My beefs with Link-vault

I joined LV April 25, 2005. Here are my comments/ beefs with them. Firstly I want to say that they are a new kid on the block and deserve credit for attempting to create a coop that includes static linking. They will need time to grow. In time to come they may be a real network force. Right now I'm probably pulling out. Here's why:

1) When you reach level 3 referrers you can see all the links that point to you. Many of them simply don't have my link included on the said page or there are shady webmasters redirecting to other pages. In my case I had PR6 page redirecting to a PR0 page. When I posted this on the forum I was told they' re on 7 day warning. WTF...I've seen Shawn become aware of blantant COOP manipulation (Cloaking)...you're out now PERIOD. Here they get a seven day grace period for blantantly abusing the system.

2) I have posted another message to forum admins stating that LOTS (roughly 1/3 of 4500 links) of pages DON'T have my link. I have said that I would be happy to post a detailed list. My vaultage has been consumed based on having these links. The higher the PR of your linkback the more 'vaultage' it costs you. No response to this post for 1 week now

3) I cannot create enough ads to consume my vaultage. It is very time consuming, which is OK and I don't mind if it pays off. But not all links go up, although your vaultage is debitted accordingly.

4) Server is WAY TO SLOW. I don't have time to wait up to 5 minutes for a reply from their server.

5) If their network (server) goes down your pages hang forever. I beleive this has been fixed now. But this was a pain in the ass when it happened.

6) The way they find pages that bear the LV code is by hand (?). So your vaultage is a VERY slow climb. IT increases as they find more pages. Unlike DP COOP which assigns your weight when you join. In my case I have 1 site with 1300 indexed pages with Google all PR ranked from 1-4. I can hardly find links on any of my pages.

7) I get some nice links once in a while...then they're reppoed (repossessed). I have all this vautage and NO way to use it. If I sit down tonight and create 100's of ads all I get is link backs from crap sites. This hardly consumes any vaultage.

8) I am not sure if this is coincidence or not but I can find 1 link back in Google's index from LV. I have found a few in MSN and Yahoo, but nothing to write home about. It's because they are constantly changing who links to who. Geez they may as well be rotating.

Well that's about it for now. In light of the recent DP Ranking experiment it is (to me) pretty obvious where my weight needs to be.

 

As to your post in the experiment thread, my main beef is that all pages MUST be cached by Google in order to direct an ad to a page. So, if your brand new site on widgets isn't cached by Google, you cannot point any of your vaultage to your new site (or even a new PAGE on an established domain). This means you need to wait x number of days before you can begin the slow and steady climb with a max of 20 links a day.

I also noticed some pages not having my links as well. I noticed that when I left the network awhile back I was still showing as active, with vaultage, and links still pointing to my pages. I had even taken the lv code off and reaped whatever benefits they had for up to a week it seemed.

 

In a way this points to one of the big scams of linking: webmasters who post very temporary links, or who post all their links on pages not attached to their site in any way, or who have software that shows a different page to different people - all worthless.

I was also disappointed in LinkAdage when I bought links there - the quality of the pages was lower than I expected. They aren't bad for revenue generation if you want to take the time.

 

If you have complaints with LV...why aren't you posting this at their forums?

 

This is a review and alot of folks are interested.

I will find the post, but the sites hanging and the server being too small were the exact predictions I made in another thread that would take them down.

It seems to be happening in their infancy.

 

Here's three good answers:
1) Another Dp member asked me to post it.
2) It may benefit COOP members here
3) I did post it in there forum.

Are you a coop member? My bet is no, or you would not make such a comment

 

Perhaps this is for the benefit of the dp readers and not just a rant. I for one appreciate the comments here.

 

Here's my comment.

Can LinkVault Set a New Standard?

 

I was kind of curious how link vault was going

I enrolled one small site, and according to their control panel, it got me 94 links

I was thinking of enrollinga a large site just to see what it would do, but since I am like a crack head with my weight, I am hesitant to jump to the unknown for any length of time.

After dozens of posts on the virtues of link vault, I am curious to know its shortcommings

 

IMO, the jury is still out.

 

LOL...you better stay away from LV then, you'll being doin crack for a long time.

Strictly my opinions and comments, you can take it or leave it . It would seem that this network could make real go of it in time. There in a tough position, I think. Alot of DPers jumped ship, plus word got around. Their resources have been exceeded.

I can recall Shawn had donations he was accepting for the new COOP server from coop members. I beleive the cost was 20k USD. It's a good thing he had/ has such a large network of good members that contributed.

 

Can you explain why your opinion is positive in light of his experience? What is being done to want one to wait for improvements in these areas?

It sounds like an experiment going wildly wrong or a scam when redirects are an issue.

What about the slow server response?

What about the lack of recip management despite compliance?

 

Just got to big too fast, noppid. I have tried a few sites over there I am going to bring the heaviest one back now to DP and study the results more closely. Maybe I have to learn how to use my weight more wisely.

I can't help but thinking that the static linking structure would be a better long term solution. If it was set up from front to back with adequet resource and planning, this could work.

 

Agreed, it's a huge task though that puts too much manual effort on end users though, that part is hard to control.

 

Thanks for the opinions Homer. Good to hear.

 

I could be wrong, but I think the donations were for a new server for the keyword tracking tool - i don't believe it had anything to do with the co op, although the co op may be running on those servers.

sorry about your not so positive experience with LV.

 

Hi Wendy. Nice to talk you...hope all is well with you. I am pretty sure that some/ all of the funds raised were for the coop server. I can recall this was right around the time I joined. I think I recall reading either in a thread or right in COOP CP that donation were being accepted to upgrade server for coop. With that also was a running chart showing daily funds increase.

 

To add to this. I added a few sites a few days back to LV and then it seemed to revert back to an older version of LV last night.

(perhaps another server crash and back to a backup?)

The concept is definitely good but I dont think they are ready for the traffic they could have gotten yet. Maybe time will improve things.

I also noticed that while I have the weight I cant consume it all. Maybe the sysadmins cant keep up?

 

I don't understand the relevance to this discussion, but I am a member of both.

The reason I posted what I did was because it seemed more like 8 complaints that a review. Complaints are better directed towards LV so if they know what your issues are, they can try to resolve them.

In fact if you search, I posted my complaints to the LV forum about 3 weeks ago. Some of which were resolved.

Not trying to create a fight...however, my comment was directed towards you Homer, not the flamers...

 

mrdjkcool... You can't consume all your vaultage?

Do you realise it is spent over time as you accumulate links at a set rate? Have you recieved links to the level that you set to accumulate them?

Homer... The thread posted in the Link Vault forums on this topic has a response from the admin have you read it yet?