Today I cancelled my link emperor account after using it for 26 days. I was fully refunded for my payment.
Last month, I signed up for a 7 days trial at link emperor. I paid $7 for the trial.
I found link emperor via Warrior Forum. I was looking for a link building service to automate all the link building process since it was getting hard for me to build links manually or via freelancers or through Fiverr gigs. It really gets hard to manage all those SEO campaigns when you have to manage each and everything yourself and meantime when you cannot afford to pay heavily to those internet marketing companies.
Link Emperor Review: My 7 Days Trial at Link Emperor
When I signed up at link emperor for a trial, I got 15000 credits. At link emperor, these guys give you link building credits that are used to build links. I registered for the Soldier plan which is priced at $147 per month.
But for now I was charged $7 only.
Things looked pretty easy at the start. Although I had to watch all those training videos to learn about their platform but it was OK for me.
The interface is complicated. Things are not simple. You have to watch training videos to get going. You cannot use the interface without watching all those training videos.
So my suggestion # 1 is to watch all those training videos before you even think of signing up for a trail.
I added 3 campaigns since I was only allowed to have 3 campaigns for my package with 100 keywords. I used 3 different sites to start off with.
Link Emperor Review: How Link Emperor Works
Starting a campaign, adding sites, keywords and URLs is easy. You can do it in a few minutes. But the real problem starts when you have to setup the campaign for link building.
You will have pretty hard time managing target values and keyword priorities. You have to set individual keyword target value of every single keyword (if it is different). Based on your target value, links will be built to every keyword.
Priorities refer to as to what keywords will be built links to first. A keyword having priority of 1 will get backlinks first, then keyword having priority 2 and then 3 and so on.
Once you are done with this, then you need to do a few things:
- Allocate link building types like Web 2.0, wiki submission, forum profiles, social media etc.
- You need to allocate link building credits among campaigns.
- How much links you need to point to your money site and to tier sites.
- Adjust anchor text randomization which refers to how much your actual keywords are diversified.
- Run your campaigns.
You need a couple of days to learn all these things and then you will be all set.
Link Emperor Review: My Findings
Here are a few things I found.
- There are quite a few bugs there that need to be fixed. I didn’t have the time to highlight those to the support for resolution. So I don’t blame those guys for those bugs. For instance, interface is slow and it will log you out automatically. Then you have to refresh the page, enter your login and password again, click on login button to login again – I hated this.
- The reporting is perfect. I must say these guys don’t leave anything untouched when it comes to reporting. Except for “private network blogs”, you will get all the link details. Even if any blast doesn’t succeed, you will be refunded automatically for it. Don’t have to ask for it.
- You cannot judge anything in your trial. It is pretty obvious. You will see no results at all. Links will be built but of course they need time to get indexed and so on. Suggestion# 2, don’t go for the trail if you don’t plan to use them for the subsequent month.
- Customer support is fantastic. They answer all the questions with an average response time of less than 24 hours. These guys are quick.
- Refund is not an issue. I requested for refund via email. I got refunded for the last paid amount ($147) in a few hours. They didn’t even ask me as to why I need refund. I love them!
Why I Cancelled My Account
Now there are a few things that I need to share.
Why I cancelled my account after 26 days (including 7 days trial)? Here are a few reasons.
Reason-1
Links were not indexed. Even I was using Index Emperor which is their own product that integrates to your link emperor account and automatically picks all the links.
When I started using Index Emperor, I knew that it will index less than 50% of the links that are built. This is what they claimed at index emperor. But actually the indexed links were minimal. I mean if there are negligible links indexed in 26 days, I cannot expect it to do any wonder in next 26 days.
Now index emperor itself has a great and easy interface. It picks the urls, pings them, pings them again, submits RSS feeds and maintains all the records.
You can see in the above screenshot that links are build everyday and they are imported too. No issues with that.
Main issue is indexing.
Reason-2
The link quality is not pretty good. The links are somewhat spammy. Not all of them but since everything is automated so you cannot expect too much quality from software.
I manually checked several links. They were just not up to my standard.
Reason-3
Out of the 3 sites, I see no results for the first one which was a blogger blog. Not a single link was found in Google webmaster tools and no improvement in the SERPs. Thankfully there was no decline either.
For the second site, I was shown at the link emperor interface that the Google ranking is improving and it did improve. I liked all those keywords on the first page of Google.
For the third site, it lost its ranking for all the keywords. The site is not penalized by Google but it just lost the ranking in Google and this was the main reason I had to cancel my subscription.
Maybe I wasn’t using it the right way but I asked customer support to review my account and they said everything is right on target. And I trusted these guys.
But ……………
Suggestion # 3, don’t use link emperor to your money site without testing it on your other sites.
Link Emperor Review: The Good Things
Well not all the things were bad at link emperor. Here are few things that I really liked about these guys.
- I love their customer support. I sent them several emails and all of them were answered without missing any of my queries.
- They will refund you for your last payment. I still had to request for the refund of my index emperor account which cost me $37 but I am pretty sure they will do it willingly. Whenever you want to cancel your account at link emperor or index emperor, you will be refunded for the last payment that you paid. It doesn’t matter how long you have been using it.
- The keyword search tool is great. You can easily get your competitors keywords and can add those keywords to your campaigns.
- Full reporting. Each and everything is right at your fingertips. Nothing hidden. No lies. No wrong charges.
- I must say that link emperor is great for parasite seo or parasite hosting. I mean if you have a youtube video or a Squidoo lens, you can easily get top position for it via link emperor. But when it comes to your money site, you have to use it smartly and carefully.
- You can choose the types of links you want to build. If you don’t like forum profiles or blog comments, you can just turn them off.
- You can diversify your anchor text. In fact these will be diversified automatically for you if you don’t do anything. This is to keep things natural. By default, 40% of the links will be built to your actual anchor text like red apples, 40% will be built to amended anchor texts where anchor text is amended automatically for instance, small red apples, red apples cheap, buy red apples etc. and rest of the 20% are built to random anchor texts like click here, info etc. So all you have to do is adjust the percentages and rest will be done automatically. I actually loved this anchor text randomization stuff.
- You can choose how many links you want to build to your tier network and to actual money site. You can also choose what type of links to build for tier network and to money site. Tier targets are saved and you can also choose to make them strong by building more links to your tier targets.
Link Emperor Review: Things I Don’t Like
Here are a few things I don’t like about link emperor (other than the ones mentioned previously).
- Video tutorials are outdated. Most of the things in tutorials don’t exist in the actual interface. It’s good that they made a lot of changes but they didn’t update their video tutorials. I highlighted the same to these guys.
- You will have to use an indexing service to get your links indexed, else you will not going to see any results at all. I prefer using index emperor for two reasons. First, it is their own service and is quite easy to integrate. Runs pretty smoothly. Second, it is cheap as compared to other two indexing services that you can integrate in your link emperor account via API. It will cost you an additional $37 per month if you will use index emperor which is a must because it is useless to build links if they are not found.
Do I Recommend It?
Well you need to use link emperor if and only if:
- You are sure what you are doing.
- You own a seo company and you need to build links to hundreds of sites of your clients. As it is not easy to manage all that link building stuff manually so you have to rely on automated link building.
- You are interested in parasite seo. If you want to promote a youtube video, a squidoo lens, facebook page, wordpress.com blog or any other page that is hosted on another authority site. Link emperor claims that you can easily rank such pages quite easily.
For individual customers who want to promote their personal site or blog, I don’t recommend link emperor because:
- It is expensive.
- It is risky and can get your site penalized if you will not use it the right way.
Link Emperor Review Conclusion
Link Emperor is a moderate link building tool.
Out of the 3 sites I tried it on:
First had no changes in the Google rankings.
Second saw improvement in rankings but those were not pretty noticeable.
Third lost its rankings.
Remember, I only used it for 26 days.
The interface is good but you have to watch videos before you can use it smoothly. I love customer support. You can ask for refund any time and they will not ask a question. An indexing service is a must preferably index emperor.
Link emperor is best for building links to youtube videos, squidoo lenses, press releases and all such pages that reside on any authority site.