OK, I've put this review off for too long... But at least we get (almost) 30 day picture of the rankings.
Ordering 5 of 5
Ordered 2 Challenger Packages for 2 different higher profile client sites with plenty of age. It looks like the order went live on Nov. 1. I spent a couple of days previous emailing back and forth with questions, etc. Dean was extremely responsive and the communication was great!
Reports 5 of 5
As it has been said over and over again, the reports are stellar! One complaint (and I have the same complaint with most everyone else out there), NON CLICKABLE LINKS. I know, I'm being overly picky, but damn it would be nice if I didn't have to copy and paste every link in the Word doc... These are still the best reports that I have ever received.
Content 3 of 5
With all the talk about super unique, manual quad-spunned content, I really expected better. I've been doing this a while and I know what a pain in the ass it is, that's why I was most excited about and most let down by this bit... To me there was nothing spectacular about the content. It read like spun content. Pretty much all Web 2.0 submissions seemed very similar. To do it again, I would go with 2 beginner packages instead of the Challenger Package.
One of my clients goes through the reports and he was quite concerned about what he thought were poorly written articles with terrible grammar mistakes, but he loved the report!
Rankings 5 of 5
This is the part that most of you care about... Unfortunately, my rankings are tainted with and impacted by other efforts that I had going previously and since. The bottom line is that I do think that Rank Showdown did have the largest impact to my ranking improvements for both sites.
Site 1 - Google:
KW1 - November 1 POS 76, November 29 POS 19 Competition Exact Match 29,200,000 Searches Exact Match 110,000
KW2 - November 1 POS 29, November 29 POS 4 Competition Exact Match 78,500 Searches Exact Match 8,100
KW3 - November 1 POS 11, November 29 POS 9 Competition Exact Match 1,040,000 Searches Exact Match 22,200
Site 2 - Google:
KW1 - November 1 POS 78, November 29 POS 24 Competition Exact Match 1,260,000 Searches Exact Match 9,900
KW2 - November 1 POS 236, November 29 POS 17 Competition Exact Match 316,000 Searches Exact Match 3600
KW3 - November 1 POS 26, November 29 POS 12 Competition Exact Match 155,000 Searches Exact Match 4,400
I had nice images of graphs all set to post, but I can't post images apparently...
Conclusion This is a great service.
With everything included, the sheer diversity of links, social signals, etc.. are pretty awesome. I saw positive improvement in my rankings and I would recommend this service.
I personally think that I may get more bang for my buck if I order all Beginner Packages in the future, and tailor them to one keyword each. This way I get a unique master article (or set of articles) for each keyword. If you order the Challenger Package you get 5 more Web 2.0s but that seems to be 15 articles written from the one master article (or set of articles). For the same money I would rather order 2 Beginner Packages and get 2 unique master articles (or sets of articles), spun and submitted to 10 Web 2.0s each.
Bottom line is that I will use this service again. Improve the content further, add in a couple document shares to Tier 1 and I will buy multiple packages monthly.
