Have You Tried V7N Links Yet?

Yesterday Darren posted about contextual links from V7N, and today I see Loren posting that Matt slapped V7’s John Scott about a bit over claims of them being undetectable by Search engines.

In his case I’d have backed down too, but it’s kind of funny all the same. A word on Matt’s blog and all of a sudden a different tune is being sung. Really earnestly too heh..

Good work John, nice coverage 🙂

Is anyone using V7N links currently? If so, what do you think?

4 thoughts on “Have You Tried V7N Links Yet?

  1. Darren

    I just think it’s hilarious that they ring me up, begging me to review their product – but stressing that they want my honest opinion – but then when I give it the owners of the program start writing posts question whether I’m ethical because I express a concern about them not allowing bloggers to be transparent…..

    I called you up. I asked for your honest opinion. As far as I know, you posted your honest opinion. I expressed my gratitude for your honest opinion.

    If I ever have a problem with you, or somebody else I respect, I will always have the decency of addressing that issue in private with you.

    If you ever have an issue with anything I say, please do likewise.

  2. V7N and some of the people in their forums seemed to maintain an anti-Google rebel yell tone at first. Now it seems like the 800lb Google Gorilla has squished another company.

    Google has good intentions for trying to keep the internet easy enough to monitor with their algorithms, but at the end of the day, there is still a huge demand for people to help companies and websites get better placement. Google has created room for the middle man by not making their technology efficient enough to really find everything from a few simple search words and so they can’t really get terribly upset when swarms of middlemen show up to get a slice of the pie.

    Absent the in your face claims about search engines, this model actually seems somewhat efficient.

    • Positive – There are no other requirements other than using the keywords and link – so bloggers are free to drop those in any context they like, leaving a huge amount of writing freedom.
    • Negative – The service is all run out of a forum currently so not terribly efficient, compared to iWebtools or PPP, blogitive, blogsvertise etc.
    • Neutral – I’m neutral on the non-disclosure requirement. I think its silly to threaten the bloggers working for the service with the inappropriate release of their involvement with this company. I do not think it will stand up in court at all. However, as bloggers are working through a middle man and can write anything they like about the link it kind of equals out. If a blogger uses the Ontok highlighter, which would generate hyperlinks in a post randomly, they could still say whatever and links to ads would be created. In this case they can say whatever and they know the link. Theoretically, they could even warn their readers that the product or site on the link is terrible (unless I have missed something in the literature). I write negative comments about George Bush all the time, would I accept $10 to put a link to the white house in my blog and write anything I want about GW? Maybe so. Would I take $10 to write something nice about GW? Not likely.

    I guess to sum it up, its just another company working as the middleman. There are lots of people in this racket whether they have white hats on or black hats. This one has/had the tone of a dark grey hat, but really had the service of a fairly light grey hat. I think its recent entrance actually highlights some of the weak sides of the other players in this market like PPP, Blogitive, Blogsvertise and ReviewMe. Some companies want links and that is it, they don’t always want the frilly stuff and they don’t want their purchase publicized. In any marketplace there will always be certain groups, buyers and sellers that want to remain anonymous for many reasons, some very legitimate and some not very legitimate.

    As an example of a legitimate move, take an author like JK Rowlings. She has a little known book coming out sometime in the future about a boy wizard that goes through school developing his wizarding skills and fighting an evil character. She doesn’t want to leak the name of the book, but she does want to be prepared for her marketing work to promote the book, the movie, DVD, website, yada yada yada.

    So she has her attorney go out and solicit several companies to buy up properties including websites with specific domain names. Then they start a campaign to build up PR in anticipation of the release of the movie so that when the name is made public for her soon to be forgotten book, movie, dvd, collectors set addition and more, people can initially find the right site as opposed to lets say, the porno site with a similar name that 8 year old kids might otherwise stumble upon from Google.

    Is JK Rowling manipulating Google and the PR of her sites? Sure. Is that good or evil? Neither it is just the business of marketing on the web. Marketing has always been somewhat of a sleazy game at times, just look at any book on the NY Times best seller list and the anonymous purchases that took place to drive circulation numbers up so high.

  3. I just think it’s hilarious that they ring me up, begging me to review their product – but stressing that they want my honest opinion – but then when I give it the owners of the program start writing posts question whether I’m ethical because I express a concern about them not allowing bloggers to be transparent…..

Comments are closed.