking programs/softwares/systems.
I’ll be cancelling my subscription as well. This is my second month and am far from impressed. Around 30% of sites don’t allow any commenting and around 20% are non-English. That’s half the sites gone already.
The majority are also PR 0. I’d say only around 50 of the 2000 sites are PR 1 or greater. Also most of the comments don’t even show up when you make them and the rest are awaiting moderation, but none so far have been approved. A lot of the sites are old as well so the web masters probably aren’t even checking them so the comments never get approved.
Out of all the comments I’ve made so far, I’ve only had around 4 or 5 that have been approved. Not worth the cash. Anyone know of any similar (but better) programs that offer a similar service?
I would like to thank everybody for the information. I was considering the “cheap” way out and using this backlinking system instead of paying for a more expensive service. I guess at the end of the day you get what you pay for… right. Anyways, thanks again Chris, you saved me at least $69!