02-16-2012, 12:46 PM
What is it?
Free, automated, backlinks…every internet marketers 3 favourite words. Unfortunately its not very often you come across a good quality service which actually provides when it promises. Social Monkee does! The free account allows you to add 1 URL per day which will then be submitted to 25 different bookmarking sites, however it is possible to get a free upgrade to their Premium account by referring others to sign up (or you could pay a one time fee to upgrade). The Social Monkee Premium account allows you to submit 3 different URLS per day, each submitted to 100 bookmarking sites. Totally free…totally automated…everyday!
Submitting Bookmarks With Social Monkee
The control panel for Social Monkee is simple and easy to use. Once you login you are given a menu across the top, simply click the “Download Plugin/Submit” button. You will then be given the option to download the Firefox plugin so you can bookmark any page without having to go to SocialMonkee.com or you can submit the details for the URL you want to submit while you are logged in on the same page.
For each bookmark you need to supply:
- URL – Must be unique, however if you delete a report for a URL you can resubmit at a later stage
- Title – Must be at least 20 characters, can be spun with between 3 and 20 variations.
- Description – Must be at least 160 characters and again can be spun, either in its entirety or at word/sentence level.
- Tags – Minimum of 2 keywords, all can be spun again.
- Category – A list of 10 generic categories for you to select from.
- Drip Feed – For the free account you do not have this option, however the premium account allows you to drip the bookmarks over 2 – 14 days.
Once you have completed those fields, simply click submit and you are done! Now you just wait for your report…
Social Monkee Reports
Once your free social bookmarking blast has finished, simply go to the “reports” tab and you will be given a list of all the URLS you have submitted. You can then view a HTML report of where all the links have been submitted and Social Monkee Premium members will also be given the option of having an RSS feed to that you can ensure all of your links become indexed. Even with a free account, the HTML report with clickable links is good enough for exporting your links into any “Backlink Indexed” that you may use.
Social Monkee Results
The most important thing with any service is the results. It doesnt matter if you pay $100, $10 or if its free. If the links arent any good – its a waste of time! I took an old report (2 weeks old) which had 88 links in it and ran it through Scrapebox to find the PR of each of the sites:
- PR2 x 2
- PR1 x 3
- PR0 x 83
Some of the domains do not seem like they started life as a bookmarking site (allvegitarian.org, aerobicscardio.org and allergiesguide.org are just a few – thats before I got to letter B!), however they are all on different IPS, so if nothing else they should do for a bit of IP diversity or for linking to your other backlinks.
The final test while Scrapebox was open was to check how many of these 100 links where actually indexed in Google. I hadn’t done any sort of “Backlink Indexing” or “Backlink Boosting”. I just left them – I didnt even ping the URLs. From the 88 links created to my site, 1 was indexed! Maybe this would improve with some backlink boosting. I think the reason they wont get indexed is because each site has 8 posts on the front page so the chances of your link being there when the Google spider soming is next to zero. One site I checked at random at 8am GMT had published 15 bookmarks in the last hour and was last cached 5 days ago. That means since the last time Google indexed that site around 1,800 bookmarks would have been added – pushing you back to page 225 already! If you are going to use Social Monkee it would definately be worth using a backlink boosting system with them, which is made quite easy as they supply you with RSS feeds of every URL you link is on and also an RSS feed of all your RSS feeds.
Social Monkee Improvements
For free, you cant really complain, however there are a few things I would like to see improved with Social Monkee for it to become a really good service:
- Remove the massive footprint you are leaving! Every site has the same users, with the same usernames, posting the same bookmarks! Mix it up a litle, change usernames from site. Throw some random links in with the bookmarks so that every user doesn’t just have 1 bookmark. Perhaps make it bookmark the site you have submitted, plus a random bookmark from someone else. Usernames are currently in the format “SM_WORD_???”, for example, “SM_peter_5U8″ – every single user is in that format!
- Build authority to the sites. Most have the sites have less than 100 backlinks (probably left over from before the domain dropped) and are PR0. Regular link building to the sites to increase PR and index rate would help a lot.
- Import URLs or schedule URLs for bookmarking. At the minute you have to bookmark each url individually. This is either by using their bookmarklet or using the form on the site. You cant import a CSV of links and you can only add 3 per day. There is no option to add say 30 URL’s and have 3 bookmarked per day for the next 10 days.