1 Way Links Review
I wanted a way to rank my affiliate websites quickly without having to resort to hours of creating accounts and submitting my website like like in the olden days.
I also know that submitting your site to the directories, submitting the same article to article directories and social bookmarking doesn’t have the same impact it used to. Profile links are becoming less effective as people realize that in order for the link to be valuable it needs to be indexed.
I searched high and low for a link building service that wasn’t spammy but was also automated enough so that it needed just a few hours a month.
There were two services which I found and signed up to, the first was 3waylinks and the other one is 1waylinks. Both are link building solutions from Jonathan Leger.
This website is a review of my personal experience with the success, failures, benefits and drawbacks of 1WayLinks.
Bottom Line
1WayLinks has worked for me and many other people. It does require you to write 250 word articles which use the spintax format to rewrite the articles. If you can’t do this yourself then you need to be able to outsource it. Provided that you can create the articles then 1WayLinks will help you with your link building efforts.
Click here to signup to 1waylinks now for just $7
How It Works
1WayLinks is a large blog network designed to help its users get high quality backlinks from a huge variety of websites.
When you sign up you will be asked to contribute a blog to the network. This can be a new WordPress installation on one of your existing websites (eg. example.com/newblog) or you can register a domain specifically for the purpose of donating it to the network.
Once you have donated a blog you need to set it up with some special settings which allows the 1WayLinks network to automatically post articles to your blog.
Each month you will be given a number of credits. Each credit equals one article on a blog within the network. By default you are given 250 credits so your $47 a month can buy you 250 links on other blogs.
However if you donate more blogs to the network it increases the number of credits you are given. For each blog you donate you earn 50 credits per month. You can donate up to 50 blogs so you could get up to 2750 links per month.
Each article that you submit needs to be a minimum of 250words. Now if you submit the same article to 250 different websites then there is a strong chance that Google will hit it with the duplicate content filter. To avoid the duplicate content filter you have the option of ‘spinning’ your articles to create thousands of variations.
1WayLinks has a built in spintax form or you can use a service like The Best Spinner and copy and paste the spintax text in to 1WayLinks.
You can place up to three links in each article which is great for getting those important deep links and ensuring that your sub pages get top rankings.
When you submit an article you can choose how many credits you want to use so if you wanted you could submit three articles and use 100 credits for two of them and 50 for another. Once your article has been submitted and approved 1WayLinks will start drip feeding your article across the network over a period of time.
Why Do You Need Backlinks?
Watch this short video about why backlinks are important for the ranking of your website in Google.
Benefits
When compared to other SEO methods like article marketing, directory submissions, profile links and blog commenting, 1WayLinks is far more effective in helping you to achieve rankings and can easily replace all of these tasks.
#1 It’s Cheap
1WayLinks is probably the cheapest way you will get access to a high quality blog network and since the members themselves contribute the blogs it means you get a link diversity rarely possible with a private blog network.
By comparison, other private blog networks will charge you $149 or more per month and insist on every piece of content you submit to be unique.
#2 Diversity and Scale
At the last count, 1WayLinks had over 8,500 websites in the blog network. The nearest competitor has less than 500 webistes in a network. Added to that, the domain extensions and geo-location of the blogs will be global getting a variety that few other networks can match.
#3 Awesome Deep Linking Capability
1WayLinks is perfect for getting rich anchor text backlinks to your subpages.
#4 Boost the Link Juice of Other Links
If you have built profile links or other lower quality backlinks then 1WayLinks is a great way to get all your links indexed. You can add up to 3 links in each article and by using spintax you can use different links in each article that is submitted.
#5 Human Edited Quality
1WayLinks uses a human editor to check the quality of each article that is submitted so that you can be sure you are going to get only quality articles posted to your site
Drawbacks
As with most backlinking methods 1WayLinks isn’t without its drawbacks and it’s important that you are aware of them before signing up.
#1 Link Indexing
Getting your links indexed is the biggest challenge with 1WayLinks. Since the blogs are donated, most people take a set it and forget it approach and the vast majority of blogs are PR0-2. What this means is that when the Googlebot comes along it doesn’t crawl very deep in to the site and only indexes a few pages which means your link doesn’t get picked up.
There are a few ways to get around this and I know that Jonathan Leger has taken steps to ensure all posts get indexed.
17th November 2011 Update: Jonathan has added a 3rd party service which now works to get our articles indexed by Google. I’ve personally noticed a big increase in the number of blog posts that get indexed and stay indexed which has also had an impact on my rankings.
#2 Content Restrictions
You can’t post any adult, pharma, gambling or religious related articles. 1WayLinks does take this a little bit too far though so you can’t even post about yoga, Christmas or Halloween because they are considered to have religious connotations.
#3 Less Link Juice
Compared with a more expensive private blog network which has fewer blogs but which have higher pagerank, the links are not as valuable so you need more links to have the same value
#4 Donator Blogs
You will need to set up a donator blog which will cost money to buy the domain. Sometimes the blog can throw up errors when the system tries to post articles to it automatically.
#5 Greyhat SEO Method
As with all blog networks it runs the risk of being penalised by Google. Google doesn’t like people trying to manipulate their rankings which is exactly what a blog network does
Personal Experience
I have been a member of 1WayLinks for a couple of years now which should tell you that I see the value in the service! Unfortunately I can’t tell you which blogs I’ve donated or which websites I have been optimizing because it is against the terms and conditions of 1WayLinks.
Wishlist
I think Jonathan sometimes takes a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to his services. 1WayLinks works beautifully as it is but even so there are some things I wish he would update.
#1 Delete Blogs From Network
Sometimes I need to delete a donated blog from the network, the only way to do this is to contact the support and ask them to remove it. Until this is done the site doesn’t let you post any more articles.
#2 Choose Blog Category
Jonathan has stated many times that he’s not a believer in site relevance when it comes to getting links. As long as the article is relevant, he says, it will get given some weightage. Myself and many other SEO’s respectfully disagree and wish he would categorize the blog network so we could get health links from health websites
#3 High PR Blogs
The diversity provided by everyone contributing their own blog can’t be underestimated but there is no incentive to promote or do anything with the donator blog which means most sites in the network are PR0 or PR1 which means you need a large volume of links to make any impact. I would like to see 1wayLinks add a handful of high PR blogs for an extra boost.
Is It Right For You
Now this is a big question. The first thing I would say is that you shouldn’t be using 1WayLinks to promote your main website or money website. This is because Google does frown upon link networks and it could ban all the sites it finds in the network. To protect your money website you should use 1WayLinks to link to your other links that you have built, for example to EzineArticles, Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogspot etc.
What I personally do is buy feeder websites which link to my main website. I then use 1WayLinks to build links to all those feeder sites and to low value links like profile links.
1WayLinks is also not a set and forget type link building service, if you want a completely automated link building solution I suggest you take a look at 3wayLinks. You need to provide spintax articles for submission in to the blog network, if you don’t then you won’t get any benefit from it.
Risk Free Trial
If you are still not sure about 1WayLinks then let me give you something which should help you make up your mind. If you signup today you will get the first 30 days for just $7. That’s a very cheap way to take a look around and use the service before deciding whether to continue.
For just $7 you can get 250 links within 1 month to your website, or even more if you submit donor blogs to the network.
$7 really is nothing to try out this service and no other blog network service has this kind of introductory offer.