Smart Traffic Review – Crappy SEO Company

Overview: £500 for 20 links.

One day I thought it would be worth checking out if these link building companies are worth the money at all. I wasn’t overly confident but I thought if I try it once and it works, I can keep repeating and if it is useless, then I’ll only have made the mistake once. Unfortunately that seemed to be the only option I had as asking for a review of such a company would return only glowing, obviously affiliated, reviews. It seems they make such a fat profit; they can afford to pay their affiliates £250 per sale.

I chose Smart Traffic because they were number 1 in Google for “SEO company” so they must know what they’re doing.

If I was going to test it, I might as well test it properly so I opted to pay £500 for 20 links to be built over a month. I assumed at this price they would be good quality links. I was pretty angry when I saw my bank statement and they had charged £575. Apparently they aren’t legally required to state the amount including VAT when they usually deal business to business. Still I’ve never dealt with anyone else that would omit such a detail. A pretty low sales tactic if you ask me.

My site was very new and targeting a pretty easy keyword “Timberland Work Boots”. Surely spending that much money in links will get me into the top 5 in Google at the very least I thought. They never told me where the links came from for some reason (well I assume to make it harder for people to see how crap they are) but I found them using backlink tools.

Here’s an example of one of the sites my link appears on www.tiesntags.co.uk. The homepage has a PR of 1. According to Google, the site has 93 pages. Most of those pages contain a couple of paragraphs of text then around 25 external links. A site with a homepage PR of 1 containing barely anything but hundreds of outbound links is going to be no good to anyone.

Here's the sort of links you'll be receiving. They don't look awful, but when you consider the site is mostly made up of these and has a PageRank of 1, it's useless.

And here's how you navigate to those pages. Obviously lots of pages with lots of links and barely any real content.

Even worse, I was offered “high quality” links where the link would be included as part of a review. Contextual links are much stronger links in general but with Smart Traffic they cost around 5 times as much and the links come from this same useless type of site. I’m glad I didn’t order any of them, but I feel sorry for anyone that has.

Let’s see how this “link building” work affected my search ranking. I had done no link building myself but since the keyword wasn’t competitive, I was already on page two in Google (proving it shouldn’t take much to get a high rank). Smart Traffic’s link building campaign began in at the start of May and lasted till the end of the month.

There you can see that when Smart Traffic started link building for this keyword, my site’s ranking didn’t improve, in fact they dropped (apart from one day where they very briefly spiked). The month after, when the link building was completed, my rankings seemed to be severely punished.

Smart Traffic Conclusion

Save yourself time by burning £500 (plus VAT), then file a spam complaint with Google against your own website.

Network Blazer Review

Overview: £20 per month to build and host easy to make affiliate websites.

I first joined Network Blazer with a free trial which came with an ebook which has now been replaced by Info Product Killer. Network Blazer is run by a man with a split personality. His evil side is an lazy, arrogant, 17 year old, international sex machine and affiliate millionaire with a fondness of the word “numpty”. In some of his videos he talks about Affi as if he is a different person and at one point even received a text message from him. Thankfully his alter ego seems to have disappeared although I’m not entirely sure that his technical support isn’t another side to his complex personality.

Network Blazer itself is a content management system designed to make building an affiliate website easy. It does this well, this most complex code you’ll need to understand is [LINK=http://www.example.com/]Buy Toys heres![/LINK]
Network Blazer provides an easy interface for uploading pictures, text and most importantly price comparison charts which are updated automatically.

One of the best features is that you don’t need to pay for a host or deal with FTPing everything for the site since all sites are hosted on Network Blazers servers. There is no limit on the number of sites you can host on their which is a great deal in itself. It has a members’ only forum with lots of nice people and no egos.

The downside is that you have no control over the code. If you want to do anything which isn’t built into the system, there’s no way to do it. For example, Google analytics is built into the system, but Webmaster tools isn’t. You can’t edit CSS (well you can change the background and text colours) which makes all Network Blazer sites look very similar. This can make them an easy target for a manual penalty and you might need to deal with a Google reconsideration request. Many updates to the backend are talked about but rarely delivered with a few acceptations such as servers based in the US to help with localisation.

Network Blazer Conclusion

If you have could fully edit your sites, I would recommend Network Blazer to just about anyone who wants to get into affiliate marketing. But you can’t so I’m going to say it’s a great all in one affiliate website package for people who don’t have much experience building websites.

Network Blazer