What was done with $197?
PHASE 1
x number of Video submission but links are not given so I cannot verify this!
5 Facebook links
15 Press releases
236 Pligg links
67 Article submissions
105 HIGH PR forum links
26 Social bookmarks
38 Web2.0 properties
29 Status update sites
64 PHPDUG links
50 EDU links
15 Document sharing sites
PHASE 2
57 NoFollow EDU links
10 ******** EDU links
PHASE 3
65 Foxy blog links
100 Moin Moin links
222 MY BB forum links
157 PHP FOX links
100 JCOW links
100 Media wiki links
111 Wikka WIKI links
41 ***** WP links
My review
Campaign order date was 17th of August and I got one ranking report in the middle of September and final report on 5th of October. Report itself was a huge 50Mb pack of files and it was pretty decent. Main drawback is that none of the links had accounts associated so this kinda blows up whole huge work. But quantity and diversity of the links is impressive.
What comes to the service itself, it was a little bit late accompanied with communication problems, which was talked a lot on sales thread. Provider had problems to track or follow up with many support requests, but at the end I think most or all people were replied. I also noticed he still could keep it all calm and get work done which is a good sign under the pressure.
I have not yet checked all links if they are present, I'm going to put a script to validate them this week. But from five Facebook accounts only one was working at the time of report sent. He promised to replace deleted pages with new ones. Other links are mostly new, so the final link juice is to be seen in future.
Overall results weren't as good as expected with this price tag. Main keyword was pumped 2 positions. Secondary keyword came from nothing to 3rd position, but probably it was also because of adding content to the site and having page indexed by Google. Third keyword already had huge competition. Interesting is, that it popped up on results #6 for few days, but then disappeared. Since then its been jumping between positions 200-500. Bonus that was promised in between delivery is still not delivered or commented even I've been asked it several times in private messages. Recently they moved to zendesk support ticket platform to maintain requests on reasonable level. This might help to get feedback and reports of the job easier than before and have more current situation view over the project. But current state of the support system has also problems because its not letting in requests claiming bad words were used on post even thats not been the case...
Results
I have provided a detailed report of rankings for three keywords and urls on sales thread over the last 7 weeks, so this is a replication of it:
Code:
Week: ----- 0 ------ 1 ------ 2 ------ 3 ------ 4 ------ 5 ---
--------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 24.08 -- 31.08 -- 07.09 -- 15.09 -- 24.09 -- 10.10
Keyword 1: #5 ----- #4 ----- #4 ----- #3 ----- #3 ----- #3 --
Keyword 2: na ----- #2 ----- #2 ----- #3 ----- #2 ----- #3 --
Keyword 3: na ----- na ----- #6 ----- + ----- #190 --- #498
Backlinks: 72 ----- 72 ----- 57 ----- 56 ----- 42 ----- 61 --
This has been a hard project to carry on and although many complains, I can't complain the end results which are better than starting point. Price is a little bit high for expectations because keywords weren't actually commercial keywords, but more like educational keywords. But price is still reasonable when thinking of the work load.
Thanks for your efforts Entri3!